Paradox (handling ambiguity)

In proposing an ontology of motion capture, this paper identifies three modalities — capture, hold, release — to conceptualise the peculiar affordances of motion capture technology in its relationship to a performer’s movement. Motion capture is unique among contemporary moving image media in its capacity to re-perform a performer’s recorded movement a potentially limitless number of times, e.g. as applied to innumerable different CG characters. Unlike live-action film or even rotoscoping (motion capture’s closest equivalent), the movement extracted from the captured performance lives on, but only by way of the inimagable (non-visible) domain of motion data. Motion data ‘holds’ movement itself in inimagable form, and ‘releases’ it in the domain of the digital moving image. This tri-fold conception relates an important dimension of (Heideggerian) Being to the idea of movement as fundamental to an ontology or ‘being’ of motion capture. At the same time, the proposed ontology challenge...

Peter Voulkos is an American West Coast Ceramist who is best remembered today as an Abstract Expressionist hero. Instead of perpetuating this ongoing narrative however, my paper compares his work to lesser-known creative influences, such as American avant-garde composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, Japanese potter Shoji Hamada and not least, Zen ceramics. In doing so, I argue that that it is more productive to see Voulkos as a revolutionary figure who strategically employed failure, performance and deconstructive techniques in a way that is medium specific to ceramics. Also, I will examine how Voulkos’ clay pieces employ the notion of paradox in order to complicate and challenge accepted preconceptions of ceramics and its perceived relationship to function. In doing so, he reframed the clay vessel as an aesthetic object in its own right and ultimately, established ceramics as an autonomous medium.

The chapter provides analytical discourse regarding land policy ambiguities, tenure security and subsequent ethnic conflict in Kibale drawing on various existing literature that has been reviewed. While elements of ambiguities have been found in existing literature, there are also stunning gaps which suggest inability to act systematically in provision of tenure security and subsequent reduction of ethnic conflicts in Kibale district.
The proposition of this chapter focuses on the NLP drafts and the 1998 Land Act which legislatively actualized most of the land policy reforms in the 1995 Constitution of Uganda.

.....the double bind as constituting an entirely new, non-material, principle of evolution, major conceptual revisions may need to be made in our general understanding of evolution as contained within the “modern evolutionary synthesis”.

KEYWORDS:
behavior, communication, context, contradiction, deutero-learning, double bind, epistemology, evolution, incompleteness theorum, kinesics, learning, logical type theory, metacommunication, metamessages, metatheory, mystification, paradox, relationships, schismogenesis, schizophrenia,  scientific elegance, symmathesy, teleology, temporality, transcontextual, transdisciplinary, trauma

A convert to Catholicism, G.K. Chesterton was a leading intellectual of the British Edwardian age and one of the important social and religious thinkers of the twentieth century. His trademark was paradox. He wrote in defense of the imagination and the corralling of opposites, oppositions, contradictions and bountiful inconsistencies. The article explores Chesterton’s views on faith, religion, God, Christianity, Islam, modernity, change, and progress. It locates him in a philosophical stream that sees laughter and comedy as a religious disguise, paradox as a creative force, and the imagination as a necessary complement of reason. This is framed by a discussion of Chesterton’s thoughts about the importance of limits and boundaries in defining good actions and good societies.

Cultural Midwifery is a theoretical inquiry that explores an ontology of
being, being with, and being within the becoming that may ease the transition of individuals, communities, organizations, and social institutions through the uncertainties of “postnormal times”—the undefined spaces between paradigms that are failing and those that have yet to emerge. With a mind toward a declining Industrial Age in the West, and a possible Ecological Era on the horizon, Cultural Midwifery attempts to cull the knowledge and skill sets of midwives, who have been attending to liminal spaces for millennia, so as to inform and to narrativize the emergent and complex adaptive dynamics of epistemology, leadership, relational care, and culture. Midwifery is presented as an originary, poetic, pragmatic, and embodied ēthos of relating, meaning-making, and leading into being. To engage this inquiry with a depth of understanding and a breadth of awareness that honors myriad ways of knowing, that calls upon a wholeness of being, and that allows for nonlinear emergentism, a new, processual inquiry perspective, entitled the “complex gaze,” is also introduced.

