Number acquisition is a field of research with a wealth of studies mainly by psychologists. In this article, I try to add some linguistic insights. To acquire all number words with their meanings as a basis for further mathematical thinking-at least other numerals than those for small numerosities like [two] or [three] (and maybe [ four])-a child has to learn a number sequence as a list of speech forms meaningless at first. It is claimed that general principles of rhythm and coordination explain the child's ability to learn by rote a sequence of such speech forms and their word class. I show that these principles also apply in the acquisition of sequences of the names of the days of the week and the names of the months. As far as the development of the counting abilities for numbers up to [a hundred] is concerned, I argue that the particular rhythmical structure of the sequence provides the child with the raw material to develop a concept "decade word." The child will have to learn by rote a second sequence, that is, the sequence of the decade numbers [10, 20, 30, etc.]. This is an important step in the detection of the algorithm that ultimately makes the generation of all natural numbers possible. I argue that the theory of reduction from Lerdahl and Jackendoff's (1996) generative theory of music may explain this step.
In this paper, empirical data are presented related to memory and time perception. The data are the frequencies with which specific calendar years are cited in newspaper texts. Whenplotted, the curves produced by the time series of these frequencies turn out to be independent of the languages and cultures in which the texts have been written as well as the year and the year density of the text corpus. The frequency of a specific year is inversely proportional to the distance from that year to the year in which the texts were written. It is argued that these curves are forgetting curves. It is suggested that the curves might be explained in terms of the "cognitivedistance" between past and present. An argument is presented based on the curve representing the frequencies with which future years are cited in newspaper texts.The aim of this paper is to present and analyze empirical data related to memory and time perception. A difference from other investigations in this field is that the number of data to be presented is very large. Moreover, the data relate to rather large time spans between present and remembered past, measured in decades and centuries rather than in minutes, hours, days, or weeks. The data are not the outcome of experiments, but they have been collected from large language corpora.The data provide some empirical evidence that corroborates the intuition that the further the past recedes, the less often we make an appeal to it, and that this decline does not come to an end when we go beyond the beginning of the past we have experienced ourselves. Apparently, the content ofour memory for historical matters decays with the passage of time. The data might be arranged as "forgetting curves." This process of decay, however, is a function of real time and apparently not related to the moments in which we experienced these things of the past through education or private reading. Therefore, the data ask for answers to questions about "forgetting."Unless stated otherwise, here and in the rest of this paper I do not refer to historical knowledge as the knowledge one can find in documents of the past or the publications of historians, but I refer to historical knowledge as a mental property. As far as I know, little is known about the temporal-cognitive structure of internalized historical knowledge, especially the knowledge of a time that we did not experience ourselves. Undoubtedly, his-The author wants to thank
Voor zover het maken van kopieën uit deze uitgave is toegestaan op grond van artikel B Auteurswet j het Besluit van juni , St.b. , zoals gewijzigd bij het Besluit van augustus , St.b. en artikel Auteurswet , dient men de daarvoor wettelijk verschuldigde vergoedingen te voldoen aan de Stichting Reprorecht (Postbus , AW Amstelveen). Voor het overnemen van gedeelte(n) uit deze uitgave in bloemlezingen, readers en andere compilatiewerken (artikel Auteurswet ) dient men zich tot de uitgever te wenden. Inhoudsopgave
This article is about the logic of the concept of "coherence" as used by historians to justify an argument. Despite its effectiveness in historical arguments, coherence is problematic for epistemologists and some theorists of history. The main purpose of this article is to present some insights that bear upon the logical status of coherence. As will be demonstrated, this will also shed some light on the allegedly dubious epistemological position of coherence. In general I will argue that, logically seen, coherence is a property of a set of related beliefs that makes it possible to justify a choice out of different factually justifiable interpretations. Coherence disambiguates vague or ambiguous observations. As words lose their vagueness or ambiguity in contexts, so do contexts disambiguate historical facts. My argument will be based on some relatively recent findings about the cognitive processes underlying vision and reading. Research in the field of text linguistics is used to show what kinds of relationships exist between historical representations that might be considered to cohere.
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