C. J. Moore

In this paper we examine the judged similarity among the eight basic focal colors, and their names, among female and male Chinese and English speaking respondents. The major findings are: all respondents share approximately sixty percent of their knowledge of the judged similarity structures of both semantic and perceptual tasks, there are genuine individual differences among respondents that account for about fourteen percent of their knowledge on average, there are small but statistically significant gender differences that come to about three percent on average, there are small but statistically significant differences between Chinese and English respondents of about one-and-a-half percent, there are differences in the semantic structure of the names of colors as compared to the judgments of the color samples that amounts to about five percent, and there is about a three percent difference in the paired comparison task and the triads task. The results place strong constraints on theories relating to individual differences, linguistic relativity, and the relation of perceptual and semantic structures for colors.

This book discusses the contribution of philosophers and thinkers whose ideas have recently begun to permeate international relations theory. It provides an introduction to the contemporary debates regarding theories and methodologies used to study international relations, particularly the relationships between interpretive accounts of social action, European philosophical traditions, hermeneutics and the discipline of international relations. The authors provides a platform for dialogue between theorists and researchers engaged in a more specific area studies, geo-political studies, political theory and historical accounts of international politics. The volume analyzes a variety of theoretical and explores the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Gramsci, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Levinas, Bakhtin, Patocka, Derridean, Deleuze and Susan Sontag. Making an important contribution to discussions about how to study the complexities of world politics, this book will be of interest to students and researchers of international relations, politics, sociology, philosophy and political theory.

We consider the question of whether thermodynamic macrostates are objective consequences of dynamics, or subjective reflections of our ignorance of a physical system. We argue that they are both; more specifically, that the set of macrostates forms the unique maximal partition of phase space which 1) is consistent with our observations (a subjective fact about our ability to observe the system) and 2) obeys a Markov process (an objective fact about the system's dynamics). We review the ideas of computational mechanics, an information-theoretic method for finding optimal causal models of stochastic processes, and argue that macrostates coincide with the ``causal states'' of computational mechanics. Defining a set of macrostates thus consists of an inductive process where we start with a given set of observables, and then refine our partition of phase space until we reach a set of states which predict their own future, i.e. which are Markovian. Macrostates arrived at in this way are provably optimal statistical predictors of the future values of our observables.