Allegories function as bearers of meaning in Western civilization. In medieval times, allegories of Faith emerged in the visual arts as rethorical figures, their sources of inspiration relating to classical models. From the late Middle Ages onwards, such allegories were gradually transformed. In modern times, one dicisive factor occurred in the aftermath of the Second War World, when in 1965 the Catholic Church responded with Nostra Aetate. Around this declaration changes take place, including the elaboration of allegories of Faith  which are more consonant with our times. Conflict gives place to dialogue. However, an equivocal attribute can still be detected in various allegories of Faith--the blindfold, whose strange presence is symbolic and can be understood as a visual paradox.

This review (written in Spanish) offers a description of the plot and background themes of "Manalive" (1912). This novel is essentially a preview of Chesterton's conversion to Christianity or at least a lucid fable about the human attitude that encourages the conversion, namely, the willingness to live by a creed rather than by routine, the continuous re-discovery of things and a persistent attention to the real so that we never lose sight of the possibility of miracles to happen.

This is an exegesis based on the comparison of Abraham, Sarai and Hagar, their relationship as compared to contemporary values. In contemporary society Abraham, Sarai and Hagar would be considered an Alternative relationship while during the times they lived their relationship is perfectly normal and in accordance with the customs of their era. The purpose is to explore the reality of human evolution, changing values thereof and how the Bible is defined, interpreted, reinterpreted and redacted to conveniently support and fit human behavior and values rather than being a static doctrine.

An exploration of the self in dramaturgical societies: This is the double, duplicitous, witty self, the one who communicates indirectly through characters and masks, the self who is a personality, who knowingly plays a role on the public stage, and who inhabits a wry, not to say awry, paradoxical world created by a mischievous comic God. A motley bunch of characters wander across the stage of this article. These include recusant Catholics, American sociologists, theologians of paradox, philosophers of comedy, Oscar Schindler, Mick Jagger, William Shakespeare, G.K. Chesterton, as well as various assorted epicurean puritans, inventive liars, elusive playwrights, pompous intellectuals, sleuthing heroes from detective fiction, ambitious pretenders, satirists of newspaper folly, media nitwits, boys playing girls playing boys, and, if you are really good, girls playing boys playing girls. All of them bearing testament to Viola's immortal line: I am not what I am.

If we are to recognize that life and architecture are part of a larger phenomenon of nature and the cosmos, we would realize that they are part of a never-ending process of creation or the process of becoming. This process is continuously fed by various inherent contradictions. The constant struggle to deal with these dual tendencies is essential to "existence" in the larger sense. Hence, the notion of "long lasting architecture" in the context of the perennial "process of becoming", itself has an inherent paradox.
Today, we are part of a network culture driven by digital network technology. Over the last 20 years or so, it has shaped the dynamics of contemporary society creating a whole new set of relationships which now drive the world. We live in a state of paradox in trying to deal with the unprecedented contradictions posed by this shift. Our frame of mind is desperately struggling and swaying between simultaneous conflicting tendencies.
With this picture in mind, the paper ponders whether architecture is a solution, a remedy or a mere reflection of these transformations.
The fundamental premise is that the paradox cannot and should not be resolved or camouflaged. It should be expressed and made integral to the architectural process. With this intent, the paper hopes to project an agenda to help dwell in the realm of "paradox".

This special issue of Empedocles arose out a conference that was held in 2008 at Monash University, Melbourne, on the theme of 'Paradox and Indirect Communication'. The one-day conference brought together a series of speakers interested in the way in which some of the most productive, creative and enduring forms of human communication are articulated through paradoxes. Through the medium of paradox, human beings communicate indirectly about matters that are among the most important in human lives. These things are often notoriously elusive – which is why they lend themselves to tacit, enigmatic and tangential methods of communicating.

An exploration of the self in dramaturgical societies: This is the double, duplicitous, witty self, the one who communicates indirectly through characters and masks, the self who is a personality, who knowingly plays a role on the public stage, and who inhabits a wry, not to say awry, paradoxical world created by a mischievous comic God. A motley bunch of characters wander across the stage of this article. These include recusant Catholics, American sociologists, theologians of paradox, philosophers of comedy, Oscar Schindler, Mick Jagger, William Shakespeare, G.K. Chesterton, as well as various assorted epicurean puritans, inventive liars, elusive playwrights, pompous intellectuals, sleuthing heroes from detective fiction, ambitious pretenders, satirists of newspaper folly, media nitwits, boys playing girls playing boys, and, if you are really good, girls playing boys playing girls. All of them bearing testament to Viola's immortal line: I am not what I am.

