Strict Logic Research Articles

Eying the Thought Awry: The Anamorphosis of John Donne's Poetry

AbstractBy applying the concept of anamorphosis to the logical structures of John Donne's poetry, this essay extends the concept of anamorphosis from the visual peculiarity of an obscured image whose revelation requires finding an eccentric point of view to the epistemological process experienced by the viewer. An encounter with anamorphosis possesses its own strict logic; likewise, anamorphic constructions engender a rhetoric specific to their needs. Riehl argues that literary criticism should extend the study of anamorphosis in early modern literary texts in a new direction: both visual and verbal anamorphic models are engendered by the habits of thought, patterns of thinking that, by the seventeenth century, pervade various media and modes of representation. Even in the absence of explicit references to perspective, seeing, or painting, a text may nevertheless operate according to the rules of anamorphic logic and rhetoric. Aiming the anamorphic lens at Donne, this essay unravels anew the complex argum...

Die Rhetorik der Degeneration in der antisemitischen Literatur Das Bild des ,,entarteten“ jüdischen Künstlers

AbstractThis essay analyses the specific rhetoric of degeneration which was observable in the antisemitic polemic discourse of the last decades of 19th century. It provides an overview of the representation of Jewish art und artists as it took shape in the antisemitic literature of the Wilhelminian epoch. The growing emphasis placed by psychiatrists and racial theorists on the pathologies of the ,,Jewish race“, such as hysteria or degeneration, resulted in the tendency to pathologize Jewish art and artists, which were deemed responsible for the alleged decline of German culture. Mere aesthetic categories underwent a process of reduction and ideologization and were finally used for defamatory purposes, as shown in the case of the antisemitic denigration of Heinrich Heine. In order to demonstrate this, the analysis outlines the strict dichotomic logic of these argumentations, as the definition and consolidation of an ideal German essence was usually based on the construction of a degenerated Jewish identity.

Mammalian synthetic biology: Engineering of sophisticated gene networks

With the recent development of a wide range of inducible mammalian transgene control systems it has now become possible to create functional synthetic gene networks by linking and connecting systems into various configurations. The past 5 years has thus seen the design and construction of the first synthetic mammalian gene regulatory networks. These networks have built upon pioneering advances in prokaryotic synthetic networks and possess an impressive range of functionalities that will some day enable the engineering of sophisticated inter- and intra-cellular functions to become a reality. At a relatively simple level, the modular linking of transcriptional components has enabled the creation of genetic networks that are strongly analogous to the architectural design and functionality of electronic circuits. Thus, by combining components in different serial or parallel configurations it is possible to produce networks that follow strict logic in integrating multiple independent signals (logic gates and transcriptional cascades) or which temporally modify input signals (time-delay circuits). Progressing in terms of sophistication, synthetic transcriptional networks have also been constructed which emulate naturally occurring genetic properties, such as bistability or dynamic instability. Toggle switches which possess "memory" so as to remember transient administered inputs, hysteric switches which are resistant to stochastic fluctuations in inputs, and oscillatory networks which produce regularly timed expression outputs, are all examples of networks that have been constructed using such properties. Initial steps have also been made in designing the above networks to respond not only to exogenous signals, but also endogenous signals that may be associated with aberrant cellular function or physiology thereby providing a means for tightly controlled gene therapy applications. Moving beyond pure transcriptional control, synthetic networks have also been created which utilize phenomena, such as post-transcriptional silencing, translational control, or inter-cellular signaling to produce novel network-based control both within and between cells. It is envisaged in the not-too-distant future that these networks will provide the basis for highly sophisticated genetic manipulations in biopharmaceutical manufacturing, gene therapy and tissue engineering applications.

