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  • Forest Yukaghir language
    ...of the ethnic group) who are divided about equally into two enclaves: Tundra Yukaghir (also called Northern Yukaghir) in the Sakha republic (Yakutia), near the estuary of the Indigirka River; and Kolyma, or Forest, Yukaghir (also called Southern Yukaghir) along the bend of the Kolyma River. Extinct earlier dialects or languages related to Yukaghir are Omok and Chuvan (Chuvantsy); these were......
  • forest-steppe (vegetation zone, Ukraine)
    The forest-steppe, which covers an area of about 78,000 square miles (202,000 square km), extends south from the Polissya. About two-thirds of this agricultural region is arable land; forests take up only about one-eighth of the area....
  • forest-tundra
    ...the temperature of the soil, and the extreme minimum winter temperature. The boreal forest belt consists of three roughly parallel zones: closed canopy forest, lichen woodland or sparse taiga, and forest-tundra. The closed canopy forest is the southernmost portion of the taiga. It contains the greatest richness of species, the warmest soils, the highest productivity, and the longest growing......
  • Forester, C. S. (British author)
    British historical novelist and journalist, best known as the creator of the British naval officer Horatio Hornblower, whose rise from midshipman to admiral and peer during the Napoleonic Wars is told in a series of 12 novels, beginning with The Happy Return (1937; U.S. title Beat to Quarters)....
  • Forester, Cecil Scott (British author)
    British historical novelist and journalist, best known as the creator of the British naval officer Horatio Hornblower, whose rise from midshipman to admiral and peer during the Napoleonic Wars is told in a series of 12 novels, beginning with The Happy Return (1937; U.S. title Beat to Quarters)....
  • forester moth (insect)
    any of a group of moths in the family Zygaenidae (order Lepidoptera) that are closely related to the burnet moths. The adult forester moth has shining green forewings with a span of about 3 cm (1.2 inches), translucent, dark hind wings, and an iridescent body. The insect’s green appearance at rest may have given rise to the common name forester. Young larvae mine in leaves of various ...
  • Forestier Peninsula (peninsula, Tasmania, Australia)
    peninsula in southeastern Tasmania, Australia, measuring 12 by 9 miles (19 by 14 km) and bounded by the Tasman Sea (east) and by Norfolk Bay (west). To the north the promontory is connected to the mainland by a short isthmus, and to the south it is linked to the Tasman Peninsula by the 1...
  • forestry
    the management of forested land, together with associated waters and wasteland, primarily for harvesting timber. To a large degree, modern forestry has evolved in parallel with the movement to conserve natural resources. As a consequence, professional foresters have increasingly become involved in activities related to the conservation of soil, water, and wild...
  • Forests, Statement of Principles on (international agreement)
    ...27 broad, nonbinding principles for environmentally sound development. Agenda 21 outlined global strategies for cleaning up the environment and encouraging environmentally sound development. The Statement of Principles on Forests, aimed at preserving the world’s rapidly vanishing tropical rainforests, is a nonbinding statement recommending that nations monitor and assess the impact of......
  • Forever Amber (film by Preminger)
    ...1625—to have become thoroughly naturalized. There is a surprisingly accurate representation of its being played by Charles II and one of his mistresses in the film version of Forever Amber (1947). The game’s popularity among the literate is suggested by its prominence in the earliest books of instruction in card play, which date from the 17th century. It h...
  • Forey, Élie-Frédéric (French general)
    ...victory recalled to this day in Cinco de Mayo celebrations—the French retreated to await reinforcements. Napoleon dispatched 30,000 more troops under the command of the French general Élie-Frédéric Forey. The Mexicans could not withstand French might, and on June 10, 1863, Forey rode as conqueror into Mexico City. The French rapidly secured much of central......
  • Forez (region, France)
    former region of France lying on the eastern side of the Massif Central and included within the modern département of Loire. The name is derived from that of Feurs (Forum Segusiavorum in Roman times), a town midway between Roanne and Saint-Étienne, in an agriculturally rich area watered by the ...
  • Forfar (Scotland, United Kingdom)
    small burgh (town), council area and historic county of Angus, eastern Scotland, situated at the eastern end of Forfar Loch (lake) in the scenic valley of Strathmore. It was in existence by 1057, when an early Scottish Parliament met in the castle to confer titles on the nobility. The castle also figured in English-Scottish ...
  • Forfarshire (council area, Scotland, United Kingdom)
    council area and historic county in eastern Scotland, bounded on the east by the North Sea and on the south by the Firth of Tay. The council area lies entirely within the historic county of Angus, which also includes the city of Dundee...
  • Forfarshire (ship)
    The daughter of a lighthouse keeper, Darling grew up on Longstone in the Farne Islands. Intensely shy and private, she become the focus of national attention after the steamship Forfarshire sank during a severe storm in September 1838. Nine people managed to find refuge on nearby rocks, and Darling and her father battled rough water to row to their rescue. The incident inspired......
  • forfeda (alphabetic script)
    ...of from one to five strokes, thus giving 20 letters. These were incised along the edge of a stone, often vertically or from right to left. A fifth set of five symbols, called in Irish tradition forfeda (“extra letters”), is seemingly a later development. The origin of ogham is in dispute; some scholars see a connection with the runic and, ultimately, Etruscan alphabets,......