The article discusses on the resemblances between humor and philosophical paradoxes. It explains that successful jokes involve certain incongruities. It also narrates several verbal jokes and elaborates how those jokes contradict between the expectation and the revelation. It emphasizes that the teasing, stripping, and exposed sabotage are to be observed within several philosophical paradoxes as well as within the context of jokes.

The Unexpected Hanging Problem is also known as the Surprise Examination Problem. We here
solve it by isolating what is logical reasoning from the rest of the human psyche. In a not-soorthodox analysis, following our tradition (The Liar, Dichotomy, The Sorites and Russell’s Paradox),
we talk about the problem from a perspective that is more distant than all the known perspectives.
From an observational point that is in much farther than all the observational points used until now,
the reader can finally see why the problem has been perpetuated as a problem and can also see
that the problem was never an actual problem: Once more, we have an allurement. The allurement
this time makes us start paying attention to all the complexity of the human psyche when studying
problems that involve human feelings. The main finding could be told to be that we have to
understand and study more the human psyche, in all its intricacies, also when dealing with
problems that seem to belong with exclusivity to Mathematics or Logic

This paper discussed the ontological phase of the supernatural being Red Bull, depicted in The Last Unicorn in view of archetypal shadow motive.  According to the description of Deuteronomy, prophesied magical creature "reem" had the power to chase all the people out of the world.  In "The Last Unicorn" it was the Bull that took all unicorns away from the world.  But according to the description of King James Bible, the  "reem"  was identified as "unicorns". Interestingly paradoxical interpretation is suggested that unicorns caused unicorns to vanish out of the world.  The  ambiguous descriptions given to the Red Bull are reexamined to find out the deepest theme hidden in The Last Unicorn.

Why is the paradox such a common trope in scholarly texts discussing Thailand’s contemporary socio-cultural configuration? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Thailand’s lower Northeast, this article presents philosophical reflections on the omnipresence of the paradox and sets out to document a paradoxographical trend in contemporary Thai studies. As becomes clear in the debate on “Anthropology and the study of contradictions” initiated by David Berliner, anthropological fieldwork is a special laboratory for observing contradictions.
I started my ethnographic fieldwork with the goal of documenting how the ethnic identity of Thailand’s Khmer-speakers is reproduced through popular religious rituals. The assumption that there is an ethnic group to be studied became the source of various apparently paradoxical observations that moved the question for the place of the paradox in contemporary Thai Studies into the center of my theoretical reflections. Based at the intersections of anthropology, philosophy and sociology this interdisciplinary texts seeks out to deconstruct the paradoxographical trend that haunts contemporary Thai studies by mapping the ideological function of the paradox in naturalistic language games.

http://www.polylog.net/aktuelles-heft/polylog-43/

This contribution focuses on the game Uddertale (2016), developed by the artist Doxy for The Poundry, a young distributor of online sex games. As its title suggests, Uddertale, is a spoof of the indie hit Undertale (Fox 2015), an adventure role-playing game which received numerous accolades for its originality and humour. In this chapter, I pay attention, firstly, to the parodic and pastiche aspects of Uddertale’s relationship to Undertale. Secondly, I focus on the palimpsestic web that connects the two games to the 1999 film American Pie. Through this analysis, I ask how gamic parodic humour comes to differ from other forms of video game humour, or parodic humour at large, when it becomes part of the greater intermedial agenda of translating, adapting, or transforming an existing game into a playable pornographic object. Ultimately, this double case study allows me to highlight an especially troubling aspect of humour in general: its ability to maintain contradictory ethical positions in suspension, with no resolution in sight.

A convert to Catholicism, G.K. Chesterton was a leading intellectual of the British Edwardian age and one of the important social and religious thinkers of the twentieth century. His trademark was paradox. He wrote in defense of the imagination and the corralling of opposites, oppositions, contradictions, and bountiful inconsistencies. The article explores Chesterton’s views on faith, religion, God, Christianity, Islam, modernity, change, and progress. It locates him in a philosophical stream that sees laughter and comedy as a religious disguise, paradox as a creative force, and the imagination as a necessary complement of reason. This is framed by a discussion of Chesterton’s thoughts about the importance of limits and boundaries in defining good actions and good societies.

