World Of Everyday Experience Research Articles

Des personnages fragiles dans un monde fragmenté : hamartia chez Hérondas

The notion of hamartia in Aristotle’s Poetics and his moral writings refers to harmful and yet unintentional acts committed in ignorance. In the Poetics it is considered as an important feature of the best type of tragic plot and the action of many tragic characters, while relevant instances are found in both tragedy and comedy. The aim of this paper is to examine hamartia in Herondas’ mimiambs, a literary genre that draws upon the tradition of genres such as the mime, iambic poetry and drama. It is argued that mimiambs 1 and 5 show an awareness of hamartia’s usages in Aristotle and in dramatic poetry. Yet in Herondas these usages are not fully developed. They contribute instead to the elucidation of specific aspects of the characters who emerge from the mimiambs. This demonstrates Herondas’ concern with ethical norms in a world of everyday experience and his multi-faceted use of earlier philosophical discourse and literary genres.

If the propagator of QED were reversed, the mathematics of Nature would be much simpler


 
 
 In Quantum ElectroDynamics (QED) the propagator is a function that describes the probability amplitude of a particle going from point A to B. It summarizes the many paths of Feynman’s path integral approach. We propose a reverse propagator (R-propagator) that, prior to the particle’s emission, summarizes every possible path from B to A. Wave function collapse occurs at point A when the particle randomly chooses one and only one of many incident paths to follow backwards with a probability of one, so it inevitably strikes detector B. The propagator and R-propagator both calculate the same probability amplitude. The R-propagator has an advantage over the propagator because it solves a contradiction inside QED, namely QED says a particle must take EVERY path from A to B. With our model the particle only takes one path. The R-propagator had already taken every path into account. We propose that this tiny, infinitesimal change from propagator to R-propagator would vastly simplify the mathematics of Nature. Many experiments that currently describe the quantum world as weird, change their meaning and no longer say that. The quantum world looks and acts like the classical world of everyday experience.
 
 

Decrypting the Central Mystery of Quantum Mathematics:


 
 
 The fact that loophole-free Bell test experiments have proved Einstein’s local realism wrong, does not prove that the quantum mechanical (QM) model is correct, because the Theory of Elementary Waves (TEW) Axioms can also explain the Bell test experiments. Bi-Rays are a pair of coaxial elementary rays traveling at the speed of light in countervailing directions. In a Bell test experiment a Bi-Ray stretches from Alice’s equipment, through the fiberoptic cable, across the 2-photon source, through more fiberoptic cable, to Bob’s equipment. A pair of entangled photons is born into that Bi-Ray. Each photon follows the same Bi-Ray in opposite directions. This model produces the same Bell test results found by QM. According to QM this would be classified as a “non-local” model, so it is no surprise that it can explain the Bell test results. But it is a different model than QM. TEW supports a more realistic view of Nature, based on better Axioms. Although QM can explain quantum experiments, it requires that you believe the quantum world is weird. TEW Axioms explain the quantum world in a way that is more intuitively similar to the world of everyday experience.
 
 

The Quantum World Is Astonishingly Similar to Our World: The Timing of Wave Function Collapse According to The Theory of Elementary Waves

This is one of a series of articles building a map of elementary waves, based on experimental data and quantum mathematics. Previous articles showed that elementary waves carry no energy. Particles follow them backwards. Why? Elementary rays consist of probability amplitudes, which influence particles because that is what probability amplitudes do. Elementary waves are that part of nature corresponding to quantum mathematics. Since these waves are the physical analogs of quantum equations, those equations provide a roadmap to the world of elementary waves: a map written in hieroglyphs. Quantum math is our Rosetta stone. The quantum world is far, far more similar to the world of everyday experience than quantum experts think. Waves are in a superposition. Particles are not. Wave function collapse does not occur when we measure something. It had occurred much earlier, when the object came into existence. This resolves insoluble problems that stumped John von Neumann. The smooth functioning of a Schrödinger equation abruptly collapses into one specific eigenstate when a gun is fired, not when the bullet hits the target. The bullet that caused World War I is an example. That bullet caused an abrupt collapse of the smooth probabilities of commerce and diplomacy.

