Textbook Account Research Articles

Quantum ontology without textbooks. Nor overlapping

In this paper, I critically assess two recent proposals for an interpretation-independent understanding of non-relativistic quantum mechanics: the overlap strategy (Fraser & Vickers, 2022) and the textbook account (Egg, 2021). My argument has three steps. I first argue that they presume a Quinean-Carnapian meta-ontological framework that yields flat, structureless ontologies. Second, such ontologies are unable to solve the problems that quantum ontologists want to solve. Finally, only structured ontologies are capable of solving the problems that quantum ontologists want to solve. But they require some dose of speculation. In the end, I defend the conservative way to do quantum ontology, which is (and must be) speculative and non-neutral.

Multi-word Vernacular Formations in the Multilingual Durham Account Rolls

The textbook account of the history of English suggests that Middle English favoured lexical borrowing and native compounding declined. Still, some types of compounds carried on being productive and new types were developed in Middle English. The non-negligible presence of complex lexical units—encompassing both compounds and other multi-word expressions (see Schlucker 2019)—in late medieval English texts whose base language is Medieval Latin is worth tracing: What kinds of complex lexical units are present in those texts and why are they expressed in the vernacular instead of using Latin equivalents (if any)? This article gives a sketch of the background to the historical development of compounding, putting it alongside (rather than in isolation from) the languages and textual traditions with which English had contact, and provides examples of such compound formations from a case study, the Durham Account Rolls.

Whole body acid-base modeling revisited.

The textbook account of whole body acid-base balance in terms of endogenous acid production, renal net acid excretion, and gastrointestinal alkali absorption, which is the only comprehensive model around, has never been applied in clinical practice or been formally validated. To improve understanding of acid-base modeling, we managed to write up this conventional model as an expression solely on urine chemistry. Renal net acid excretion and endogenous acid production were already formulated in terms of urine chemistry, and we could from the literature also see gastrointestinal alkali absorption in terms of urine excretions. With a few assumptions it was possible to see that this expression of net acid balance was arithmetically identical to minus urine charge, whereby under the development of acidosis, urine was predicted to acquire a net negative charge. The literature already mentions unexplained negative urine charges so we scrutinized a series of seminal papers and confirmed empirically the theoretical prediction that observed urine charge did acquire negative charge as acidosis developed. Hence, we can conclude that the conventional model is problematic since it predicts what is physiologically impossible. Therefore, we need a new model for whole body acid-base balance, which does not have impossible implications. Furthermore, new experimental studies are needed to account for charge imbalance in urine under development of acidosis.

Historical Consciousness and Historical Media - A History Didactical Approach to Educational Media

This paper presents a theoretical approach to analysing educational media using the concept of historical consciousness. The concept of historical consciousness is defined and operationalised and its relevance for analysis of historical media is discussed. One aspect of the theoretical framework proposed is then applied in an analysis of a history textbook account. The analysis finds that while the framework may be applied in analysis of textbooks, its results regarding historical consciousness are tentative and in need of further investigation from the perspective of how its users perceive and appropriate the textbook account. Still, it is argued that the framework proposed may be useful since it specifies how a historical consciousness may be manifested and what methodological approaches that can be used when analysing it.

Rethinking inhibition theory: On the problematic status of the inhibition theory for forgetting

The standard textbook account of interference and forgetting is based on the assumption that retrieval of a memory trace is affected by competition by other memory traces. In recent years, a number of researchers have questioned this view and have proposed an alternative account of forgetting based on a mechanism of suppression. In this inhibition account, such forgetting is due to an inhibitory control process that operates whenever non-target information hinders the retrieval of a specific target item. It is assumed that the memory traces of these non-target items are suppressed or inhibited in order to overcome their interfering effects and it is claimed that this inhibition has a longer-lasting effect on the strength of the suppressed memory traces. In this paper we critically review the claim that the inhibition theory provides a better account of forgetting than more traditional competition-based theories. We discuss the explanations that have been proposed to account for retrieval induced forgetting, the think/no-think paradigm, directed forgetting, the part-list cuing effect, output interference and list-strength effects. We conclude that the theoretical status of inhibition as an explanation for interference and forgetting is problematic. We show that the claim that these findings cannot be explained by standard competition-based accounts is incorrect.

