Ordinary World Research Articles

Empathy and Otherness

this is the secret that keeps the stars apart i carry your heart with me i carry it my heart -e. e. cummings All poetry reveals more than we could have expected; these lines from cummings more than most. The secret that accounts for our subjective experience of spatiality is the dual location of the beloved. Space opens up along the lines of access to a beloved other, who is my heart, though perhaps far away space or historical time. Space is the room for the distance between the other within my own consciousness and the real other who may be far away. We have all had the experience of empathy, which is the process and the fruit that the poet describes, but for the transcendental philosopher the interesting question concerns the conditions of its possibility. If we are each single, solitary selves, how can a stream of consciousness other than our own really have a place within our psychic inventory? Wouldn't all that the I is conscious of be absorbed into the I? Nevertheless, we have all had the experience of a friend who behaves a fashion unlike himself, causing us concern about him. Yet, how else can the other really live for me except in as an intentional aspect of my own consciousness? But, how is this possible, if we are really each distinct selves? The poet implies that the constitution of the cosmos and its spatiality are functions of the empathetic awareness of otherness. Phenomenologists, such as Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein, wholeheartedly concur. If pressed, they would add that the everyday experience of the ordinary world is shot through with empathy. This reflection brings Husserl and Stein to bear on a description of the transcendental conditions of the poet's insight, i.e., how is it possible that I, a single sphere of consciousness more or less mysterious even to myself, can include another consciousness so that my experience is that I carry his heart with me, my own heart? Husserl's Cartesian Meditations and Ideas II and Stein's On the Problem of Empathy provide phenomenological analyses of the experience of otherness within an I's own consciousness. The platform for this reflection on these texts is the pairing of two subjects. I leave it to my readers to expand this structure to include the third, the alien other, and groups of others such as communities and states. I. The Experience Although much of our time is spent superficial contact with others, as empirical persons, mundane others, sometimes we feel that we touch each other. We may even dwell each other, participating each other's lives either directly or through intentional regard or both. This phenomenon occurs on the basis of the empathy which makes awareness of the other as another person possible. Empathy, which develops out of the intersubjective constitution of others, roots us the world which becomes ours by means of mutual recognition. As I have argued elsewhere, (1) empathy requires a prior moment of identification at the doxic level of constitution. First, the I constitutes the other as another person, emptily intended--that he is and second, the I turns towards an other to recognize him empathically as the individual who he is. Without an empathetic grasp of the other, my service to him or appreciation of him is only a mirror of whom I am and what I want. Rational sympathy is grounded empathy. Moreover, empathy includes us the world which otherwise would remain alien to us or worst still, mine alone, undifferentiated from myself. When we empathetically dwell with others, we have a home the world. Sometimes we can express our primordial life, our deepest, most original, most private and authentic experience. An easy flow between the depths of ourselves and others validates this, our real life. The others who connect with us such streams moor us the uncertain sea into which we have been cast. Long-term reciprocal empathic relationships result an anchor for each the other. …

Objects limit human comprehension

This paper demonstrates that the human visual system, the primary sensory conduit for primates, processes ambient energy in a way that obligatorily constructs the objects that we ineluctably perceive. And since our perceptual apparatus processes information only in terms of objects (along with the properties and movements of objects), we are limited in our ability to comprehend ‘what is’ when we move beyond our ordinary world of midsize objects—as, for example, when we address the micro microworld of quantum physics.

