Books on the topic 'Reductive meaning'

The 2017 SIS Conference aims to highlight the crucial role of the Statistics in Data Science. In this new domain of ‘meaning’ extracted from the data, the increasing amount of produced and available data in databases, nowadays, has brought new challenges. That involves different fields of statistics, machine learning, information and computer science, optimization, pattern recognition. These afford together a considerable contribute in the analysis of ‘Big data’, open data, relational and complex data, structured and no-structured. The interest is to collect the contributes which provide from the different domains of Statistics, in the high dimensional data quality validation, sampling extraction, dimensional reduction, pattern selection, data modelling, testing hypotheses and confirming conclusions drawn from the data.

Abstract Inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, this book develops a new, non-reductionist, response to the sceptical argument about meaning famously developed in Saul Kripke’s book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. It begins by outlining an intuitive notion of following a rule, explaining its relationship to the notions of linguistic meaning and intentional content. It then gives an outline and development of Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s sceptical argument, going into detail on the arguments against reductive dispositional accounts of meaning. It also explains Kripke’s Wittgenstein’s objections to non-reductionist views which take semantic and intentional facts to be primitive and sui generis and argues against views – such as error theories and forms of non-factualism – which attempt to respond to the argument by conceding that there are no meaning facts. The position advocated in the book emerges from a response to recent arguments developed by Paul Boghossian (“The Inference Problem”) and Crispin Wright (“The Minor Premise Problem”) which appear to imply that rule-following and competent language use are impossible even if we assume that Kripke’s challenge has been met. A reply to Boghossian and Wright is then developed via a new account of Wittgenstein’s remarks on the notion of “following a rule blindly” or “blind rule-following” that connects it to the Wittgensteinian idea that there is a way of following a rule that does not involve interpretation. In turn, this is used to generate a response to Kripke: understanding an expression is a matter of having an intention to exercise one’s ability to use it in accord with its meaning or correctness condition.

This chapter argues for a primitivist view of color: a view according to which colors are primitive properties—not reducible to such things as sets of spectral reflectances, disjunctions of microphysical surface properties, or dispositions to cause experiences. The argument is modeled on Paul Benacerraf’s well-known argument against reductive accounts of the integers. It begins by pointing out that there are many equally good candidates to count as reduction bases for the colors, and no way to choose between them. It then notes that all of these candidates have the drawback of endowing colors with properties that we should not think colors actually have. Finally, it shows that there is an explanation available, in terms of a use theory of the meaning of color terms, that does not reduce them to anything else.

This book presents Czesław Miłosz’s poetic philosophy of the body as an original defense of religious faith, transcendence, and the value of the human individual against what he viewed as dangerous modern forms of materialism. The Polish Nobel laureate saw the reductive “biologization” of human life as a root cause of the historical tragedies he had witnessed under Nazi German and Soviet regimes in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. The book argues that his response was not merely to reconstitute spiritual or ideal forms of human identity, which no longer seemed entirely plausible. Instead, he aimed to revalidate the flesh, elaborating his own non-reductive understandings of the self on the basis of the body’s deeper meanings. Within the framework of a hesitant Christian faith, Miłosz’s poetry and prose often suggest a paradoxical striving toward transcendence precisely through sensual experience. Yet his perspectives on bodily existence are not exclusively affirmative. The book traces his diverse representations of the body from dualist visions that demonize the flesh through to positive images of the body as the source of religious experience, the self, and the poet’s own creative faculty. It also examines the complex relations between “masculine” and “feminine” bodies and forms of subjectivity, as Miłosz represents them. Finally, it elucidates his contention that poetry is the best vehicle for conveying these contradictions, because it also combines “disembodied,” symbolic meanings with the sensual meanings of sound and rhythm. For Miłosz, the double nature of poetic meaning reflects the fused duality of the human self.

Recent work in the philosophy of language has emphasized the importance of ‘stimulus-independent’ representational abilities in understanding both the nature of concepts and the extent to which concepts play a role in the thoughts of non-humans. This recent work dovetails in significant and interesting ways with Terrence Deacon’s work on symbols and with more recent work in continental philosophy on symbolism, language, actor-network theory, and analytic work in the philosophy of skill. It is in light of this work that this chapter revisit Whitehead’s book Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. In particular, it argues that the claim of many commentators, both early and late, that Whitehead is a panpsychist is a mistake, and relies upon an understanding of experience and subjectivity that Whitehead seeks to account for rather than presuppose. In his account of experience and subjectivity, it is rather a non-subjective, pre-individual process of individuation that allows for the possibility of an identifiable subjective experience, and hence for the claims of panpsychism. Whitehead’s understanding and account of these processes is able to account for an indeterminate variety of types and degrees of experience, and in a way that avoids both a reductive materialism and a reductive panpsychism.