Toward a Feminist Ontology

Thus the outlawed element-called the slave and the repressed in other symbolic systems-rules without appeal or recall the very text that outlaws it. Luce Irigaray I argue in this essay that Luce Irigaray offers tools in her early work that serve to radicalize the notion of difference that we find in traditional metaphysics since Plato. As I see it, sexual difference in "Plato's Hystera" is a trope that Irigaray employs to disrupt the economy of identity and difference that we have inherited from Plato, an economy that excludes true difference.1 I call this kind of work feminist ontology. I argue that by challenging the tyranny of truth based on identity as it has come to us since Plato, Irigaray offers us a new metaphysics that grants difference a claim to truth outside the hierarchy of identity. Reading Plato's analogy of the cave in "Plato's Hystera," Irigaray maintains that Plato's description of truth necessarily undermines itself. Against Plato's claim that the sun, as the one signifier, evidences the lack of knowledge in the cave, Irigaray argues that the cave offers its own multiple account of truth that threatens the logic of the sun. In fact, she contends, Plato's One of the sun is rooted in the originary epistemological moment of the cave which disrupts the entire economy of Platonic truth from within itself. Because the passage between the cave and the sun is continually forgotten, as Irigaray repeats over and over again as if to remind unceasingly, because this passage is forgotten, we fail to recognize the cave as its own economy of truth and see it only as a dim reflection of the strict logic of the One sun.2 Plato's privileging of one signifier demands that we constitute meaning in terms of non-difference. By non-difference, I mean difference understood solely in relation to identity for Plato. Difference is measured by the distance from identity, and not in itself. By assuming the existence of an original and judging by the failure of a thing to be like the original, this account of difference gives priority to the original and not to the different thing. Irigaray contends that difference cannot be understood in relation to identity: the one thing that measures what it is not. Instead, difference must be multiple. The multiple of difference is not of a One and then of every other, the Many, which has meaning because it is related to the One. That is the meaning that follows from the logic of identity. Put in terms of sexual difference, Irigaray does not desire to be man's equal, as she supposes de Beauvoir strives to be, because this equality involves a relation to identity-being the same as another.3 Rather, difference must be understood in terms of true otherness. The One must be eliminated altogether, and difference understood as the relation of all the existing particulars in relation to one another. Irigaray illustrates this relation of difference and identity by showing that the logic of the sun, of identity, requires the logic of the cave, of difference, not vice versa as Plato would have us believe. In fact, any working political ethics demands this multiplicity.4 Essentialism and the (Im)Possibility of Difference When we read Irigaray's essay on Plato, we must remember that this chapter is the bookend that mirrors its other bookend, the first chapter on Freud. Feminist readers of Irigaray find themselves in an ambiguous relationship with her theorizing on difference and sexual difference in particular. They acknowledge that her efforts to multiply sites of signification are necessary for the subjective development of women. Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis reasserts the traditional notion of signification and identity in terms of one signifier, the phallus, which bestows meaning only on that which finds itself in relation to the signifier. It is clear in Irigaray's analysis that Freud is just another thinker of the logic of signification that Plato establishes in his analogy of the cave. …

Baby Doe Redux? The Department of Health and Human Services and the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002: A Cautionary Note on Normative Neonatal Practice

Baby Doe Redux? The Department of Health and Human Services and the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act of 2002: A Cautionary Note on Normative Neonatal Practice

AUV fuzzy neural BDI

The typical BDI (belief desire intention) model of agent is not efficiently computable and the strict logic expression is not easily applicable to the AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) domain with uncertainties. In this paper, an AUV fuzzy neural BDI model is proposed. The model is a fuzzy neural network composed of five layers: input (beliefs and desires), fuzzification, commitment, fuzzy intention, and defuzzification layer. In the model, the fuzzy commitment rules and neural network are combined to form intentions from beliefs and desires. The model is demonstrated by solving PEG (pursuit-evasion game), and the simulation result is satisfactory.

Randomization Inference With Imperfect Compliance in the ACE-Inhibitor After Anthracycline Randomized Trial

Anthracyclines are quite effective at curing certain cancers of childhood, but they may damage the heart. The ACE-Inhibitor After Anthracycline (AAA) study compared enalapril to placebo in a randomized trial in an effort to determine whether treatment with enalapril would preserve or improve cardiac function among children previously treated with anthracylines. As is true in many clinical trials, patient compliance with the study protocol was imperfect; some children took less than the prescribed dose of enalapril or placebo. Most analytical procedures that acknowledge imperfect compliance do so at significant cost, abandoning the tight logic of random assignment. With noncompliance, assignment to enalapril or placebo is randomized, but the dose of enalapril actually received is not, and self-selection effects parallel to those in observational studies can exist and have been documented in some instances. Some researchers advocate adherence to the strict logic of randomization by reporting only, or else strongly emphasizing, the so-called “intent-to-treat” analysis, which makes no use of information about compliance. Other researchers report analyses that are not justified by random assignment and can be subject to substantial biases, such as “per protocol” analyses or “treatment received” analyses. Here we apply a recent proposal for randomization inference with an instrumental variable that uses randomization as the “reasoned basis for inference” in Fisher's phrase. We make no assumption that compliance is random; indeed, compliance may be severely biased. Importantly, the proposed analysis will find a statistically significant effect of the treatment if and only if the intent-to-treat analysis finds a significant effect; yet, unlike intent-to-treat analysis, our analysis acknowledges that a patient assigned to a drug that he or she does not take will not receive the drug's pharmacological benefits.