Editorial: Wine and drug evaluations: lessons on making comparisons of noninferiority

Wine rating is best performed under blinded conditions. Sur-prisingly, it is sometimes not possible to distinguish whitefrom red wines when blindfolded. Knowing that the wine isexpensive increases the client’s appreciation. The risks ofmigraine attacks and hangover are not estimated in the ratings,and we look to unbiased experts’ books and columns beforeshopping (Van Zyl, et al., 2008). However, how do we knowwhether one wine is just as good as another?That question may not go down well with competitive winemerchants. Drug regulators, although, request data to showthat one treatment is no better or worse than another. Aswith wine quality, that cannot be established with mathemati-cal accuracy, a certain degree of flexibility is accepted, pro-vided that the drug data are of comparable quality.Drug regulators were primarily concerned with drug safetyrather than efficacy. FDA came about in 1938 when manypatients died from a pharmacy contamination of sulphanila-mide. Following the thalidomide teratogenicity disaster in1956–1962, a solid regulatory foundation was laid for assessingthe utility of human medicines by strict standards. This nowgoverns all aspects of drug testing. The first version of the Dec-laration of Helsinki was composed by the World MedicalAssociation in 1964 to provide a universal guideline for ethicsreview committees to assess the merits of drug trial protocolsbased on patient consent and protection.In the EU, regulation for the supervision of human medi-cines was centralized in 1993 in the European MedicinesAgency. The pharmaceutical industry, in consort with regula-tory agencies, formulated a code of trial conduct (Good Clini-cal Practice) that ascertained methods for selecting patients,measuring and recording the efficacy and safety of treatments,audit trails for controlling data quality, source data verifica-tion, monitoring, etc. Research ethics are now governed bylaw in some countries. Increasingly, to bring about innovativetherapies, the clinician has to cope with a technology that hasdistanced itself from the ordinary world of clinical medicine. Ithas moved into specialized units for drug testing.One aspect in this new environment for clinical drugresearch is that of the ethics of placebo. Following a WMAmeeting at the University of Pretoria, the Declaration of Hel-sinki was revised in 2000, and its 29th paragraph became thesubject of controversy: ‘the benefits, risks, burdens and effec-tiveness of a new method should be tested against those ofthe best current prophylactic, diagnostic and therapeutic meth-ods’. Thoughtful statisticians commented that to show a differ-ence between two active treatments it requires much largersample sizes than those required for valid comparisons withplacebo, thus exposing many more subjects, the nonresponders,to remain ill (Leon and Solomon, 2003). A partial solution tothis dilemma is to randomize more patients to active treat-ments than to placebo. Another solution was proposed byFisher, et al. (2001), estimating the effect of a ‘putative pla-cebo’ by means of odds ratio as if a placebo arm had been ina trial. Following a period of debate, the WMA issued a noteof clarification that placebo can be accepted for a minor condi-tion that does not pose any additional risk of serious or irre-versible harm. Currently, a WMA task force with membersfrom Brazil, Japan, Sweden, South Africa and Germany hasbeen appointed to revise the Declaration for adoption by theWMA general assembly in October 2008.Hence, one of the latest concepts in clinical trial design fordrug regulation is that of noninferiority. In the absence of aplacebo arm, how does one determine whether two active treat-ments are similarly safe and effective or not? It cannot be donewith certainty. The words equivalence and superiority are morepalatable than noninferiority, but noninferiority is the pre-ferred term in reporting trials (Piaggio, et al., 2006). This termfirst appeared on PubMed in 1998, and now has less than 500entries (there are 250,000 entries for the term randomized con-trol trial, 5600 of which are on psychotropic drugs).In 2005, the European Medicines Agency issued a guidelineon the choice of the noninferiority margin stating at the outsetthat ‘a noninferiority trial aims to show that the test product isnot worse than the comparator by more than a prespecified,small amount. This amount is known as the noninferioritymargin, or delta’. This approach to experimental data is furtherexplained in two of the articles in this issue of the journal (All-gulander, et al., 2008; Nutt, ., 2008).One reason why noninferiority has become an issue inrecent years is the increasing number of medicines with similar

Deconstructing the Laws of Logic

AbstractI consider reasons for questioning ‘the laws of logic’ (identity, non-contradiction, excluded middle, and negation), and suggest that these laws do not accord with everyday reality. Either they are rhetorical tools rather than absolute truths, or else Plato and his successors were right to think that they identify a reality distinct from the ordinary world of experience, and also from the ultimate source of reality.

