The Perfective Paradox: Or How to Eat Your Cake and Have it Too

The Perfective Paradox: or How to Eat Your Cake and Have It Too

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Introduction I always feel guilty when I go see the dentist. We all know the rules—avoid sweets, brush after every meal, floss several times a day. Talking about tool and shop safety gets the same treatment in articles and books– always read the owner’s manual, inspect your tool for hazards daily, make sure your tools are properly grounded (sound familiar?) The challenge I present to you is tha...

Event Systems: How to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too

This paper addresses the fundamental tradeoffs in event systems between scalability (of event filtering, routing, and delivery mechanisms), expressiveness (when describing interests in events), and event safety (ensuring encapsulation and type-safe interaction with polymorphic events). We point out some ramifications underlying these tradeoffs and we propose a pragmatic approach to handle them....

You can have your cake and eat it too: Introducing Dynamical Systems to Cognitive Science

Timothy Van Gelder and Robert Port (PVG) have thrown down the gauntlet to Cognittive Science. Flaunting a young but dynamic tradition of looking to the computer as a possible model of what the brain is, PVG offer to replace this tradition by a new one based on dynamics. The tenets of this shift include a new emphasis on continuous state and time. Through their 500 page edited collection, PVG ho...

Have Your Cake and Eat It Too: The Old Principal Principle Reconciled with the New*

David Lewis (1980) proposed the Principal Principle (PP) and a “reformulation” which later on he called ‘OP’ (Old Principle). Reacting to his belief that these principles run into trouble, Lewis (1994) concluded that they should be replaced with the New Principle (NP). This conclusion left Lewis uneasy, because he thought that an inverse form of NP is “quite messy”, whereas an inverse form of O...