On the strict logic foundation of fuzzy reasoning

This paper focuses on the logic foundation of fuzzy reasoning. At first, a new complete first-order fuzzy predicate calculus system K* corresponding to the formal system L* is built. Based on the many-sort system Kms* corresponding to K*, the triple I methods of FMP and FMT for fuzzy reasoning and their consistency are formalized, thus fuzzy reasoning is put completely and rigorously into the logic framework of fuzzy logic.

Ex Cathedra Cladistics

There is barely a field of biology that remains untouched by the use of phylogenies. From linguistic analysis to the study of conservation and biodiversity, phylogenies are an integral tool for comparative studies in all branches of biology. It is therefore not surprising that teaching the basic elements of phylogeny reconstruction has become an essential part of most undergraduate biology courses, and for many students cladistics is their first introduction to this subject. Yet its strict logic and daunting technical vocabulary mean that for many the cladistic method is difficult to grasp, especially when taught from the rather dry accounts available in some evolution textbooks. This publication is the latest in a series of recent books attempting to bridge this gap. Combining an interactive CD-ROM and accompanying book, the authors provide an introductory account of the cladistic method that takes advantage of the electronic medium while assuming no prior knowledge of cladistics.

Speculations on the Origins of Linear Perspective

Richard Talbot demonstrates an approach and method for constructing perspectival space that may account for many of the distinguishing spatial and compositional features of key Renaissance paintings. The aim of the paper is also to show that this approach would not necessarily require, as a prerequisite, any understanding of the geometric basis and definitions of linear perspective as established by Alberti. The author discusses paintings in which the spatial/geometric structure has often defied conventional reconstruction when the strict logic of linear perspective is applied.

The lazy logic of partial terms

AbstractThe Logic of Partial TermsLPTis a strict negative free logic that provides an economical framework for developing many traditional mathematical theories having partial functions. In these traditional theories, all functions and predicates are strict. For example, if a unary function (predicate) is applied to an undefined argument, the result is undefined (respectively, false). On the other hand, every practical programming language incorporates at least one nonstrict or lazy construct, such as the if-then-else, but nonstrict functions cannot be either primitive or introduced in definitional extensions inLPT. Consequently, lazy programming language constructs do not fit the traditional mathematical mold inherent inLPT. A nonstrict (positive free) logic is required to handle nonstrict functions and predicates.Previously developed nonstrict logics are not fully satisfactory because they are verbose in describing strict functions (which predominate in many programming languages), and some logicians find their semantics philosophically unpalatable. The newly developed Lazy Logic of Partial TermsLLis as concise asLPTin describing strict functions and predicates, and strict and nonstrict functions and predicates can be introduced in definitional extensions of traditional mathematical theories.LLis “built on top of”LPT. and, likeLPT, admits only one domain in the semantics. In the semantics, for the case of a nonstrict unary functionhin an LL theoryT, we have ⊨Th(⊥) =y↔ ∀x(h(x) = y), where ⊥ is a canonical undefined term. Correspondingly, in the axiomatization, the “indifference” (to the value of the argument) axiomh(⊥) =y↔ ∀x(h(x) = y)guarantees a proper fit with the semantics. The price paid forLL's naturalness is that it is tailored for describing a specific area of computer science, program specification and verification, possibly limiting its role in explicating classical mathematical and philosophical subjects.

Human and spiritual values

This paper starts with some perennial questions like “What does value mean?”, “What determines value?” and “Is there a general code of human values?” and presents the results of a long research work, both scholarly and practical, on these and further questions. Although all individuals are exactly alike in their fundamental structure, they differ in their mental, emotional and physical impressions. Nevertheless there seems to be an evolutionary course, based on a strict logic, and each individual “chooses” his personal path withing this general stucture. This personal path is related to the deep individual hierarchy of values (as opposed to a superficial one, that is used as a mask), whose first items contribute determining the personality and creating the life style. Hence, values have a very important role, establishing the direction and goals of individual and social actions and inducing the conception of possible gains out of given situations. Human and spiritual values are evolutionary forms, means by which one's consciousness evolves. Evolution is the moving towards values that an individual (and/or a society) senses, judges and values as superior, and the forgoing of perceived lower ones. In this process all higher values will become, one day, present ones, leaving their space for newly perceived higher values, and further on they will be our lower ones, until we will cast them off. Values cannot be enforced from the outside, and everybody should be allowed to freely choose the system of values governing her/his life. There are, though, forms of ethics that are deeply rooted into the human structure, parts of a universal and impersonal ethical code that we can try and detect. The paper presents some clues for pursuing this personal search, describing the so‐called “survival dynamics” and their interactions with five life categories and four phases of life. It then highlights the ethical code that is present and common in all religions and in all the more developed civilisations, whose starting point is that “we are all one family”. From this standpoint some considerations are then discussed with respect to the present day world situation.