Using invariants to determine change detection in dynamical system with chaos

The problem of change detection in dynamical systems originated from ordinary differential equations and real world phenomena is covered. Until now suitable methods for detecting changes for linear systems and nonlinear systems have been elaborated but there are no such method for chaotic systems. In this paper we propose the method of change detection based on the fractal dimension, which is the one of characteristics dynamical system invariants. The application of the method is illustrated with simulations.

“Things That Happen and What We Say About Them”: Speaking the Ordinary in DeLillo’sThe Names

Near the end of Don DeLillo's The Names, Owen Brademas is recounting his childhood experience with glossolalia. The scene is charismatic church in the Midwest; his parents are full of the Spirit, but he himself cannot summon spiritual tongue, and indeed is paralyzed by the preacher's unrelenting rhetoric. The reader receives the language of this preacher indirectly, mediated by the narrator: There is Spirit lurking here. Show me the scripture that says we have to speak English to know the joy of talking freely to God. Ridiculous, we say. There's no such document. Paul to the Corinthians said men can speak with the tongues of angels. In our time we can do the same. (306) One does not think to question the preacher's scholarship, but he has made mistake, and the mistake is emblematic of the specious ambitions of language in the novel as whole. The mistake involves the subtle falsification of Saint Paul's words. What his first letter to the Corinthians actually says is this: If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or clanging cymbal (13:1). Speaking with the tongues of angels is spoken of only as possibility, and the possibility itself operates only as provocation to foreground its superior: love. In this scene, however, Owen is cut off from such intersubjective possibilities. Unable to speak and tempted to begin striking himself, he flees the church into the rain outside. That the preacher's aspiration for language to achieve total metaphysical transparency--a condition of expression proper to the angels--is source of social alienation for young boy implies critique of such aspiration. Its trajectory overshoots what the novel sees as the proper habitation of language: the ordinary world of human relations. James Axton, the narrator and main protagonist, knows this by the end of the book, when he says, is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about (312). The breadth of this definition marks the growing identity of language itself with love, and the coincidence of both with attention to ordinary experience. Much of the early criticism of The Names understood the novel as postmodern exploration of language's possibilities and deficiencies, its fecundity and indeterminacy. For Paula Bryant, at stake in the novel was a language system which refuses to fulfill its implied promise to define reality, let alone allow [one] to communicate with others to [one's] satisfaction (18). This paradigm is still current; its most compelling recent spokesman is David Cowart, who reads The Names along the lines of his general account, in which DeLillo's aesthetic suggests recognition that language will always resist and betray attempts by the unsubtle to make it transparent medium, window on the world of things. Immured in language, one has ... only words to play with--words that refer to other words and such reality as words may construct, but never to the world in its extralinguistic integrity. (2) This model of criticism tends to focus on what language cannot do in DeLillo's novels, on its persistent thwarting of our expressive and hermeneutic aspirations. I want to make the case that while The Names cannot be understood without these insights, it moves beyond them as it strives to narrow the gap between our hopes for language and what it accomplishes. In doing this it explores not only language's slippery refusals but also the psychological and moral conditions that animate the very expectations we place on it. The novel moves, in other words, from delineation of our frustration to an inquiry into whether we should be frustrated at all. I want to suggest that after staging an implicit struggle between competing conceptions of language, The Names affirms vision in which language is, before all else, the fertile domain of our response to the ordinary world. …