Cultivating the pretence of binary simplicity
Objectively understood configurations indicative of fundamental cognitive implication
Purportedly objective configurations with potentially subjective implications
Subjectively understood configurations indicative of fundamental cognitive implication
Configuring personality types and gender orientation as the archetypal challenge
Interactively understood configurations indicative of fundamental cognitive implication
Configuring polarities for cognitive engagement of higher order
Exercises in centro-symmetric encoding using hexagrams
Systematic configuration of ambiguity and liminality?

The National Association of Students of Architecture (NASA India) is one of the largest Architectural Student Organizations in the world with student participants from over three hundred colleges. When NASA was held at Sir JJ College of Architecture in Bombay in 1981, it was relatively an intimate affair as there were only about 22 colleges in the country. The editorial board of the NASA journal Akriti, decided to have articles by professionals and one student. My student contribution (audaciousness notwithstanding; the science is suspect) began a journey of publishing essays that continues (it was predated only by my interview of Hasan Fathy in 1980).

Soon after, I misplaced my copy. Inquiries some years ago with friends and JJ College archives, drew a blank. But thanks to Ajit in Lonavala, who recently located someone who still had a copy after 38 years!  It was Jacob in Goa: "The mag is not in good condition, but it’s one of the few that survived half a dozen house/ office moves, 1995/6 floods (we had 3ft water in house) & rising damp..."

Jacob and I had jammed together on Me & Bobby McGee -  he on guitar and vocals and I finger drummed on a matka as makeshift ghatam. We were strangers one night around a bonfire, during NASA 1980 in Hyderabad. Song over, I had got up and left. We met again only a decade later, at JJ, and recognized each other.

Thank you Ajit, Jacob and Dean (whose office scanned Jacop’s copy). The Richard Bach quote at the end of the essay, added by Akriti’s astute editor Kavita, was indeed prophetic:

“And meeting again, after moments or lifetimes, is certain for those who are friends.”

December 31, 2020

В докладе на основе практической аргументации (касательно действий) предложено решение знаменитого спора в суде между Протагором и Еватлом по поводу платы за обучение, которую Еватл задолжал Протагору. В противовес тому, что этот спор обычно трактуется как логический парадокс, в статье показано, что парадокс порожден двойной путаницей в описании сути спора. Одна часть путаницы состоит в том, что лингвистические выражения, используемые для обозначения действий Протагора, Еватла и суда, идентифицируются с самими этими действиями. Другая ее часть заключается в том, что несовместимые пары действий, которые одному агенту невозможно выполнить одновременно, выражены при помощи двух различных пар предложений, одна из которых представляет собой пару логически противоречивых предложений, тогда как предложения в другой паре совместимы одно с другим и противоречия не составляют. Акциональное решение спора проясняет эту двойную путаницу посредством двух основных разграничений между действиями и предложениями - пропозиционального и экспрессивного. Пропозициональное разграничение помогает избежать путаницы между эмпирической несовместимостью действий и истинностно-функциональной противоречивостью предложений, используемых для указания на действия. Экспрессивное разграничение показывает, что в силу того, что одни и те же лингвистические выражения могут быть использованы для обозначения и действий и предложений, пара эмпирически несовместимых действий может быть выражена как парой противоречивых, так и парой совместимых между собой предложений. Таким образом, действие получения платы Протагором может быть лингвистически выражено четырьмя различными способами: Протагор получает плату по решению суда, Протагор получает плату по договору, Протагор не получает плату по решению суда, Протагор не получает плату по договору, и, соответственно, и также для действий Еватла. Экспрессивное и пропозициональное разграничения используются для классификации двух групп выдвинутых ранее решений парадокса, правовых и логических, которые мы систематизируем на основе от того, какой из двух аспектов путаницы они стремятся преодолеть. Акциональная реконструкция спора показывает, что в нем имеется только один единственный агент - Протагор, в то время как другой, называемый Еватлом, - это фантом, скорее всего, придуманный Протагором в своих целях ради создания этого изящного софизма.

