Formal Theory

Eighteenth-century Britain saw the emergence of a new poetic genre, the “work” poem which took various forms of labor as its subject and was often written by laborers themselves. Several of these working class poets found their lives transformed due to the success of their verse (Stephen Duck most famously), but most faded into literary obscurity. However, a substantial body of “work” poems was produced by a diverse group of poets throughout the century, each manifesting divergent concerns and attitudes about the experience of work. This chapter assesses the formal connections uniting this poetic genre, particularly the frequent use of such literary devices as ironic distancing, litotes, and mock-georgic description. Instead of solely classifying “work” poems on the basis of their subject matter, this chapter demonstrates that such poetry (indeed the genre itself) lends itself to sophisticated literary techniques often associated with other poetic genres. In this fashion the full measure of eighteenth-century working class poetry can be evaluated more fairly, particularly by analyzing the formation of a new genre designed expressly by the poets themselves. The chapter ultimately seeks to demonstrate the connectedness, rather than the alienation, of working class poetry to the eighteenth-century British poetic tradition.

Accounts of Robert Burns's reading are well-documented in his correspondence, where he frequently attests to his enjoyment of three books in particular: John Moore's Zeluco and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling and The Man of the World. These three Scottish novels recount the lives of vividly-imagined men whose actions affect those around them in dramatic fashion. Zeluco lies, deceives, and ultimately murders his lovers and family; the “Man of the World” Sindall behaves similarly, threatening the well-being of an innocent, virtuous family. At the other end of the spectrum, Harley (the lead of The Man of Feeling) weeps and emotes in vignette-like encounters with various scenes of suffering. Each of these characters holds clues to the exceedingly popular model of masculinity represented by the writing and reputation of Robert Burns. This essay examines the templates of masculinity embodied by Zeluco, Sindall, and Harley, in order to determine how and why they commanded such an influence on Burns's imagination. The characters' relation to late eighteenth-century ideals of politeness is also examined, in addition to the novels’ engagement with sentimental discourse. The essay offers an analysis of the combined influences of these three "men of feeling" on Burns, his writing, and his posthumous reputation.

We do not yet have strong evidence that the rally effect motivates domestically vulnerable leaders to become engaged in international conflict. We draw upon mechanism design to argue that, if anything, diversionary incentives should be associated with a greater likelihood of being the target of disputes, though the conditions under which the result obtains are restrictive. Our analysis of all dyad-months involving the US and its rivals for the period from 1956--1996 yields suggestive evidence of the uncon-
ventional behavior anticipated by our model, while failing to find evidence of patterns anticipated by either traditional diversionary accounts or strategic conflict avoidance. These results suggest that if we are to better understand international conflict by focusing on diversionary incentives, which may not be very useful, we should focus on the behavior described by our formal model rather than that anticipated by either traditional diversionary accounts or strategic conflict avoidance.

L'obiettivo della tesi è duplice: da una parte, ci si propone la comprensione del calcolo delle probabilità da un punto di vista teorico, per mezzo della semantica della logica classica; dall'altra, si vuole sviluppare un algoritmo per il calcolo delle probabilità a partire da un modello matematico, che sia il più efficiente possibile. Per realizzare ciò, viene utilizzata una restrizione della logica predicativa, basata su un linguaggio del primo ordine. In particolare, il linguaggio rappresenta solo modelli che possiedono domini finiti equipotenti, anche se la loro cardinalità non è fissata a priori. Se infatti ammettessimo domini infiniti o non equipotenti, per i teoremi di Church-Turing e Trakhtenbrot il calcolo diventerebbe indecidibile, e quindi l'algoritmo non sarebbe sviluppabile. La tesi è divisa in due parti: nella prima viene esposta la teoria, in cui sono formalizzati i fondamenti teorici dell'algoritmo, mentre nella seconda viene sviluppato l'algoritmo vero e proprio, con l'implementazione in appendice. L'algoritmo è pensato in modo tale che prenda in input una formula chiusa del linguaggio e una struttura di probabilità predicativa (PPrS), presentata nel secondo capitolo, e restituisca in output la probabilità che la formula ha di essere vera nella struttura, o meglio, la probabilità che l'evento rappresentato dalla formula si verifichi in relazione alla struttura di probabilità. Per fare in modo che l'algoritmo risulti il più efficiente possibile, sono state utilizzate diverse tecniche matematiche, in particolare un algoritmo per la visita dei grafi, i tableaux semantici, la semplificazione delle formule e un'euristica sulla quantità dei modelli per una formula. Infine, è stata realizzata anche un'implementazione dell'algoritmo in Java, nella quale sono stati utilizzati JFlex e BYACC/J, per generare rispettivamente l'analizzatore lessicale e il parser per il riconoscimento e la traduzione in oggetti Java delle formule logiche; inoltre, la frontiera del tableau è rappresentata attraverso una struttura ad albero, in modo da ridurre sensibilmente l'utilizzo della memoria.

Was ist das eigentlich, eine Form? Am 31. Januar 2020 untersuchte ich diese Frage im Formlabor an der Code University in Berlin. Es ist ein Versuch, die klassische Theorie der Form in der Philosophie mit dem Formkalkül von George Spencer-Brown zu versöhnen. Gleichzeitig verorte ich die Mystik Spencer-Browns im Daoismus.