Interocular transfer of spatial adaptation is weak at low spatial frequencies

Adapting one eye to a high contrast grating reduces sensitivity to similar target gratings shown to the same eye, and also to those shown to the opposite eye. According to the textbook account, interocular transfer (IOT) of adaptation is around 60% of the within-eye effect. However, most previous studies on this were limited to using high spatial frequencies, sustained presentation, and criterion-dependent methods for assessing threshold. Here, we measure IOT across a wide range of spatiotemporal frequencies, using a criterion-free 2AFC method. We find little or no IOT at low spatial frequencies, consistent with other recent observations. At higher spatial frequencies, IOT was present, but weaker than previously reported (around 35%, on average, at 8c/deg). Across all conditions, monocular adaptation raised thresholds by around a factor of 2, and observers showed normal binocular summation, demonstrating that they were not binocularly compromised. These findings prompt a reassessment of our understanding of the binocular architecture implied by interocular adaptation. In particular, the output of monocular channels may be available to perceptual decision making at low spatial frequencies.

Staging the Nation in Fascist Italy's “New Provinces”

Read any textbook account of interwar Europe, and “indifference to nation” is not likely to figure as a heading. On the contrary, the talk will be of untrammeled nationalist rivalries leading the continent to ruin. In the territories of Eastern and South Eastern Europe that had once been part of the polyglot Habsburg and Ottoman empires, we will be reminded, nationalist hatred and border conflicts paved the way to World War I. And in the aftermath of that war, the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler took glorification of the national community to new heights, unleashing colonial and continental wars of conquest and annihilation. Small wonder that when many Europeans looked back from the rubble of 1945, what they saw was far too much commitment to nation, not too little. Indeed, the aspiration of many idealists in 1945 was precisely to supersede the nationalist rivalries and affiliations that they saw as so detrimental to peaceful coexistence and to create some kind of supranational European loyalty and structure instead.

Reading up on the Opticks. Refashioning Newton's Theories of Light and Colors in Eighteenth-Century Textbooks

Robert Smith's A Compleat System of Opticks (1738) was the most prominent eighteenth-century text-book account of Newton's optics. By rearranging the findings and conclusions of Opticks, it made them accessible to a wider public and at the same time refashioned Newton's optics into a renewed science of optics. In this process, the optical parts of Principia were integrated, thus blending the experimental inferences and mechanistic hypotheses that Newton had carefully separated. The Compleat System was not isolated in its refashioning of Newton's optics. Dutch and English promoters of the new philosophy had preceded Smith by giving Opticks a text-book treatment, and they too integrated experimental and mechanistic inferences. In this way eighteenth-century text-books produced a natural philosophical discourse of light, colors and matter. This paper traces the refashioning of Newton's optics in Dutch and English text-books of natural philosophy during the first half of the eighteenth century. It concludes w...

Who Fired First? Students' Construction of Meaning From One Textbook Account of the Israeli–Arab Conflict

In this article, I present three students' and one parent's reading of an excerpt from a textbook on the Israeli–Arab conflict. The excerpt is an account of a skirmish between Jews and Arabs in 1920, symbolizing for Jews the first bloody encounter between the two sides. While all students read the same excerpt, they use different mechanisms in their reading process to decipher the text, and come to different historical conclusions about the meaning of the text. The three mechanisms of reading identified in the article are “horizon of expectations,”“the gap in the text,” and “narrative integration.” While “horizon of expectations” focuses on the beliefs that readers bring with them to the textual account, “the gap in the text” centers on how meaning is made in the process of reading. Finally, “narrative integration” highlights the way in which text readers integrate the account they read with other information they acquired earlier. In the conclusion of the article I compare the three processes readers use in their engagement with the text.

Logicist Responses to Kant

textbook account of the movement in the philosophy of mathematics called logicism is summed up in the title of chapter 9 of Raymond Wilder's Introduction to the Foundations of Mathematics : The Frege-Russell Thesis: Mathematics an Extension of Logic (Wilder 1965, 219). In The Logicist Foundations of Mathematics, Rudolf Carnap spells out the view implicit in this title (Carnap 1931, 91; for other examples, see Irvine 1996 and Richter 2004, 113):

It’s Not Written Here, But This Is What Happened: Students’ Cultural Comprehension of Textbook Narratives on the Israeli–Arab Conflict

A group of Israeli high school students (n = 11) from two socially distinct schools read aloud a textbook account of a 1920 bloody encounter between Jews and Arabs. The study aimed at examining the relation between the textbook account and the students’ formation of historical perceptions. Prior to reading the textbook excerpts, students wrote accounts of the event from their memory (the prenarrative). After being questioned about the prenarratives, the students read the textbook excerpts aloud and explained their understanding of the event. Twelve months later, they wrote another account of the event (the postnarrative). The study found that students “culturally comprehended” the textbook, or, in other words, that the nature of the students’ recollection was strongly affected by the social memory of the group within which they lived.

Rites of passage of the engram: reconsolidation and the lingering consolidation hypothesis.

