Give Functionalism Another Chance

Give chance a chance

How did I get to become a cell biologist? Or, more generally, why do things happen the way they do? The answer provided by the philosopher Democritus and later adopted by Jacques Monod is "everything existing in the universe is the fruit of chance and necessity." While I read Monod's book Chance and Necessity as an undergraduate student, little did I appreciate the accuracy of this citation and...

Give Us a Chance, Matron

Glare Marc Wallace shows, by her own experience, mat me uuiding profession is no different from any other when it comes to re-employing a member who has been mentally ill I have been an atypical schizophrenic for 12 years, and have been admitted to psychiatric hospital on 17 occasions for short periods during that time. Because of my history, I have had difficulty in getting suitable work. The ...

Give the kid a chance.

Give Me Another One!

We investigate the complexity of an optimization problem in Boolean propositional logic related to information theory: Given a conjunctive formula over a set of relations, find a satisfying assignment with minimal Hamming distance to a given assignment that satisfies the formula (NearestOtherSolution, NOSol). We present a complete classification with respect to the relations admitted in the for...

Integrating Two Epistemological Goals: Why Shouldn't We Give It Another Chance?

As Beller, Bender, and Medin (in press) pointed out in their target article, in the contemporary study of culture in psychology, anthropology is virtually invisible. In this commentary, I traced this invisibility to a root conflict in epistemological goals of the two disciplines: Whereas anthropologists value rich description of specific cultures, psychologists aspire to achieve theoretical sim...