Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Recursion refers to a procedure that calls itself, or to a constituent that contains a constituent of the same kind).

Roughly, in tail recursion, a procedure invokes another instance of itself as a final step (or, in the context of language, a constituent an identical kind of constituent at its periphery).

In true recursion, a procedure invokes an instance of itself in mid-computation and then must resume the original procedure from where it left off (or a constituent has an identical kind of constituent embedded inside it).

Recursion consists of embedding a constituent in a constituent of the same type, for example a relative clause inside a relative clause (a book that was written by the novelist you met last night), which automatically confers the ability to do so ad libitum (e.g. a book [that was written by the novelist [you met on the night [that we decided to buy the boat [that you liked so much]]]]).

Second, syntactic trees have a characteristic structure, in which each constituent contains a distinguished member, the head, which determines the category and semantic referent of the constituent, and around which the other elements are grouped as arguments and modifiers (this is the basis of the X-bar theory of phrase structure).

But in another sense thinking is itself a constituent of perception and action, and is, indeed, but a proper part of problem solving.

Here it is important to note that the continuing propensity should not be identified with a sequence of separate propensities to utter constituent syllables, though it includes them.

Different recipes determined by statements with different constituent structure might end in the same place, no matter what the facts (as, for example, with statements of the forms ~(PÚ Q) and (~PÙ ~Q)).

Accordingly the sensation that we have when we see a patch of colour simply is that patch of colour, an actual constituent of the physical world, and part of what physics is concerned with.

But this constituent of the intensity of sensations is absent in mental imagery"(p.