This chapter focuses on the largely ignored issue of Burns’s critical practice. In his prose and letters, one can find wide-ranging discussions of poetry and song, along with detailed analyses of literary forms and modes. Burns’s critical writings belie the deliberate oppositions of critic and poet and reveal a writer deeply invested in his craft, using critical axioms and sentimental topoi to refine his work. The tone and posture of much of Burns’s criticism is both brash and apprehensive; he critically values what he can creatively put into practice. For Burns, criticism was less about displaying correct learning or taste than on discovering sources for emulation. Successful emulation resulted from critical analysis and creative transposition, studying primary texts for sources, ideas, and strategies for future writing. Such a vigorous and surprisingly cohesive attitude about the craft of writing forms the heart of Burns’s criticism, an uncollected commentary randomly dispersed throughout his prose. This body of work also pointedly refutes his supposed ‘want of Learning’ and reveals a predominantly practical reader intrigued with the process of poetic creation.

A detailed body of literature has challenged the model of Supreme Court justice voting as ideologically sincere, arguing that legal regimes exert independent effects on merits voting and restrain ideological discretion. This study hypothesizes that this proposition should manifest itself most clearly in the voting behavior of justices on the ideological extremes, the justices whose votes are most reliable. We find evidence that although legal rules do correlate with restrictions on ideological voting, we find that there is little evidence that this behavior is externally imposed by a legal regime. Rather, we find that evidence that the changes in ideological voting patterns are attributable to common consensus to abide by new legal frameworks.

This paper is a new step in the development of linguistic geometry. This formal theory is intended to discover and generalize the inner properties of human expert heuristics, which have been successful in a certain class of complex control systems, and apply them to different systems. In this paper, we investigate heuristics extracted in the form of hierarchical networks of

Our lives are facilitated and mediated by software. Thanks to software, data on nearly everything can be generated, accessed and analysed for all sorts of reasons. Software technologies, combined with political and commercial ideas and practices, have led to a wide range of our activities being monitored, which is the source of concerns about surveillance and privacy. We pose the questions: What is monitoring? Do diverse and disparate monitoring systems have anything in common? What role does monitoring play in contested issues of surveillance and privacy? We are developing an abstract theory for studying monitoring that begins by capturing structures common to many different monitoring practices. The theory formalises the idea that monitoring is a process that observes the behaviour of people and objects in a context. Such entities and their behaviours can be represented by abstract data types and their observable attributes by logics. In this paper, we give a formal model of monit...

Sanjaya Lall has grappled with the dilemmas of development by concentrating his life-long research on technology, international trade, manufacturing and industrial development largely but not exclusively in the developing world. He constructed taxonomy on low technology; resource based products, medium technology intensive and high tech intensive products and tried to measure the challenges, opportunities and difficulties for resource based producers like the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to enter into medium and high technology intensive manufactures. The rich empirical work undertaken on the developing economies, South East Asia and others has led him to formulate the appreciative concept of National Technology System (NTS). In this paper we distinguish between the development and relationship between formal and appreciative theories in general and the NTS and national system of innovation (NSI) concepts in particular. We shall attempt to examine, compare and contrast broadly Sa...

Pundits, politicians, and political scientists alike often bemoan the long delays in filling both executive and judicial vacancies.  However, most political science scholarship has ignored why executives delay nomination, instead focusing on why legislatures delay confirmation.  In this article, I develop a formal model that seeks to explain the causes and consequences of both types of delay.  By incorporating the effects of time, nominee competence, and nonpolicy incentives, the model provides a number of important findings:  (1) The passage of time exacerbates the executive's first-mover advantage and may result in less-competent nominees; (2) Confirmation delay results when the executive's costs of searching for new nominees are sufficiently high and/or the pool of potential candidates for nomination is sufficiently incompetent; and (3) Nomination delay results when the executive's internal vetting process indicates a candidate for nomination is sufficiently incompetent relative to the pool of potential nominees.

The initial wave of celebrity surrounding Robert Burns’s print appearance in 1786 largely derived from the novelty of the poet’s class background. Dubbed the “heaven-taught ploughman” by Henry Mackenzie, Burns achieved sudden fame as an untaught prodigy whose inspiration came directly from nature and the folk culture which he represented in his person and work. Although even contemporary critics of Burns such as John Logan doubted the poet’s authenticity, much of Burns’s 1786 Kilmarnock edition employs content and imagery that bolsters the poet’s “heaven-taught” persona. However, close analysis of Burns’s work often reveals the use of distancing devices that separate the poetic speaker from the content. Nowhere is this use more apparent than in “Halloween,” a long, quasi-anthropological study of the Scottish folk traditions surrounding the holiday. At 252 lines (among the longer productions in Burns’s body of work), “Halloween” teems with rich, often confusing detail about folk customs and rites that is meticulously explained in footnotes. While they do clarify matters of content and style, Burns’s footnotes also underscore and in fact, embody the distance between the poem’s folk content and its educated, primarily urban audience. Not only does Burns’s use of academic discourse belie his folk authenticity but more significantly, it points to gaps in access to experiences that separated and differentiated classes. In this sense, the footnote serves as a bridge between whole “ways of life” (to use Raymond Williams’s term) that were being increasingly confounded in eighteenth-century Scotland. This chapter explains how Burns straddled and attempted to traverse this gap in his poem “Halloween,” looking particularly at how the footnote both affirms and alienates the content to which it is appended.