We explore how the opt-out movement has responded to the combination of a stringent federal policy with weak and often variable implementation among the states. Gaps between federal expectations and states' understandings of just how to make NCLB's demands a reality have created policy ambiguity. Parents who oppose standardized testing have recognized the resulting tensions and oversights in state education systems as a policy vacuum rife with opportunities for resistance. We examine how parents have exploited policy ambiguity through creating Journal website:

An exploration of the self in dramaturgical societies: This is the double, duplicitous, witty self, the one who communicates indirectly through characters and masks, the self who is a personality, who knowingly plays a role on the public stage, and who inhabits a wry, not to say awry, paradoxical world created by a mischievous comic God. A motley bunch of characters wander across the stage of this article. These include recusant Catholics, American sociologists, theologians of paradox, philosophers of comedy, Oscar Schindler, Mick Jagger, William Shakespeare, G.K. Chesterton, as well as various assorted epicurean puritans, inventive liars, elusive playwrights, pompous intellectuals, sleuthing heroes from detective fiction, ambitious pretenders, satirists of newspaper folly, media nitwits, boys playing girls playing boys, and, if you are really good, girls playing boys playing girls. All of them bearing testament to Viola's immortal line: I am not what I am.

This article analyses whether Official Development Assistance (ODA) is linked to multidimensional poverty indicators in the context of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Sustainable Development Indictors and the principles stated by the Global Partnership for Effective
Development Co-operation. Focused on three western Sub-Saharan Africa and least developing countries such as Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, this article uses Error Correction Vector Model to estimate if ODA and economic growth are cointegrated and a sectoral and spatial analysis to check if ODA are linked to Multidimensional Poverty Indicators in the sample countries. Despite the 2014 Ebola outbreak, the three countries have achieved noticeable good results in poverty alleviation. Results shows a certain macro-micro paradox because, despite a common trend between aid and growth identified at the macro level, we cannot find any sign of ODA contributions to the multidimensional poverty indicators when the micro level analysis is carried out. Our results may serve to increase the level of implementation of the ownership principle for effective development co-operation and achieve a significant improvement of several goals and targets included on the 2030 Agenda.

In proposing an ontology of motion capture, this paper identifies three modalities — capture, hold, release — to conceptualise the peculiar affordances of motion capture technology in its relationship to a performer’s movement. Motion capture is unique among contemporary moving image media in its capacity to re-perform a performer’s recorded movement a potentially limitless number of times, e.g. as applied to innumerable different CG characters. Unlike live-action film or even rotoscoping (motion capture’s closest equivalent), the movement extracted from the captured performance lives on, but only by way of the inimagable (non-visible) domain of motion data. Motion data ‘holds’ movement itself in inimagable form, and ‘releases’ it in the domain of the digital moving image. This tri-fold conception relates an important dimension of (Heideggerian) Being to the idea of movement as fundamental to an ontology or ‘being’ of motion capture. At the same time, the proposed ontology challenges the ‘illusion of life’ metaphor as the accepted definition of (motion capture) animation. The Oscar’s Special Rules for the Animated Feature Film Award asserts that ‘by itself’ motion capture does not qualify as an animation method. The notion that a technology could do or be anything ‘by itself’ affords a conceptual leap toward Heideggerian thinking on the nature of Being as embodied in temporality, in which past, present and future are unified. In its capacity to operate outside the domain of the digital moving image, ‘movement itself’ not only articulates an ontology of motion capture: motion capture itself can be understood to be brought into being by movement, thus also challenging the notion that capture technology has a parasitic relationship to a performer’s originary performance.

This special issue arose out a conference that was held at Monash University in Melbourne in 2008 on the theme of 'Paradox and Indirect Communication'. The one-day conference brought together a series of speakers interested in the philosophy of communication, and specifically in the way in which the most interesting and the most productive, creative and enduring forms of human communication are articulated through paradoxes. Through such paradoxes, human beings communicate indirectly about the things that are most important in human lives. These things are often notoriously elusive, which is why they lend themselves to indirect, tacit, enigmatic and, in general, indirect ways of communicating.