Specific psychotherapies bring specific challenges with them. Engagement with cognitive behaviour therapy and its success depends upon how the individual’s cognitions are affected by cultures and how amenable these are for therapy. Similarly, family therapy carries with it different roles of different members across cultures, and not everyone’s role will be the same. Minority therapists may face potential difficulties while looking after patients from majority cultures. General principles of psychotherapy across cultures will apply but they may carry different meanings for each individual. It is essential that therapists are flexible enough to ensure the best patient engagement, and additional modifications may be required. Each of these therapies can be reductive, reconstructive, or supportive, and a mixture of more than one approach can be utilized. Assessment must explore very carefully needs and indications for therapy. In many cultures these words have very different meanings with personal and social expectations.

Since Paul and Zipf, it has become evident that lexical choice and meaning change are largely guided by pragmatic principles. Two central interacting principles are, first, the least-effort tendency to reduce expression and, second, the communicative requirements on sufficiency of information. Descendants of this opposition include Grice’s bipartite Maxim of Quantity (‘Make your contribution as informative as/no more informative than is required’) grounded within a general theory of rationality and cooperation, the Q and R Principles (essentially ‘Say enough’/‘Don’t say too much’), and the interplay of effort and effect within Relevance Theory. This chapter motivates a (Q-based) constraint on lexicalization, surveys the role of the R principle in motivating the Division of Pragmatic Labour, syntagmatic reduction, narrowing of meaning, euphemism, and negative strengthening, and provides pragmatic motivation for the lexical clone, un-noun, and un-verb constructions, and for the complementary Avoid Synonymy and Avoid Homonymy principles.

Economic geographers have made important contributions to the understanding of many facets of climate change, yet the field has had relatively limited engagement with the study of climate impacts, vulnerabilities, and adaptation. Instead, most work on the economic consequences of climate disruption is being done by researchers in other disciplines or in other subfields of geography. This chapter argues that broad recognition of humanity’s role in shaping Earth’s planetary systems, combined with new hope and opportunity engendered by the 2015 Paris Agreement on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, present a pivotal moment for economic geographers to take a more central role in the study of climate change and in broader, interdisciplinary conversations about the meaning and implications of the Anthropocene.

This chapter explores Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness meditation, above all in his writings about his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. It argues that Kabat-Zinn’s vision conveys a profound sense of enchantment, a deep sense of life’s value. The chapter argues that this vision reworks fundamental conceptual categories, especially those of the secular, the spiritual, and the scientific. Life’s meaning is formulated as flowing naturally from mindful observation of everyday life, especially of painful experiences. This naturalizing approach, drawing on bodily experience, the authority of science, metaphysical religious roots in American culture, and Buddhist teachings, makes mindfulness occupy many registers at once: Buddhist yet ecumenically inclusive, secular yet spiritual, scientific but revealing a larger sense of purpose. This multimodal character of mindfulness, always available through simple awareness, explains its popularity, which is helping to reshape American culture.

Roling describes how vehemently religious orthodoxy in Germany and elsewhere resisted Spinoza’s denial of biblical miracles. Though scholars like Charles Blount, Thomas Pyle, and Jean Le Clerc adopted Spinoza’s explanation of the standstill of the sun at Gabaon (Joshua 10:12–14) as a natural phenomenon, viz. a ‘mock sun’, a parhelion, they did not break through the ramparts erected by academic theology. Quite the opposite: science was exploited to make miracles plausible again. An influential advocate of a literal interpretation was Johann Scheuchzer, in his Physica sacra (1731–1735). Many translations, commentaries, and summaries document the success of his defence. Deriving their arguments from the sciences, these theologians fought the reduction of the biblical text to a historical document. Scheuchzer offered a ready summary of all those exegetes who embraced the view that science was the handmaid of the scriptural text, not an instrument for re-evaluating its literal meaning.

This book studies the Indonesian martial art Pencak Silat and related media practices, and, building on that, assesses mediatization processes, meaning the potential influence of technology-based media practices. Pencak Silat represents a cultural system of values and beliefs, with hierarchical structures and relations, and social advancement being mediated in embodied social learning. The study contributes to martial arts studies and media studies, demonstrating potentials and limitations of media technologies and their (dis-)embodiment – their extension or reduction of the body as medium, and their embeddedness in or detachment from a given socio-cultural context. With Pencak Silat being practiced all over Indonesia, by a large part of the population, the thesis also represents a contribution to Indonesian studies. Based on extensive fieldwork (between 2008 and 2016), the study analyzes martial arts and/as media in Indonesia, and presents an ethnography of Pencak Silat and mediatization.

The Child’s Curriculum Group was created by former nursery school teachers concerned about reduction of local government support for the schools they had nurtured. They have a lifelong commitment to excellent provision for young children and their families and they urge recognition of the benefits to a child and their lifetime of learning when parents and nursery educators nourish companionship in discovery of meaning for work and play in early years. The child’s enthusiasm inspires development of a generous and valued ‘common sense’ in the community. The editors of our book are academics who investigate how the young child shares human vitality and learning. Aline-Wendy Dunlop, Emeritus Professor in Education at Strathclyde University, is Scottish Coordinator for the Pedagogies of Educational Transitions Project (POET), and Vice President of Early Education. She was head teacher at Westfield Court Nursery School in Edinburgh. Jonathan Delafield-Butt is Senior Lecturer in Child Development in Education at Strathclyde on the neuroscience and psychology of human movement and its growth in affectionate care for meaning-making. Colwyn Trevarthen, Emeritus Professor in Psychology in Edinburgh, and Vice President of Early Education, is a psychobiologist with 50 years’ experience in charting the development of communication from birth to symbolic communication by speech and writing. We invited experts in early education and care in different human worlds to share their experience of the strengths of children, and received wonderful contributions. We acknowledge the inspiration from the teachers who founded the Child’s Curriculum project in 2006, and who continue to guide its progress.