The Ghosts of South Florida

levKw The Ghosts of South Florida Mark Budman St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves Karen Russell Knopf http://www.aaknopf.com 256 pages; cloth, $22.00 Why should The Plot Against America (2004) by Philip Roth be considered literary fiction' while alternative history books by Harry Turtledove are genre? Moreover, how is a literary ghost different from his lowly genre counterpart? Arc his claws more exquisitely trimmed or his fangs more intricately curved? Does his blood drip in more shapely rivulets or his moans follow the beats of Mozart's symphonies? Broadly speaking, where do you draw the line between the dreaded genre in the ravine and the literary world on top of the hill? Does this line still exist or has it been smeared and deconstructed by the intrepid pioneers of the magic realism world, writers the caliber ofGabriel Garcia Marquez, Aimee Bender, and, now, Karen Russell? Every story in the young author's debut collection has its own ghost, unless the protagonist is a werewolf cub-child, sent for cultural reeducation to the nunnery, a child who becomes human only when she utters her first lie. Imagine Harry Potter meeting Dickens's Oliver. In the case of the cub-child, her own past, present, and future torment her instead of the ghost. In addition to the normal ghost's employment , haunting, these ghosts do everything possible under the sun and the moon, including making love tp the protagonist's sister and hiding in underwater grottos. But even if they are still living, every single character in each story is still tormented one way or another and has his or her skeleton in the closet, even if this is an exoskeleton. Of course, life is never onedimensional , so many stories are infused with satire. Of macabre variety, of course. Don't forget, this is a pack of not yet tamed werewolves we are dealing with: "they found Mirabella...trying to strangle a. mallard with her rosary beads." And the ghosts in the collection are of a Floridian stock, a regional variety suited for the humid climate endurance, dune sliding on giant crab exoskeletons, cleaning after seagulls, gators wrestling, and early blossoming sexuality. The title story's plot, though dealing with the children of werewolves raised by nuns, could be considered a metaphor for race relationships, punctuated with frequent use of the term "brothers" and "sisters" applied to werewolves' cubs. Or it's a metaphor forjuvenile crime and societal punishment. Or it's a metaphor for immigration and xenophobia. The presence of metaphors, whatever they are, and the intricate language they are constructed with, give Russell's stories an edge over traditional genre. That, and the astute observations of the ordinary world: "the way that squirrels are saved from looking like rodents by their poofy tails." Two little blemishes mar the otherwise nearperfect skin of his collection. Call the first one immaturity or call it too close following of the current literary trend, but in some stories, notably "Haunting Olivia," the ending is suspended in the air, failing to create a resolution. "Olivia could be everywhere." Considering that the plot of story is essentially a quest of two brothers for their dead sister, it leaves too much to the imagination. Imagine Harry Potter meeting Dickens's Oliver. Granted, an intelligent writer expects an intelligent reader to cooperate with her in the story's creation , but leaving off the piece almost in the middle of a sentence is too much. This ending contrasts markedly with the ending ofthe title story collection, where the above-mentioned former werewolf cub is facing her parents: "So," I said, telling my first human lie. "I'm home." But, on the other hand, children mature fast in the swamps of South Florida. The second one is that though all the protagonists in the collection are children, they talk and think like adults. "I've got Dad '.s blond hair and blue eyes, his embraceably lanky physique." Embraceably ! Is this an Emily Bronte character who has wandered into a time travel machine? The boy who said that did not even reach his teens, and he's not a bookworm by any means. In "Ava...