  • Forfeit (novel by Francis)
    ...and who becomes emotionally involved with the case. The typical Francis villain is a pretentious snob whose smooth exterior masks his vices. Among the novels are Nerve (1964) and Forfeit (1968), which won an Edgar Award for its tale of a disaffected racing correspondent who discovers a South African syndicate....
  • forge (metallurgy)
    open furnace for heating metal ore and metal for working and forming. From earliest times, smiths heated iron in forges and formed it by hammering on an anvil. A bellows operated by an assistant or by a foot treadle provided the forced draft for raising the temperature of the fire. Later, a waterwheel or animal power was often used to operate the bellows; modern forges have mechanically powered b...
  • Forge of Vulcan, The (painting by Velázquez)
    ...pictures” painted in Rome, which Palomino records he took back to Spain and offered to the king: Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob and The Forge of Vulcan. These two monumental figure compositions are far removed from the limited realism in which he had been trained. As a result of his Italian studies, particularly of......
  • Forge Valley (British Columbia, Canada)
    city, southern British Columbia, Canada. It lies in Okanagan Lake country, 274 miles (441 km) northeast of Vancouver. Pioneers called the early settlement Priest’s Valley owing to a missionary outpost maintained there by Paul Durieu. It was also known as Forge Valley (for its blac...
  • forge welding (metallurgy)
    This original fusion technique dates from the earliest uses of iron. The process was first employed to make small pieces of iron into larger useful pieces by joining them. The parts to be joined were first shaped, then heated to welding temperature in a forge and finally hammered or pressed together. The Damascus sword, for example, consisted of wrought-iron bars hammered until thin, doubled......
  • Forged Classics, The (work by Kang Youwei)
    ...In 1890 he opened a school in Guangzhou (Canton) to teach new learning. Assisted by his students, among whom was Liang Qichao, who collaborated in his reform movement, he wrote The Forged Classics (1891), which reveals that the Confucian Classics held sacrosanct as bases of the state cult had been tampered with in the Han period (206 bc–ad...
  • forgery (art)
    in art, a work of literature, painting, sculpture, or objet d’art that purports to be the work of someone other than its true maker. The range of forgeries extends from misrepresentation of a genuine work of art to the outright counterfeiting of a work or style of an artist. Forgery must be distinguished from copies produced with no intent to deceive....
  • forgery (law)
    in law, making of a false writing with an intent to defraud. Writing, to be forgery, must either have legal significance or be commonly relied upon in business transactions. It need not be handwriting; the law of forgery covers printing, engraving, and typewriting as well. In most jurisdictions, however, “writing...
  • Forges et Ateliers du Creusot, Société des (French company)
    ...and began producing arms with machinery brought from England. The town’s metallurgical industry subsequently declined until 1836, when the brothers Adolphe and Eugène Schneider founded the Société des Forges et Ateliers du Creusot (“Creusot Forge and Workshop Company”), which produced the first French locomotives as well as armour plate. Iron is no long...
  • forget-me-not (plant)
    any of about 90 species of the plant genus Myosotis (family Boraginaceae), native to temperate Eurasia and North America and to mountains of the Old World tropics. Some are favoured as garden plants for their clusters of blue flowers. (For Chinese forget-me-not, see hound’s-tongue...
  • forgetting (psychology)
    Whether immediate and short-term data simply decay or are lost through interference is a matter of controversy. However, evidence is clearer that interference affects retention of information in long-term storage. Retention of the word happy (learned as a paired associate of table) seems to be subject to the interference of a strong tendency to associate table with......
  • Forgetting Sarah Marshall (film by Stoller [2008])
    ...was a funny Woody Allen movie about sexual attraction, sparked into extra heat by the teaming of Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz. Wider audiences enjoyed Jason Segel and Kristen Bell in Forgetting Sarah Marshall (Nicholas Stoller)—a comedy that was rude one minute and sweet the next (in the current fashion) but that was dispatched with well-drawn characters. Two giants in.....
  • forging (technology)
    in metallurgy, process of shaping metal and increasing its strength by hammering or pressing. In most forging an upper die is forced against a heated workpiece positioned on a stationary lower die. If the upper die or hammer is dropped, the process is known as drop forging. To increase the force of the blow, power is sometimes applied to augment gravity. The number of blows str...
  • Forgione, Francesco (Italian priest and saint)
    Italian priest and saint of the Roman Catholic Church. Born into a devout Roman Catholic family, he consecrated himself to Jesus at age 5. At age 15 he joined the Capuchin order and took the name Pio. In 1910, the year in which he became a priest, he received the stigmata...
  • Fori regni Valentiae (Spanish code of law)
    ...for Catalonia and Majorca continued to be the Usages of Barcelona, and in 1251 James I pledged that Roman law would not supplant them. He provided the newly conquered kingdom of Valencia with the Fori Regni Valentiae (1240), a code of law largely Roman in substance. In 1247 he promulgated the Code of Huesca, a compilation of the customary law of Aragon; the code, which originally defined......
