Suicide and Homo Duplex an Interpretation of Durkheim's Typology of Suicide*

The four types of suicide that Durkheim distinguished are implicit in his concept of homo duplex and the view of socialization this entailed. The individual requires both repression of his passions and direction toward society; too much or too little of either of these two processes leads to suicide and each of the four types represents one type of such failure in socialization. Internal evidence from Suiciae is used to show that Durkheim did in fact derive the suicide typology from his view of man. From the standpoint of this interpretation, those by Parsons and Douglas and by commentators who equate the anomic and egoistic suicide types are reviewed and their misunderstandings noted. Finally, the interpretation given is used to shed light on other aspects of Durkheim's thought, especially some that are disputed in the secondary literature.     

Caregiver-Child Interaction in the Development of Self: The Contributions of Vygotsky,Bruner, and Kaye to Mead's Theory

A way of updating Mead's half-century old formulations is suggested. It entails regarding Mead's formulations as one of a class of interactionist theories of the genesis of self. Such theories regard the internalization of symbols and social relations as the basis of self development and stress the role of the interaction between caregiver and child. Sensitizing concepts developed by other theorists, namely, zone of proximal development (Vygotsky), scaffolding (Bruner), and the child-as-apprentice (Kaye), are reviewed as heuristic devices which specify the nature of the interaction between caregiver and child which facilitates the latter's self development.     

Supervised access: A judicial alternative to noncompliance with visitation arrangements following divorce

Visitation of children after divorce by noncustodial parents is a “natural” right, generally regarded to be in the best interest of children. Custodial parents frequently refuse to allow visitation, even when ordered to do so by the court. The purpose of this report is twofold: (a) to review issues and problems related to visitation; and (b) to describe a program, developed under family court sponsorship, which provides mediation to families in visitation disputes, and supervised visitation when more reasonable access is frustrated by noncompliant parents or when there is concern for the safety and well-being of visited children.     

Probabilistic text understanding

We discuss a new framework for text understanding. Three major design decisions characterize this approach. First, we take the problem of text understanding to be a particular case of the general problem of abductive inference. Second, we use probability theory to handle the uncertainty which arises in this abductive inference process. Finally, all aspects of natural language processing are treated in the same framework, allowing us to integrate syntactic, semantic and pragmatic constraints. In order to apply probability theory to this problem, we have developed a probabilistic model of text understanding. To make it practical to use this model, we have devised a way of incrementally constructing and evaluating belief networks. We have written a program,wimp3, to experiment with this framework. To evaluate this program, we have developed a simple single-blind testing method.