The rhetoric of liberty

For a long time now, of course, intellectuals have been trying to avoid rhetoric in defense of liberty. They might as well avoid mere reasoning or mere speaking. The defenses are commonly set in the axiom-and-proof rhetoric of the line Eucid-Aquinas-Hobbes-Russell. Formality is trumps and the meaning of formality is an imitation of Euclid's certitude. Consider Alan Peacock's twopage article on Economic Freedom in The New Paigrave: A Dictionary of Economics (which with Alan Ryan's other two on Liberty in the Dictionary brings the total of modem economic reflection on liberty to four pages out of some 4000). Peacock begins by setting the question of economic freedom into the standard Samuelsonian framework of modem economics-maximization of utility under a budget constraint-with careful delineation of the subscripts, as though relevant. After two opening paragraphs of such mathpride, however, he rejects his own formal construct, pointing out that mere liberty to move within a budget constraint is not what people mean by liberty.Anything-the KGB's rules of conduct in pre-democratic Lithuania, for example-can be included in the budget constraint, making slaves by definition into men, to choose within the constraints of their shackles. Peacock argues plausibly that more than liberty to move about within a budget constraint must be required: Economic freedom requires that the various terms in the budget constraint reflect the absence of 'preference or restraint' (Adam Smith) on the (Vol. 2,33). As Herbert Spencer said, when he is under the impersonal coercion of Nature, we say that he is free (493, italics added). Peacock then tries to connect the absence of or to the market: Therefore (the prices must) ... result from the operation of competitive market forces with the individual being to choose between alternatives (italics added). The therefore fails in strict logic, though demanded by the axiom-and-proof rhetoric of his piece. The problem is that it is not obvious that an absence of preference or restraint requires competition. Peacock does

Domestic Structure and Preventive War: Are Democracies More Pacific?

Realists have long viewed uneven rates of growth among states as a major cause of wars. According to strict logic of realpolitik, a declining dominant power should launch a preventive war against a rising challenger as a prudent long-term security strategy. But historically, power shifts have only sometimes resulted in war. Although preventive war has been the preferred response of declining authoritarian leaders, no democracy has ever initiated such a war. Instead, depending on the regime type of the rising challenger, democratic states have chosen accommodation, defensive alliances, or internal balancing to solve the problem of impending decline. In addition to establishing the correlation between preventive war and authoritarian regimes and explaining why democratic states forgo this option, this essay (1) develops a model based on the domestic structures of the leader and challenger that predicts which strategy will be employed by a declining dominant power and (2) tests the propositions against historical survey data and several in-depth case studies.

Abstract Morality, Concrete Cases

Practitioners of disciplines whose problems are debated by moral philosophers regularly complain that the philosophers are engaged in abstract speculation, divorced from ‘real-life’ consequences and responsibilities, that it is the practitioners (doctor, research scientist, politician) who must take the decisions, and that they cannot (and should not) act in accordance with strict abstract logic.

Abstract Morality, Concrete Cases

Practitioners of disciplines whose problems are debated by moral philosophers regularly complain that the philosophers are engaged in abstract speculation, divorced from ‘real-life’ consequences and responsibilities, that it is the practitioners (doctor, research scientist, politician) who must take the decisions, and that they cannot (and should not) act in accordance with strict abstract logic.

In Search of Hidden Information: Some Issues in the Socio-Economic History of Russia in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

R. J. Collingwood compares the historian to a detective. Both, in his opinion, are dissatisfied with what is contained in the documents and engage in a search for hidden or lost information. Both follow their intuition, guided by scientific positivist methods, and base their work on hypotheses and the strict logic of question and answer (1980: 253-269). In recent years the research laboratories of detectives and historians almost simultaneously have been replenished by quantitative methods of analysis, which substantially increased the possibility of achieving the desired goals: to find hidden information and go beyond the bounds of what is directly contained in the documents.

Poet and painter in eighth-century Greece

The relationship between poetry and the visual arts is seldom close and never simple. But special difficulties attend the study of it in the eighth century before Christ in Greece, when evidence is not only in excessively short supply but, when it does come, is almost by definition ambiguous. On the whole question of the interpretation of Late Geometric vase-painting and other eighth-century art, there are well-established opposing positions: each new discovery finds a different interpretation on the part of what may be called the optimists – those who seek for correspondences between the Homeric epics and the visual arts – and of the sceptics, who habitually argue that there is no evidence for anything of the kind. Each party appears to have found an outlet for the promulgation of its view, inasmuch as many general or semi-popular accounts of Geometric and other early Greek art present it as having a major mythological content derived from epic poetry; while many closer scholarly studies, deploying an array of iconographical learning and strict logic, nowadays reach the opposite conclusion, that there is little or no narrative content of any kind, mythological or otherwise, and no significant contact with epic, until the end of the Geometric period.