Memory consolidation refers to the progressive stabilization of items in long-term memory as well as to the memory phase(s) during which this stabilization takes place. The textbook account is that, for each item in memory, consolidation starts and ends just once. In recent years, however, the notion that memories reconsolidate upon their reactivation and hence regain sensitivity to amnestic agents has been revitalized. This issue is of marked theoretical and clinical interest. Here we review the recent literature on reconsolidation and infer, on the basis of the majority of the data, that blockade of reconsolidation does not induce permanent amnesia. Further, in several systems, reconsolidation occurs only in relatively fresh memories. We propose a framework model, which interprets reconsolidation as a manifestation of lingering consolidation, rather than recapitulation of a process that had already come to a closure. This model reflects on the nature of consolidation in general and makes predictions that could guide further research.

The neurobiology of consolidations, or, how stable is the engram?

Consolidation is the progressive postacquisition stabilization of long-term memory. The term is commonly used to refer to two types of processes: synaptic consolidation, which is accomplished within the first minutes to hours after learning and occurs in all memory systems studied so far; and system consolidation, which takes much longer, and in which memories that are initially dependent upon the hippocampus undergo reorganization and may become hippocampal-independent. The textbook account of consolidation is that for any item in memory, consolidation starts and ends just once. Recently, a heated debate has been revitalized on whether this is indeed the case, or, alternatively, whether memories become labile and must undergo some form of renewed consolidation every time they are activated. This debate focuses attention on fundamental issues concerning the nature of the memory trace, its maturation, persistence, retrievability, and modifiability.

Stability of retrieved memory: inverse correlation with trace dominance.

In memory consolidation, the memory trace stabilizes and becomes resistant to certain amnesic agents. The textbook account is that for any memorized item, consolidation starts and ends just once. However, evidence has accumulated that upon activation in retrieval, the trace may reconsolidate. Whereas some authors reported transient renewed susceptibility of retrieved memories to consolidation blockers, others could not detect it. Here, we report that in both conditioned taste aversion in the rat and fear conditioning in the medaka fish, the stability of retrieved memory is inversely correlated with the control of behavior by that memory. This result may explain some conflicting findings on reconsolidation of activated memories.

Energy Conservation in GTR

The topics of gravitational field energy and energy-momentum conservation in General Relativity theory have been unjustly neglected by philosophers. If the gravitational field in space free of ordinary matter, as represented by the metric g ab itself, can be said to carry genuine energy and momentum, this is a powerful argument for adopting the substantivalist view of spacetime. This paper explores the standard textbook account of gravitational field energy and argues that (a) so-called stress-energy of the gravitational field is well-defined neither locally nor globally; and (b) there is no general principle of energy-momentum conservation to be found in General Relativity. I discuss the nature and justification of the zero-divergence law for ordinary stress-energy, and its possible connection with the failure of General Relativity to realise Mach's principle.

Fiscal commissions, consensus and informal representation: taxation in the Savoyard domains, 1559–1580

SUMMARY In this article, Matthew Vester examines how Duke Emanuel Filibert of Savoy set about re-establishing the ducal revenues after he recovered control of his duchy in 1559. Ducal commissioners were sent into the provinces to gather data on their tax obligations, and the control of the ducal castles and manors, something that could only be done with the help of the local communities and their officers, who were generally cooperative about providing information. The process of investigation was mainly one of negotiation rather than coercion, though the use of quartering soldiers to encourage compliance where concealment or obstruction was suspected was occasionally practised. The article re-examines the standard textbook account of the re-establishment of ducal authority, which treats it as an early exercise in royal absolutism. It is usually represented that in 1560 the duke summoned the estates of Piedmont and having secured their consent to an increase in taxation, dismissed them. Thereafter there were no further meetings of representative bodies in Savoy-Piedmont. The article shows that in reality there never was a formal meeting of the estates in 1560. Instead the duke negotiated privately with representatives of the nobles and the communities. The final tax settlement that emerged was the result of ongoing discussion between the ducal officers and the communities. And contrary to the absolutist model, it continued to be the practice in Savoy-Piedmont to negotiate with a variety of representative gatherings over taxation and services. Finally the article suggests that this kind of informal discussion with the representatives of the communities, which was a realistic appreciation that revenue raising without consent and cooperation could be very difficult, may have been widespread in the absolute monarchies of early modern Europe.

The 1999 Crafoord Prize Lectures. The idea of information in biology.