Generic appearance of objective results in quantum measurements

Measurement is of central interest in quantum mechanics as it provides the link between the quantum world and the world of everyday experience. One of the features of the latter is its robust, objective character, contrasting the delicate nature of quantum systems. Here we analyze in a completely model-independent way the celebrated von Neumann measurement process, using recent techniques of information flow, studied in open quantum systems. We show the generic appearance of objective results in quantum measurements, provided we macroscopically coarse-grain the measuring apparatus and wait long enough. To study genericity, we employ the widely-used Gaussian Unitary Ensemble of random matrices and the Hoeffding inequality. We derive generic objectivization timescales, given solely by the interaction strength and the systems' dimensions. Our results are manifestly universal and are a generic property of von Neumann measurements.

Mediation, Reading, and Yorick's Sentimental Vehicle

Taking Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey as a case study, this article explores how mid-eighteenth-century novels of sensibility theorized mediation—and by extension, the very act of reading. Sentimental fiction draws attention to the instability of individual feeling in a media culture where a network of people, things, and texts intermingle in commercial society. Working through the epistemology of possessive individualism, sentimental fiction tends to question whether individuals really own their feelings. The form of the novel mirrors this concern to challenge the relationship between texts and the world the novel represents. Sterne continually exposes the ontological instability of both texts and readers in a networked commercial environment; just as Yorick is affectively led astray by accidental encounters with people and things, readers are also exposed to narrative disruptions. This essay argues that these symptoms are not a sign of sentimental fiction's failure to achieve formal realism but an indication of how sentimental fiction participated in a historically specific culture of reading that emphasized the continuity between textual representation and the world of everyday experience.

Death ends a life not a relationship: timework and ritualizations at Mindet.dk

When parents are expecting, the child is usually awaited with hope and plans and reflections on how to share the life and future with this new child. As such the child opens the parents' perspective to a new future, a span of time or potentiality, a certain narrative—that is, being parents, raising a child. When a child is stillborn or dies at a very young age, this event not only turns off all hopes for this particular child, but also all good things envisioned for the child and his or her family, the world itself changes radically. At the Danish website Mindet.dk, parents engage in ritualizations through which they resituate themselves in the world through performing their grief and loss, re-relating themselves to others and renewing their acquaintance with themselves and the world. These ritualizations are carried out through narratives and performances dealing with different aspects of the loss and are not about “translating” the everyday experience into, for instance, a religious realm. Rather “the work of ritual … involves developing repertoires that operate in complex interplay with the world of everyday experience” and, eventually, through time and repetition, lead to re-experiencing life.

Supersymmetry

This article deals with the introduction of supersymmetry as the latest and most emerging burning issue for the explanation of nature including elementary particles as well as the universe. Supersymmetry is a conjectured symmetry of space and time. It has been a very popular idea among theoretical physicists. It is nearly an article of faith among elementary-particle physicists that the four fundamental physical forces in nature ultimately derive from a single force. For years scientists have tried to construct a Grand Unified Theory showing this basic unity. Physicists have already unified the electron-magnetic and weak forces in an 'electroweak' theory, and recent work has focused on trying to include the strong force. Gravity is much harder to handle, but work continues on that, as well. In the world of everyday experience, the strengths of the forces are very different, leading physicists to conclude that their convergence could occur only at very high energies, such as those existing in the earliest moments of the universe, just after the Big Bang.The Himalayan Physics Vol. 4, No. 4, 2013 Page: 75-79 Uploaded date: 12/23/2013

‘Approaching the sacred’: directionality in the relation between curriculum and knowledge structure

Increasing pressure on all levels of educational provision, whether academic or overtly vocational, to be to ‘relevant’ and ‘useful’ prompts consideration of the relation between curriculum and pedagogy in terms of the internal structure of knowledge forms. Following Durkheim’s distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ orders of meaning and drawing on the work of Basil Bernstein, this paper questions pedagogic presuppositions that directionality from sensory experience to abstraction posits the everyday life of the student as the foundation for the acquisition of complex, systematic knowledge. Two empirical examples are discussed: one focuses on the internal structure of craft knowledge, while the other focuses on the internal structure of mathematics as school subject. They converge in the finding that transmission of knowledge structure, whether in material or symbolic form, requires the transformation of empirical objects into theoretical objects before a connecting point can be found between the world of everyday experience and specialised knowledge forms. This is what constitutes a ‘relevant’ curriculum.

Pictures at an exhibition: Russian land in a global world

This article examines Russian realist landscape paintings of the Peredvižniki. It demonstrates how in the course of the formation of a national identity during the late nineteenth century, an originally ideology-free space was politically charged and in the course of decades has been incorporated through various measures and media into the collective memory. In this way, the topos of the ‘Russian Landscape’ became lieu de memoire for Russianness (russkost’) that transcends social order (Russian Empire, Soviet Union, Russian Federation). Through identification with supposedly Russian scenery, which knows no regional or national borders, love of the motherland (‘ljubov’ krodine) can be created and strengthened. In their various reproductions, these landscape images developed into a kind of world parallel to the world of everyday experience in the Stalin era. The ideology of Russian landscape painting is now experiencing a new level of appreciation in the West, the effect of which is a shift in focus in their evaluation, from national to universal criteria.