Engaging with the many debates about the meaning and character of Bonhoeffer’s late resistance theology and action, particularly as it relates to his participation in the attempted coup d’etat against Hitler, A Severe Trial: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and a Theology of the Exception attends to Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the exception. Resisting the common reduction of the exception to a political or ethical concept, O'Farrell argues that the exception for Bonhoeffer is an extraordinary moment in history that disarms persons, impinging on one’s understanding of politics and ethics. Through a wide engagement with the Bonhoeffer corpus, this book states that this leads to distinctive narrations of key concepts in Bonhoeffer’s corpus: responsibility, the free venture, simple obedience, and action beyond the law. It also offers a different portrait of Bonhoeffer to contemporary narrations. The Bonhoeffer that emerges is neither a Niebuhrian realist, a pacifist, or a religious fanatic, but one who is impelled to act apart from the law without this action becoming arbitrary. This Bonhoeffer provides a hopeful political witness that seeks a world beyond the conflicts and divisions of this age

Literary artefacts—the stories people tell, the songs they sing, the scenes they enact—are neither a by-product nor a side-issue in human culture. They provide a model of everything that cognition does. They refuse to separate thought from emotion, bodily responses from ethical reflection, perception from imagination, logic from desire. Above all, they demonstrate the essential fluidity and mobility of human cognition, its adaptive inventiveness. If we are astonished by the art of Chauvet or Lascaux as an early model of human cognition, then we should be continually astonished by what literature is and does as it reaches beyond itself to reimagine the world. This book argues that literary artefacts are quasi-autonomous living entities, fashioned to animate captured environments, embodied people and other creatures, ways of being and living that remain virtual. They own a freely delegated agency that allows them to speak to listeners and readers present and distant, present and future, adapting themselves and their meanings to whatever cognitive environment they encounter. Such an approach offers a way of linking a close attention to the specific properties of literary artefacts with the insights of cognitive anthropology and archaeology, and thus of satisfying the conditions for a properly interdisciplinary understanding of literature. It aims both to defend literary study against utilitarian and reductive arguments of all kinds and to argue that literary artefacts may give us new insights into how the mind (and its indispensable substratum, the brain) functions in the human ecology.

The challenges to which contemporary building design needs to respond grow steadily. They originate from the influence of changing environmental conditions on buildings, as well as from the need to reduce the impact of buildings on the environment. The increasing complexity requires the continual revision of design principles and their harmonisation with current scientific findings, technological development, and environmental, social, and economic factors. It is precisely these issues that form the backbone of the thematic book, Sustainable and Resilient Building Design: Approaches, Methods, and Tools. The purpose of this book is to present ongoing research from the universities involved in the project Creating the Network of Knowledge Labs for Sustainable and Resilient Environments (KLABS). The book starts with the exploration of the origin, development, and the state-of-the-art notions of environmental design and resource efficiency. Subsequently, climate change complexity and dynamics are studied, and the design strategy for climate-proof buildings is articulated. The investigation into the resilience of buildings is further deepened by examining a case study of fire protection. The book then investigates interrelations between sustainable and resilient building design, compares their key postulates and objectives, and searches for the possibilities of their integration into an outreaching approach. The fifth article in the book deals with potentials and constraints in relation to the assessment of the sustainability (and resilience) of buildings. It critically analyses different existing building certification models, their development paths, systems, and processes, and compares them with the general objectives of building ratings. The subsequent paper outlines the basis and the meaning of the risk and its management system, and provides an overview of different visual, auxiliary, and statistical risk assessment methods and tools. Following the studies of the meanings of sustainable and resilient buildings, the book focuses on the aspects of building components and materials. Here, the life cycle assessment (LCA) method for quantifying the environmental impact of building products is introduced and analysed in detail, followed by a comprehensive comparative overview of the LCA-based software and databases that enable both individual assessment and the comparison of different design alternatives. The impact of climate and pollution on the resilience of building materials is analysed using the examples of stone, wood, concrete, and ceramic materials. Accordingly, the contribution of traditional and alternative building materials to the reduction of negative environmental impact is discussed and depicted through different examples. The book subsequently addresses existing building stock, in which environmental, social, and economic benefits of building refurbishment are outlined by different case studies. Further on, a method for the upgrade of existing buildings, described as ‘integrated rehabilitation’, is deliberated and supported by best practice examples of exoskeleton architectural prosthesis. The final paper reflects on the principles of regenerative design, reveals the significance of biological entities, and recognises the need to assign to buildings and their elements a more advanced role towards natural systems in human environments.