Old Man Poems

levKw The Ghosts of South Florida Mark Budman St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves Karen Russell Knopf http://www.aaknopf.com 256 pages; cloth, $22.00 Why should The Plot Against America (2004) by Philip Roth be considered literary fiction' while alternative history books by Harry Turtledove are genre? Moreover, how is a literary ghost different from his lowly genre counterpart? Arc his claws more exquisitely trimmed or his fangs more intricately curved? Does his blood drip in more shapely rivulets or his moans follow the beats of Mozart's symphonies? Broadly speaking, where do you draw the line between the dreaded genre in the ravine and the literary world on top of the hill? Does this line still exist or has it been smeared and deconstructed by the intrepid pioneers of the magic realism world, writers the caliber ofGabriel Garcia Marquez, Aimee Bender, and, now, Karen Russell? Every story in the young author's debut collection has its own ghost, unless the protagonist is a werewolf cub-child, sent for cultural reeducation to the nunnery, a child who becomes human only when she utters her first lie. Imagine Harry Potter meeting Dickens's Oliver. In the case of the cub-child, her own past, present, and future torment her instead of the ghost. In addition to the normal ghost's employment , haunting, these ghosts do everything possible under the sun and the moon, including making love tp the protagonist's sister and hiding in underwater grottos. But even if they are still living, every single character in each story is still tormented one way or another and has his or her skeleton in the closet, even if this is an exoskeleton. Of course, life is never onedimensional , so many stories are infused with satire. Of macabre variety, of course. Don't forget, this is a pack of not yet tamed werewolves we are dealing with: "they found Mirabella...trying to strangle a. mallard with her rosary beads." And the ghosts in the collection are of a Floridian stock, a regional variety suited for the humid climate endurance, dune sliding on giant crab exoskeletons, cleaning after seagulls, gators wrestling, and early blossoming sexuality. The title story's plot, though dealing with the children of werewolves raised by nuns, could be considered a metaphor for race relationships, punctuated with frequent use of the term "brothers" and "sisters" applied to werewolves' cubs. Or it's a metaphor forjuvenile crime and societal punishment. Or it's a metaphor for immigration and xenophobia. The presence of metaphors, whatever they are, and the intricate language they are constructed with, give Russell's stories an edge over traditional genre. That, and the astute observations of the ordinary world: "the way that squirrels are saved from looking like rodents by their poofy tails." Two little blemishes mar the otherwise nearperfect skin of his collection. Call the first one immaturity or call it too close following of the current literary trend, but in some stories, notably "Haunting Olivia," the ending is suspended in the air, failing to create a resolution. "Olivia could be everywhere." Considering that the plot of story is essentially a quest of two brothers for their dead sister, it leaves too much to the imagination. Imagine Harry Potter meeting Dickens's Oliver. Granted, an intelligent writer expects an intelligent reader to cooperate with her in the story's creation , but leaving off the piece almost in the middle of a sentence is too much. This ending contrasts markedly with the ending ofthe title story collection, where the above-mentioned former werewolf cub is facing her parents: "So," I said, telling my first human lie. "I'm home." But, on the other hand, children mature fast in the swamps of South Florida. The second one is that though all the protagonists in the collection are children, they talk and think like adults. "I've got Dad '.s blond hair and blue eyes, his embraceably lanky physique." Embraceably ! Is this an Emily Bronte character who has wandered into a time travel machine? The boy who said that did not even reach his teens, and he's not a bookworm by any means. In "Ava...

Doppelganger (review)

Reviewed by: Doppelganger April Spisak Stahler, David, Jr. Doppelganger. Eos/HarperCollins, 2006258 p Library ed. ISBN 0-06-087233-0$17.89 Trade ed. ISBN 0-06-087232-2$16.99 R Gr. 7-12 In Stahler's otherwise ordinary world, doppelgangers murder humans and then adopt their forms and lives; it is therefore fortunate that their own existences are not complicated with names, societal rules, or consciences. One sixteen-year-old doppelganger cannot seem to settle into his fate—perhaps because he is part human, or perhaps he developed sympathy for the human plight from watching television in his isolated cabin while his absentee, indifferent mother came back only to feed him. After his mother kicks him out, he is forced to make his first kill to disguise himself, and he selects a sick, elderly man whom he can pretend was ready to die; he next kills Chris, a violent teen who had tried to murder the doppelganger, and he discovers that there may be lives crueler than his own when he becomes enmeshed with Chris' sad, violent family. The book raises interesting moral questions about the nature of monsters: the murderous doppelganger haunted by his seemingly unavoidable destiny is contrasted with Chris and his father, both angry and abusive men who cannot change their actions. The doppelganger's painful and realistically agonized first-person narration heightens sympathy, as do the sacrifices he makes to avoid fulfilling his murderous destiny. Stahler has written a powerful novel about crushing violence, fragile idealism, and the sometimes insurmountable difficulty of outrunning one's upbringing. Teens struggling to create their own paths, especially those raised in difficult homes, will identify strongly with the protagonist and his onerous choices. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