]TRANSCRIPTION, translation, code, library, message, editing, proof-readingany textbook account of molecular biology will define these terms, and any discussion among professionals will employ them. All are concerned with the transmission and storage of information. They have precise and well understood meanings in biology, and the parallels between the biological and colloquial meanings are rather close. For example, in proof-reading a copy is compared, symbol by symbol, with an original, and if any discrepancy is found the copy is altered so that it corresponds with the original. In our book, The Major Transitions in Evolution, Eors Szathmary and I (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995) suggested that there have been, in the course of evolution, a series of changes in the way in which information is stored and transmitted-for example, the origin of chromosomes, of the genetic code, of sex, of multicellular organisms, and of language. Each transition was the precondition for the evolution of further complexity. Few biologists, I think, would wish to disagree with this picture, although they might, with good reason, wish to argue with our account of the mechanisms underlying particular transitions. These two examples show that notions of information are now pervasive in biology. Yet, with a few honourable exceptions (e.g., Sarkar 1996; Godfrey-Smith 1999; Sterelny and Griffiths 1999), philosophers of biology either ignore the concept of information, or argue that it is irrelevant and misleading (Mahner and Bunge 1997). So, if philosophers are unwilling to analyse the notion of information in biology, it will have to be done by biologists. Jablonka (in press) has recently made such an attempt. In particular, she reviews the different mechanisms of heredity observed in the living world. This essay is my own contribution. In the main, it is a discussion of how the idea has been applied in genetics, evolution and developmental biology: I am not competent to discuss recent applications of Information Theory in neurobiology.

From presentation to representation in E. B. Wilson'sThe Cell

Diagrams make it possible to present scientific facts in more abstract and generalized form. While some detail is lost, simplified and accessible knowledge is gained. E. B. Wilson's work in cytology provides a case study of changing uses of diagrams and accompanying abstraction. In his early work, Wilson presented his data in photographs, which he saw as coming closest to “fact.” As he gained confidence in his interpretations, and as he sought to provide a generalized textbook account of cell development, he relied on increasingly abstract diagrams. In addition, he came to see that highly abstract and even schematic drawings could provide more than pictures directly from life.

Mexican Politics and the Journals

For the past two decades, the standard perception of the Mexican political system was more or less as follows. Following the Revolution and, even more so, the Cardenas presidency the Mexican political elite won the support of most of the country's peasantry and proletariat. Rather than continuing with its revolutionary policies, however, the post-1940 elite (particularly during the presidency of Aleman) used its 'popular' organizations to control rather than represent the masses while initiating a process of capitalist industrializa? tion. Subsequently, the PRI and its ancillary organizations were used to maintain social peace by the notorious process of 'co-optation and control' while income inequality grew alongside the power of the bourgeoisie. All of this was due to the logic of capitalist development to which the course of Mexican politics was increasingly subordinated. However, while earlier writers (Scott, Brandenburg) saw these developments as relatively benign and the more arbitrary and authoritarian elements of the system as on the whole transitional, later writers (Hansen, Johnson, Hellman and, in his later work, Cockroft) concentrated more on the system's repressiveness and remoteness from most of civil society. The watershed of this perceptual change was the Tlatelolco massacre of October 1968. Despite this shift, however, all of these writers implicitly or explicitly accepted the premises of desarrollo estabilisador. Work which was sufficiently recent to take account of Echeverria's presidency tended to dismiss it as an aberration, or as a heroic but doomed attempt to raise the ghost of Cardenas in a radically changed society. Indeed this perspective was shared by most non-academic observers of Mexico until about mid-1982. Faced with developments in and after 1982, it now seems clear that this textbook account of Mexican politics is either incomplete or outdated, and that a change of paradigm is necessary if one is to keep up effectively with the rapidly changing situation in that country. To put it briefly, it is no longer possible to regard Mexican capitalism as a success or to see the Mexican state as uncomplicatedly pro-middle class or pro-bourgeois (still less to see these sectors as uncomplicatedly pro-system). An early example of what will assuredly become a flood of revisionist writing is provided by Olsen (1985). Although the author (or was it the editors?) is excessively fond of post-dependencia jargon, the article does make some important points. It seeks to fit the Mexican economic crisis into the familiar pattern of late ISI crises (cf. pre-1964 Brazil) with the original policy leading to 'demand bottlenecks' and a halt to further expansion. In the Mexican context Olsen sees this crisis developing from the mid-1960s with

The Kalman Filter from the Perspective of Goldberger—Theil Estimators

Abstract This article is designed to point out the close connection between recursive estimation procedures, such as Kalman filter theory, familiar to control engineers, and linear least squares estimators and estimators that include prior information in the form of linear restrictions, such as mixed estimators and ridge estimators, familiar to statisticians. The only difference between the two points of view seems to be a difference in terminology. To demonstrate this point, it is shown how the Kalman filter equations can be derived from an existing textbook account of linear least squares theory and the notion of combining prior information in linear models, that is, the Goldberger—Theil mixed estimators' point of view. The author advocates the inclusion of these ideas early when least squares estimation concepts are being taught.