Type/Face

Type/Face

Superdistribution and the economics of bits

Why is the engineering and distribution of software fundamentally different from the engineering and distribution of other engineered objects? The author presents a unique answer to this question-an answer that could lead to a fundamental change in the way that software professionals view their creations and software marketers sell them. The infrastructure he proposes would make it feasible to buy and sell digital goods with any terms and conditions imaginable: pay-per-year, pay-per-minute, pay-per-save, pay-per-keystroke, and so on. Even today's pay-to-own terms and conditions would remain feasible, with ownership technologically enforced via invocation metering, but precisely which prices, terms and conditions should vendors offer, and which set of conditions would be most desirable to the buyers they hope to attract? Such questions are complicated, but answerable. Each is merely the electronic counterpart to questions we routinely confront in the tangible world of everyday experience, but cyberspace emerged less than a generation ago, which is not nearly enough time to even define-let alone build and deploy-a robust basis for the ownership of digital property. These technical issues are only the easy part compared to the social issues of building a true information-age economy.

Frames of Folklore, Frames of Fiction: The Narrative Frames in "El kacuy" and "Marta Riquelme"

Frames of Folklore, Frames of Fiction: The Narrative Frames in "El kacuy" and "Marta Riquelme" Bonnie Frederick Washington State University During the period from about 1860 to about 1930, many Hispanic American writers used a narrative frame to give the appearance of oral narrative to their written folkloric sketches and short stories. By feigning orality, the narrative frame evokes an underlying relationship of references, imitations, and contrasts between the oral narrative and the written text. In addition, the frame defines the values and language shared between storytellers and their rhetorical audience; this common bond is manipulated to determine the degree of ideological distance from which the audience is to regard the narrated folkloric events. The congruity or incongruity of the values embodied in the frame relationship with the values embodied in the folkloric event produces different narrative texts. In order to study these differences, three Argentine narratives have been chosen that concern the same folkloric motif: the kacuy bird whose cries are said to be the cries of an abandoned woman. The narratives include the anthropologist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche's catalogued report of the tale (1928), the folkloric sketch "El kacuy" (1925) by Ricardo Rojas, and the short story "Marta Riquelme" (1902) by William Henry Hudson. In all three, the original oral tradition exists as an implied subtext, continuing in various ways to influence the written version. The original story ofthe kacuy was an oral tale, told by a storyteller to an audience that held the same cultural beliefs as the storyteller and communicated with the same system of linguistic signs. Studies of oral narrative reveal a typical storytelling pattern of orientation, complicating action, suspension before resolution, resolution, and coda (Labov 369). The orientation and coda form the narrative frame. The frame signals to the hearers that the story is about to begin, and that they must listen in the manner appropriate to such a story. For example, "once upon a time" is the formulaic signal that the events about to be told are ruled by the logic of the magic world, not that ofthe world ofeveryday experience. The frame also closes the narrative with ending formulas that signal to the hearer that the special narrative is over, and ordinary discourse may proceed. Though each narrative performance is unique, the storytellers "must draw 8 Rocky Mountain Review upon past language, symbols, events, and forms which they share with their audience for their narrations to be both comprehensible and meaningful" (Oring 123). These narrative conventions form the metanarrative, that is, the communication between the speaker and the audience that is maintained during the time in which the narrator tells the events. Thus, the frame in an oral tale confirms the common values and language ofthe speaker and audience; the narrative itself is congruent with the audience's general set of beliefs and customs. Disruption of this congruence of language and customs could break the metanarrative relationship, as when the hearer of a joke says "I don't get it" or when the audience laughs at what was meant to be serious. Anthropologists who collect oral tales usually remove the oral narrative frame from the written report of the oral tale, thus forcing the reader's attention away from the storytelling apparatus and focusing instead on the morphology or "deep structure" ofthe story's events. As Claude Lévi-Strauss insisted, the value of the myth "does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells" (210). Without a narrative frame, a folkloric motif in written form generally looks like this Indian legend, collected by the folklorist Robert Lehmann-Nitsche and published in 1928: Dos hermanos, varón y mujer, pasaban el tiempo juntando "balas". Ella era muy mezquina. El en desquite la invitó entonces a subir a un árbol muy alto y se bajó cortando todos los gajos que le servían de apoyo, y se fue a la casa. La hermana que quedó arriba, lloró desesperadamente sin poderse bajar, y siempre llamándolo. Así pasó el tiempo y de tanto llorar se hizo pájaro que siempre grita: Kacuy. (282) This condensed version is a far cry from the original oral...