Addressing changes in conditions for practitioners that can be related to education policy in England and Wales since 2010, this article presents issues faced by teachers of art and design and their responses in practice. The current insistence on transparency in education emerges through policy that audits performativity, in a limiting skills bank. Practitioners in Art and Design are particularly affected by what I term 'the transparency-exclusion paradox', as they battle to maintain the subject area and are 'othered' by the English Baccalaureate and Progress 8. I will discuss an emergent 'ethos of ambiguity' among artist-teachers and contemporary artists, with a theoretical basis informed by Beauvoir and Foucault. Empirical data from research participants will be evidenced, to explore strategies of response in inclusive social practice. This article adds to literature that considers the effects of policy in implementation and it contributes to research on creative expressions of ambiguity in the arts.

This article was originally published in a journal published by Elsevier, and the attached copy is provided by Elsevier for the author's benefit and for the benefit of the author's institution, for non-commercial research and educational use including without limitation use in instruction at your institution, sending it to specific colleagues that you know, and providing a copy to your institution's administrator. All other uses, reproduction and distribution, including without limitation commercial reprints, selling or licensing copies or access, or posting on open internet sites, your personal or institution's website or repository, are prohibited. For exceptions, permission may be sought for such use through Elsevier's permissions site at: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/permissionusematerial Abstract In the quest to improve execution of research and development (R&D) projects, this paper focuses on the association between attainment of R&D project performance objectives and the conflicts R&D project management sparks between discretion, which refers to spontaneity, desire for change and breaking of rules, and formality, which refers to structure, stability, and following the rules. Since no solid theory exists, managers are uncertain whether both formality and discretion can be simultaneously applied, though it is clear that both are needed in R&D projects. This study aims to develop a model that conceptualizes and brings empirical evidence for the relationship between formality, discretion and R&D project performance. More than 1500 participants from 62 R&D projects, and 248 customer representatives in one high technology electronics company responded to questionnaires that measured formality, discretion, uncertainty, and additional control variables. Each project's performance was assessed using the company's information system on deviation from objectives in unit-cost (in US$), total project cost (in US$), time-to-market (in months), project product mean time between failures (MTBF) and mean time to repair (MTTR), and customer satisfaction. Results demonstrated that formality and discretion are distinct constructs of project execution. Each was found to positively affect R&D project performance; moreover, interaction existed in their relationships with performance. In other words, the positive relationship between formality and the performance achievement in R&D projects is stronger in projects that allow higher discretion than in projects that restrict members' discretion. Implications for R&D management theory and practice are discussed.

Not a history of ambiguous texts per se, but rather a quixotic attempt at a history of the ways that interpreters, and theorists of interpretation, have posited, confronted, denied, conceptualised and argued over the existence of multiple meanings in texts. The major fields discussed in the book are: linguistics (including rhetoric, semantics, poetics), law, theology (or rather the interpretation of Scripture), and literary criticism, although I also take forays into diplomacy, psychology, and other areas. Mostly Western, though there is a touch of mediaeval Sanskrit poetry and poetics, and a sprinkle of mediaeval Arabic semantics. (I do not read Sanskrit or Arabic. Things will work out, somehow.)

Working at a local level in a global context - what does this mean? What methods appear to be appropriate to ways of life where global communications mean that the most distant is as reachable and hence manipulable as the closest?  In such a context decisions can be taken in one locale that have consequences in another.  Global capitalists can switch funds from one locale to another without ever thinking in terms of the lives of the individuals affected.  Indeed, transactions are managed by ‘intelligent software’ responding in preprogrammed ways to particular market circumstances.  As a researcher I want to know what methods best serve my purposes in this kind of globalised context to local action.  First, therefore, I want to make clear as much to myself as to others some key aspects of my intentions in doing research.
    It seems to me that this is an age when control seems both so ubiquitous and so absent from the lives of individuals. Thus, most if not all my research has a focus on action and the extent to which individuals are able to enhance the quality of their lives in ways that contribute to the quality of the lives of others.  It seems important to me that research is conceived as not disinterested, but as always suffused by interests that have to be explored, critiqued and argued.  This means that research is always a political action.  Thus, what kind of politics seems to offer the most conducive framework for research that aims at enhancing freedom and quality of life for all? Without foreclosing too much on possible political frameworks it seems to me that Chantel Mouffe (1993) is right when she argues that democracy is an incomplete revolution and that its development is still the best approach available.  The radical possibilities of democracy to enhance the quality of life have yet to be worked out fully for the contemporary age.