Technology as a form of consciousness: A study of contemporary ethos

Technology as a cultural force lends itself to rhetorical investigation through the concept of ethos. Ethos, in discourse, is the expression of character, or consciousness, which in turn has been shaped by action. Examining the actions fundamental to technology reveals features of technological consciousness. Primitive, or low‐context, technology leads to ends‐means confusion, objectivism, and cause‐and‐effect reasoning. Advanced, or high‐context, technology has impressed on our character an ideology of efficiency, organizational procedure, closed‐system thinking, and optimism. These features of modern consciousness formulate an ethos of strict logic, expertise, and objectivity.

Necessity or Freedom? The Politics of an Eighteenth-Century Metaphysical Debate

Necessity or Freedom? The Politics of an Eighteenth-Century Metaphysical Debate ARAM VARTANIAN The precise relationship between necessity as a metaphysical or moral concept and freedom as a civil and political principle is a subject open to speculation. While the one need not, in strict logic, preclude the other, there is at least plausibility in the common belief that a morally free agent is, by the nature of things, fit to be also (within prescribed limits) a politically free agent; and that, conversely, a human being incapable of free choice would have no true claim to the exercise of political liberty—indeed, that the notion of such liberty has something gratuitous and absurd about it when applied to a be­ havioral automaton. Thus, even if the ideas of metaphysical necessity and political freedom are not formally in contradiction, their incon­ gruity is apparent to ordinary reasoning and is reinforced by semantic and psychological habit. If, to illustrate this point, we take the early case of Hobbes, we are impressed by the cogency of his general out­ look. Anticipating several philosophes of the eighteenth century, Hob­ bes was, of course, a mechanical materialist who denied that thinking and action could in any proper sense be described as free. He argued, 153 154 / ARAM VARTANIAN instead, that these resulted from corporeal movements that put the individual, whether he knew it or not, under ceaseless constraint. The Hobbesian politics turned out to be of a piece with his vision of a human nature ruled by necessity; for in that sphere, too, freedom became an idle word, and the outcome of all political initiatives was seen as determined by superior force among competing “bodies” in collective “motion.” Compatibly with this, Hobbes left little or no place to any consideration that the subjects of his Leviathan might possess natural freedoms or inalienable rights. In taking a historical leap to modem times, a similar pattern of ideas may easily be observed. We find that apologists of dictatorial government prefer to picture men, not as metaphysically (and therefore immutably) free agents responsible for their choices, but rather as passive participants in poli­ tics, swayed and driven by a complex of external and impersonal causes—historical, national, economic, environmental, physiologi­ cal, etc.—that dispose of their wills despite themselves. By contrast, in those societies where political liberty is a long-established fact, the dominant ideology, whatever its local version might be, takes for granted that human beings, despite all the pressures of circumstance acting on them, retain a margin of personal choice in their decisions. And one finds, in use among such peoples, an everyday rhetoric that intimately joins the notion of moral freedom to that of political and civil liberty. I have insisted on what may seem an obvious thought-structure in order to set in sharper relief the inversion of this normal paradigm during the Enlightenment, particularly in France, where several philosophes—La Mettrie, Diderot, D’Holbach—who advocated, each in his way, freedom as an intellectual, religious, civil, or political goal, also categorically spumed it as a metaphysical and moral concept. The beginnings of this anomaly were in Spinoza. The great systematizer of determinism (or fatalisme, as it was called in eighteenth-century France) had, without any visible twinge of self-contradiction, warmly approved the Republican and liberalizing tendencies of Dutch politics in his day. A like paradox runs through the story of his life. One wonders why, if Spinoza was inclined to respect necessity in all things, he had not resigned himself to the fate of being a Jew. His excom­ Necessity or Freedom? I 155 munication was, in effect, a drastic act of liberation. In that case, did his later espousal of determinism, inter alia, spring from a desire to vindicate after the fact the course he had all too freely chosen? For, as everyone knows, the appeal to necessity is two-edged: when translated into practice, it can justify either submission to whatever situation is already given; or, retrospectively, rebellion against it and selfaffirmation . If Spinoza was, so to speak, forced to be free, such a formula, which is not irrelevant to his influence on the Enlighten­ ment, may be a key...