1981 Robert A. Millikan Lecture, Steven’s Point, Wisconsin, 17 June 1981 ’’Are we overlooking something?’’

In recent decades great strides have been made in advancing the analytical level and content of introductory college physics for scientists and engineers. In order to accomodate these advances, ’’nonessential’’ or ’’less essential’’ materials may be sidetracked, de-emphasized, or omitted. Perhaps the most common candidates for characterization as nonessential are the elementary examples and applications of physics from the world of everyday experience. Although mature physicists see great beauty and understanding in analysis, a heavy classroom emphasis on mathematical analysis may give students the impression that the sole goal of elementary physics is the development of the skills of abstract analysis. Analysis is essential! But if our students are to become more than mere analysts, we must share with them some of the fun, fascination, and understanding that can be found in the physics of everyday phenomena, in the applications of physics in other disciplines, and in the interface between science and society. Examples the author has found to be useful are given.

Leibniz's Theory of Relations

D ISCUSSION of Leibniz's theory of relations has focused on the question of whether he thought that propositions about relations between substances are reducible to propositions containing nonrelational predicates only. Russell and Rescher have interpreted his doctrine that relations between substances are ideal mental entities as entailing the reducibility of relational propositions to nonrelational ones. Hintikka and Ishiguro have argued that the doctrine should not be interpreted as yielding such a strong result. I agree with Hintikka and Ishiguro on the question of reducibility. I will argue, however, that there is an important connection between relational and nonrelational propositions in Leibniz's theory which has been overlooked. The connection is not quite one of reducibility, and it has been overlooked because commentators have been preoccupied with the question of reducibility. I will explain how Leibniz's assertion of the connection is consistent with his distinction between possibility and compossibility. I will also explain how his assertion sheds new light on Leibniz's doctrine of expression. I conclude by applying the theory of relations to the relations between simple substances or monads and explaining how the world of monads makes up the world of everyday experience. If my interpretation is correct, Leibniz's theory of relations is the key to understanding some of his most central and notoriously obscure doctrines.

Prophetic and Mystic Experience: Comparison and Consequences

BEFORE sketching the distinctive features of the two major varieties of religious experience, it may be useful to introduce the discussion with an abstract analysis.2 The subject of a religious experience believes not only that (1) his perceptions are extraordinary and constitute a sharp break with the world of everyday experience, but that (2) they are far more important than ordinary perceptions and, unlike the latter, (3) their objective referents are not to be found in discrete aspects of the empirical world. The fourth criterion concerns the locus of this nonnaturalistic referent and subdivides into two categories: (4a) One who has had a mystic experience (the unio mystica) is convinced that the non-

Science and the rejection of realism in art

A rejection of representational realism characterizes much of Western art after 1850. And various inquirers have sought to found this rejection in the desire of recent artists for a new kind of audience an audience that would admire the artist not because he succeeded in reproducing the familiar world of everyday experience, but because through his genius he created a pure art-world independent of everyday experience. However, many serious students of contemporary arts have been offended by this type of explanation. They have, indeed, gone so far as to condemn all socio-aesthetic analysis which is patterned after that of Ortega Y Gasset. For, in their view, such analysis ends by denying the integrity of the whole body of recent art. No result save this is possible, these students assert, when an analysis begins with the assumption that poet and painter alter their styles solely because they refuse to tolerate a philistine audience which does not appreciate the technical imagination of the artist. Now it can be admitted that this assumption seems unlikely to provide a thoroughly adequate analysis of the motives of artists in the period in question. But precisely what an adequate analysis of motives would consist of is unclear. The defenders of the integrity of the modern artist set forth their own in generalities. They aver that the artist alters his mode of expression in the direction of difficulty or even obscurity because he feels that older modes are inadequate for the presentation of his dis coveries in an unexplored range of experience. And hence we are to conclude for ourselves that the modern artist's flight from simple repre sentational realism (and from the analogues of this style in verse and music) has been in some measure a result of a new conviction that truly realistic interpretation of human experience was impossible in that mode of art. But what was the source of this conviction? If it were possible to find one which, in its finality, excluded all others, the entire dispute might end