Newton’s Substance Monism, Distant Action, and the Nature of Newton’s Empiricism

This chapter is a critical response to Hylarie Kochiras’ (2009) “Gravity and Newton’s substance counting problem.” First, it argues that Kochiras conflates substances and beings; it proceeds to show that Newton is a substance monist. Second, it argues against the claim that Newton is committed to two speculative doctrines attributed to him by Kochiras and, earlier, Andrew Janiak—namely the passivity of matter and the principle of local causation. Third, the paper argues that while Kochiras’ (and Janiak’s) arguments about Newton’s metaphysical commitments are mistaken, it qualifies the characterization of Newton as an extreme empiricist as defended by Howard Stein and Rob DiSalle. In particular, the paper shows that Newton’s empiricism was an intellectual and developmental achievement that built on nontrivial speculative commitments about the nature of matter and space.

Ecology of communicative word distribution

We offer an extended understanding of the linguistic term distribution. We list its possible constructs in various communicative acts and communicative-semantic situations in the aspect of a new linguistic paradigm – “Emotive linguoecology”. We distinguish several constructs for the distribution of the communicative interaction of speakers. Each type of construct is illustrated with examples from the history and modern life of the Russian language, as well as fiction autobiographical literature, pedagogical parables and Internet resources. We substantiate that the modern era is characterized by the presence of createme, emotionalization and expressivization of society, as evidenced by the ecology of communication. We argue that one of the main tasks of modern world linguistics is to curb human emotions with language, its linguoplastics and reorientation of all types of communication to a positive vector. To consider linguistic facts, we propose a non-trivial approach to understanding the term concept of linguistic distribution, namely, its extended understanding: word position from right to left (contact / discount / distant), action, situation, event, confession, culture, social environment, micro-, macrocontext, chapter / section context, book parts, vertical context of the entire book, vertical context of all texts of one author , the vertical context of all books by all authors, the specific culture of all authors of fictional and non-fictional works - the global mega-context of some global word / global semantic universum.

Complexity of sensorimotor transformations alters hand perception

When using tools effects in body space and distant space often do not correspond or are even in conflict. The ideomotor principle holds that actors select, initiate and execute movements by activating the anticipatory codes of the movements’ sensory effects (Greenwald, 1970; James, 1890). These may be representations of body-related effects and/or representations of more distal effects. Previous studies have demonstrated that distant action effects dominate action control, while body-related effects are attenuated (e.g., Müsseler and Sutter, 2009). In two experiments, participants performed closed-loop controlled movements on a covered digitizer tablet to control a cursor on a monitor. Different gains perturbed the relation between hand and cursor amplitude, so that the hand amplitude varied and the cursor amplitude remained constant, and vice versa. Within a block the location of amplitude perturbation randomly varied (low predictability) or not (high predictability). In Experiment 1 both trajectories of hand and cursor followed the same linear path, in Experiment 2 a linear hand trajectory produced a curved cursor trajectory on the monitor. When participants were asked to evaluate their hand movement, they were extremely uncertain about their trajectories. Both, predictability of amplitude perturbation and shape of cursor trajectory modulated the awareness of one’s own hand movements. We will discuss whether the low awareness of proximal action effects originates from an insufficient quality of the humans’ tactile and proprioceptive system or from an insufficient spatial reconstruction of this information in memory.