The Case for Psychologism in Default and Inheritance Reasoning

Default reasoning occurs whenever the truth of the evidence available to the reasoner does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion being drawn. Despite this, one is entitled to draw the conclusion “by default” on the grounds that we have no information which would make us doubt that the inference should be drawn. It is the type of conclusion we draw in the ordinary world and ordinary situations in which we find ourselves. Formally speaking, ‘nonmonotonic reasoning’ refers to argumentation in which one uses certain information to reach a conclusion, but where it is possible that adding some further information to those very same premises could make one want to retract the original conclusion. It is easily seen that the informal notion of default reasoning manifests a type of nonmonotonic reasoning. Generally speaking, default statements are said to be true about the class of objects they describe, despite the acknowledged existence of “exceptional instances” of the class. In the absence of explicit information that an object is one of the exceptions we are enjoined to apply the default statement to the object. But further information may later tell us that the object is in fact one of the exceptions. So this is one of the points where nonmonotonicity resides in default reasoning. The informal notion has been seen as central to a number of areas of scholarly investigation, and we canvass some of them before turning our attention to its role in AI. It is because ordinary people so cleverly and effortlessly use default reasoning to solve interesting cognitive tasks that nonmonotonic formalisms were introduced into AI, and we argue that this is a form of psychologism, despite the fact that it is not usually recognized as such in AI. We close by mentioning some of the results from our empirical investigations that we believe should be incorporated into nonmonotonic formalisms.

Superconducting quantum bits

THE QUANTUM world looks very different to the ordinary world. A quantum particle can, for instance, be in two places simultaneously, while its speed and position cannot both be measured with complete accuracy at the same time. Moreover, if its mass is small enough, a quantum particle can tunnel through energy barriers that its classical counterparts could never cross.

Reminiscences of the Study of Spenser in Cambridge in the Late 1940s

Editor and critic A. C. Hamilton recalls his study of Spenser at Jesus College, Cambridge in the late 1940s and early 1950s, a post-World War II England that now seems more remote than only half a century ago, more like fairyland than the ordinary world. It is also remote from contemporary English sudies and literary criticism, and particularly from the contemporary understanding of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.

Thomas Kuhn on the existence of the world

This article argues that Thomas Kuhn's views on the existence of the world have undergone significant change in the course of his philosophical career. In Structure, Kuhn appears to be committed to the existence of the ordinary empirical world as well as the existence of an independent metaphysical world, but realism about the empirical world is abandoned in his later writings. Whereas in Structure the only relative worlds are the scientific worlds inhabited by the practitioners of various paradigms, the later Kuhn puts the non-scientific worlds of particular groups or cultures on the same footing as the paradigm-related scientific worlds. The article shows that, on what Ian Hacking called the “new-world problem”, the later Kuhn has moved to a more radical antirealist position. It is also argued that the earlier and later solutions to the “new-world problem” face insuperable difficulties, which render Kuhn's account of scientific change implausible.

La révolution transatlantique des émigrés. Des réseaux aux institutions

Both Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre present us with the paradox of a philosophy impregnated with literary and scientific culture which claims to turn its back on learning and to praise ignorance. This apparent contradiction disappears if we understand the Utopian aspect of their thought and argue that it is not knowledge as such that is rejected but the perverse use made of it in the ordinary world. Émile' s education directs knowledge towards a progressive pleasure untainted by the lust for power, while for Bernardin, one must be careful not to let learning smother love of beings and the exercise of sensibility ; thus it is not primordial and is only valuable as an instrument in the service of human relations. Both authors invite us, in their own way, to redefine the aim of teaching, the role and value of knowledge in education, together with the risks and contradictions involved. It is significant that the fundamental question concer¬ ning the purpose of learning is posed at the heart of the Enlightenment.

