This may Look like Science Fiction, But...

“But Is It Science Fiction?”: Science Fiction and a Theory of Genre

If science fiction is a genre, then attempts to think about the nature of science fiction will be affected by one’s understanding of what genres are. I shall examine two approaches to genre, one (genres as regions of conceptual space) dominant but inadequate, the other (genres as historical particulars) better, but only occasionally making itself seen. I shall then discuss several important, in...

Fiction informed by science.

What Should a Connectionist Philosophy of Science Look Like?1

1 National Endowment for the Humanities (RH-21013-91) and Georgia State University, all of which are gratefully acknowledged. I also thank Robert McCauley for his comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This is not the place to present an introduction to connectionism, an approach to modeling 2 cognitive phenomena that was first developed in the 1950s and once again gained prominence i...

What Should a Connectionist Philosophy of Science Look Like?

This is not the place to present an introduction to connectionism, an approach to modeling cognitive phenomena that was first developed in the 1950s and once again gained prominence in the 1980s, in part with the publication of Rumelhart, McClelland, and the PDP Research Group (1986). Both Paul and Patricia Churchland have presented introductions to connectionism in various of their writings. S...

Science Fiction and Macdonald's Polynomials

This work studies the remarkable relationships that hold among certain m-tuples of the Garsia-Haiman modules M and corresponding elements of the Macdonald basis. We recall that in 10], M is deened for a partition`n, as the linear span of derivatives of a certain bihomogeneouspolynomial (x; y) in the variables x 1 ; x 2 conjecturedin 6], 10] that M has n! dimensionsand that its bigraded Frobeniu...