In recent years, semiotics has become an innovative theoretical framework in mathematics education. The purpose of this article is to show that semiotics can be used to explain learning as a process of experimenting with and communicating about one's own representations of mathematical problems. As a paradigmatic example, we apply a Peircean semiotic framework to answer the question of how students learned the concept of "distribution" in a statistics course by "diagrammatic reasoning" and by developing "hypostatic abstractions," that is by (...) forming new mathematical objects which can be used as means for communication and further reasoning. Peirce's semiotic terminology is used as an alternative for notions such as modeling, symbolizing, and reification. We will show that it is a precise instrument of analysis with regard to the complexity of learning and of communication in mathematics classroom. (shrink)

1. T. Wilhelm Wundt als deutscher Denker, von Felix Krueger. Wundts Prinzip der schöpferischen Synthese, von Friedrich Sander. Wundt und die Relativität, von August Kirschmann. Die Völkerpsychologie in Wundts Entwicklungsgang, von Hans Volkelt. Zur Geschichte des Leipziger Psychologischen Instituts, von Otto Klemm.--2. T. Die Stellung der Philosophie Wilhelm Wundts im 19. Jahrhundert, von Peter Petersen. Wundts Aktualitätstheorie, von Willi Nef. Die mechanische Naturerklärung und das Naturgesetz, von Friedrich Lipsius. Über die psychischen Elemente und ihre Bedeutung in der Lehre Wundts, von (...) Friedrich Kiesow. Stellung und Aufgabe von Wundts Völkerpsychologie und der Begriff des Volkes, von Walther Schmied-Kowarzik. (shrink)

The ability to reason by analogy is particularly important because it permits the extension of knowledge of a target domain by virtue of its similarity to a base domain via a process of analogical inference. The general procedure for analogical inference involves copying structure from the base to the target in which missing information is generated, and substitutions are made for items for which analogical correspondences have already been found. A pure copying with substitution and generation process is too profligate (...) to be useful, and so constraints must be placed on what information is to be carried over. In this paper, the importance of systematicity as a constraint on inference is explored in four studies in which subjects find correspondences between domains and also make inferences. This work suggests that people prefer to make inferences of information connected to systematic correspondences between domains. A second important theme of this paper is that violations of one‐to‐one mapping can lead to inconsistent object substitutions in inference. The data reveal no such inconsistent substitutions in people's inferences, suggesting that they do respect one‐to‐one mapping in analogical inference. These findings are discussed relative to four prominent computational models of analogical mapping and inference. (shrink)

One of the foremost contributions to the study of the history of ideas. Examines ancient sources pertaining to the original condition of mankind.

Women in Rock, Women in Romanticism is the first book-length work to explore the interrelationships between contemporary female musicians and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, music, and literature by women and men. The music and videos of contemporary musicians including Erykah Badu, Beyoncé, The Carters, Hélène Cixous, Missy Elliot, the Indigo Girls, Janet Jackson, Janis Joplin (and Big Brother and the Holding Company), Natalie Merchant, Joni Mitchell, Janelle Monáe, Alanis Morrisette, Siouxsie Sioux, Patti Smith, St. Vincent (Annie Clark), and Alice Walker (...) are explored through the lenses of pastoral and Afropresentism, Gothic, female Gothic, and the literature of William Blake, Beethoven, Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charlotte Dacre, Ralph Waldo Emerson, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ann Radcliffe, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy Shelley, Henry David Thoreau, Horace Walpole, Jane Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth to explore how each sheds light on the other, and how women have appropriated, responded to, and been inspired by the work of authors from previous centuries. (shrink)