Rapport au savoir et utopie en éducation chez Rousseau et Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

Both Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre present us with the paradox of a philosophy impregnated with literary and scientific culture which claims to turn its back on learning and to praise ignorance. This apparent contradiction disappears if we understand the Utopian aspect of their thought and argue that it is not knowledge as such that is rejected but the perverse use made of it in the ordinary world. Émile' s education directs knowledge towards a progressive pleasure untainted by the lust for power, while for Bernardin, one must be careful not to let learning smother love of beings and the exercise of sensibility ; thus it is not primordial and is only valuable as an instrument in the service of human relations. Both authors invite us, in their own way, to redefine the aim of teaching, the role and value of knowledge in education, together with the risks and contradictions involved. It is significant that the fundamental question concerning the purpose of learning is posed at the heart of the Enlightenment.

Quality and Quantity in Economics: The Metaphysical Construction of the Economic Realm

There is a feeling today, more or less vague but nonetheless real, that accountants, economists, and others who deal mainly with money, inhabit a different world from everyone else. This ‘economic world' maps roughly onto the ordinary world of things, people, and the activities of life, but it comes subtly adrift at important points in ways that produce bafflement. Economists often insist that they live in the ‘real world', with the heavy implication that their critics and detractors live in a world of dreams, and though this insistence is sometimes enough to silence opposition, it is seldom accepted as wholly convincing or satisfactory. My purpose here is to argue that this feeling that the economic world is strange has substantial grounding of a kind not to be be brushed aside as inexpert ‘folk economics'. The feeling presupposes a contrast between a commonsense world and an economic world, and if there is such a contrast to be drawn, it ought to be possible to say something about these worlds and how and why they differ. I shall take it that the commonsense world is the world as it is ordinarily thought of and spoken about, and by ‘ordinary' thought and speech I mean those conducted in terms of the concepts of the natural language we all use. The economic world, accordingly, is the world as it is thought of and spoken about using economic concepts. In order to limit and define the task I shall consider two ordinary concepts which have fundamental places in our common conceptual scheme for dealing with the world and its contents, that of a thing and that of an activity.

A Currency Of Signs

A Currency Of Signs Judith Williamson (bio) Williamson, Judith. A currency of signs. In Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. London: Marion Boyars, 20–39. Reprinted with the permission of Marion Boyars Publishers Inc. ‘A sign is something which stands to somebody for something else, in some respect or capacity.’ C. S. Peirce 1 ‘That which exists for me through the medium of money, that which I can pay for, i.e. which money can buy, that am I, the possessor of the money.’ Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Referent Saussure says that with the word H-0-R-S-E, where the concept of horse is what is signified, the referent is what kicks you. Thus the referent always means the actual thing in the real world, to which a word or concept points. The referent is external to the sign, whereas the signified is part of the sign. (However, the external “reality” referred to by the collection of signs in an advertisement is itself a mythological system, another set of signs. These mythologies I call Referent Systems:(cf. Part II.) In A1 we saw how two things — an object from the ordinary world (jetty) and a product (tyre) — were connected. The jetty stood for a certain quality (strength), and by making the object and the product interchangeable in terms of this quality, its value adheres to the product. The intermediary object, the jetty, in representing a value which becomes attached to the product, is thus a sort of currency. Currency is something which represents a value and in its interchangeability with other things, gives them their ‘value’ too. It thus provides a useful metaphor for the transference of meaning; especially as this meaning is so intimately connected with real money transactions. As a preliminary to this chapter I want to start with a look at colour in visual advertising: it provides an introduction both to my method of analysis, to the way in which most visual adverts function, and to various aspects of the use to which this functioning can be put. Although the colour cannot be reproduced here it is described in the analyses. The next six examples all use colour in a slightly different way, but in each case it is the basis for a connection or connections unstated by the verbal part of the ad, and sometimes quite — apparently —irrelevant to it. Click for larger view View full resolution A2 Colour tells a story: In this picture the colour ‘axis’ is the triangle of orange-gold, formed by the two glasses of screwdrivers and the sun behind the trees. This connection already suggests a warm, natural, pure, light quality in the drink, since it is linked to the sunlight. This gold colour is echoed in the golden corn which surrounds the couple, also suggesting something natural, ripe, mellow. The other colour connection in this picture is the white of the couple’s clothes and of their bag. One would expect this white to be a reminder of the ‘White Rum’ but in fact it functions differently inside the picture. It helps tell a story, bridging time past and future. The white bag is already full of golden corn; this ‘harvesting’ is a piece of past consumption that hints at a similar action in the (at present undrunk) golden screwdrivers being placed inside, consumed by, the white couple. This hint is supported by the additional fact that the golden sun is just about to set, to ‘go down’ just as the drinks will. And so, as sure as the bag is already filled, and the sun is bound to set into the white sky, the drinks will, undoubtedly, end up inside the white people. This ‘story’ gives a new meaning to the words beneath. The idea of there being ‘still room’ now refers less to the environment (although it obviously does this on a simple level — countryside, a field, is shown) than to the fact that there is room inside the people for the drinks. The theme is, in fact, filling up, like the corn in the bag—consumption rather than expansion. It is significant that the space shown — the ‘room’ in the ‘intended...

BOOK REVIEW: Peter W. Sinnema.DYNAMICS OF THE PICTURED PAGE: REPRESENTING THE NATION IN THEILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998.

Scholars of nineteenth-century popular culture face an overabundance of material, much of it repetitive and, dare I say, boring. Relentless punning, barely comprehensible topical allusions, distasteful racial stereotypes, and rigid gender behavior characterize popular fiction, the theatre, and even the news in the cheap weekly and monthly periodicals. More than thirty years ago, Richard Altick, Louis James, and Margaret Dalziel pioneered the study of popular culture, arguing that, in spite of these obvious weaknesses, best-selling publications were well worth the labor of retrieval. The study of Victorian periodicals remains indispensable for anyone interested in understanding the daily, ordinary world of the nineteenth century, but in recent years the sheer quantity of material that must be assimilated has been a daunting barrier to all but the most assiduous student. This book may be a sign of change; a clear theoretical perspective and carefully selected examples bring to light the engaging visual and written world of the Illustrated London News for a new generation.

Observational Physics of Mirror World

Mirror (shadow) particles are required to restore symmetry between left- and right-handed coordinate systems. If mirror world exists, it has been born at the same time as the ordinary world and has the same evolution (in the case of the shadow world - broken mirror symmetry, the evolution and structure of the shadow world does not correspond with the observed world). Mirror world is a kind of dark matter. According to Bahcall (1984) local dark matter has a density approximately equal to the density of observed (ordinary) matter.

"Dead Men in Sultry Darkness": Western Theory and the Problematic of a Baseline Cultural Motif in Islamic Ascetic Tradition

In my researches on the mystical chanters in Egypt and Morocco, I have had to grapple with the problem of how to understand the whole culture of the ascetic tradition in Islam. I have concluded that the usual procedures among Western social sciences lead to a distortion of the lived experience of the Sūfīs and may not encapsulate Islamic tradition faithfully. This paper is an attempt to sketch a modified approach. The focal point of the paper is the claim that the potential member is initiated into a coherent socio-spiritual organization that transcends the normal time/space framework. It deals with issues of learning the code, with spiritual kin-group relationships and with the content of the spiritual cosmos. It suggests that the liturgical dimension of Sūfism is the central ingredient of an independent-minded spiritual movement ; it both holds the disparate social elements together, and connects the ordinary world with the supernatural world in an apparently seamless manner.