  • Forillon National Park (national park, Quebec, Canada)
    Much of the region is within conservation areas, including Gaspesian Provincial Park. A highway encircling the peninsula affords views of the rugged and picturesque coastal and mountain scenery. Forillon, a national park occupying 93 square miles (240 square km), is at the northeastern tip of the peninsula. Both sporting and local interests benefit from the excellent hunting and fishing; the......
  • forint (Hungarian currency)
    monetary unit of Hungary. The Hungarian National Bank (Magyar Nezmeti Bank), which has the sole authority to issue currency, issues coins in denominations ranging from 1 to 100 forints and banknotes of 200 to 20,000 forints. The obverse of banknotes depicts historical rulers, including Kings Charles I (200-forint note), Matthias I (1,000-forint note), and ...
  • Forio (Italy)
    resort town and seaport on the western coast of the volcanic island of Ischia, Campania region, southern Italy. It is the centre of a productive wine-making region. The wine is called Epomeo for Mount Epomeo, the extinct volcano that is at least partially responsible for the island’s fertile volcanic soils. Forio—like Casamicciol...
  • fork (utensil)
    implement consisting of two or more prongs supported by a handle, used for cooking, serving, and eating food. Forks and spoons together are known as flatware ....
  • Fork in the Road, A (memoir by Brink)
    ...A Chain of Voices), which recounts through many points of view a slave revolt in 1825; States of Emergency (1988); and An Act of Terror (1991). Brink’s memoir, A Fork in the Road (2009), is a meditation on the evolution of his political consciousness and his decreasing faith in the government of his country. His works were well received abroa...
  • fork moss
    any plant of the genus Dicranum (subclass Bryidae), numbering 94 species distributed primarily throughout the Northern Hemisphere. They form dense cushions on soil, logs, or rocks. More than 20 species are native to North America. The most common is D. scoparium, sometimes called broom moss b...
  • fork-crowned lemur (primate)
    ...Dwarf lemurs store fat in their tails and are dormant (estivate) during dry periods; they live in monogamous pairs. Mouse lemurs, which eat insects and fruit, are the smallest living primates. Fork-crowned lemurs inhabit the forests along Madagascar’s western coast and live on a diet of gum and insects....
  • fork-fingering (music)
    On six-hole transverse flutes and oboes, chromatic pitches were obtained by closing one or more holes below an open one, a technique known as cross-fingering. For example, to produce f rather than f♯, the player uncovered the fifth hole with the second finger of his right hand while keeping the sixth hole (and the first through fourth holes) covered. (Because this arrangement of the......
  • fork-tailed bush katydid (insect)
    The subfamily Phaneropterinae also includes the round-headed katydids and the angular-winged katydids (also called angle-wing katydids). The fork-tailed bush katydid (Scudderia furcata) has long, narrow tegmina (hardened leathery forewings) and often licks its feet to clean the adhesive pads found there. The round-headed katydid (Amblycorypha) has oval wings that are wider than......
  • forked fungus beetle (insect)
    The forked fungus beetle (Bolitotherus cornutus) is easily recognized by a pair of blunt, hornlike projections on the head. The dark adult is 10 to 12 mm (0.4–0.5 inch) long and has wing covers that resemble pieces of bark. The larvae live in woody bracket fungi....
  • Forkel, Johann Nikolaus (German musicologist and writer)
    one of the first great musicologists and the first biographer of Johann Sebastian Bach. After brief legal studies, he became organist at the university church at Göttingen, where, from 1778 until his death, he was musical director of the university. Forkel’s most important work is probably his Allgemeine Lite...
  • forking fern family (plant family)
    the forking fern family, containing 6 genera and about 125 species, in the division Pteridophyta (the lower vascular plants). This relatively primitive family has a long fossil history dating back to the Jurassic Period (199.6 million to 145.5 million years ago). The extant genera are Gleichenella (1 species), St...
  • forklift truck
    specialized form of industrial truck for elevating or lowering a load....
  • Forkner Alphabet shorthand
    Forkner Alphabet shorthand was first published in 1952 in the United States. The author, Hamden Forkner, spent 10 years in research before publishing the first edition of the new system, which uses a combination of conventional letters and a few symbols for the hard-to-write letters and sounds. For example, H is expressed by a short dash above the line. This same short dash through the......
  • Forkner, Hamden (American stenographer)
    Forkner Alphabet shorthand was first published in 1952 in the United States. The author, Hamden Forkner, spent 10 years in research before publishing the first edition of the new system, which uses a combination of conventional letters and a few symbols for the hard-to-write letters and sounds. For example, H is expressed by a short dash above the line. This same short dash through the......
  • Forks National Historic Site (historic site, Winnepeg, Manitoba, Canada)
    The Forks National Historic Site, at the junction of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, commemorates the history of the Canadian West. Assiniboine Park includes a zoo and conservatory. Also nearby are Bird’s Hill (northeast) and Beaudry (west) provincial parks. Winnipeg has a professional Canadian gridiron football team, the Blue Bombers. The city plays host to an annual (August) international...
  • Forks, The (Ontario, Canada)
    municipality, southern Ontario, Canada. It lies at the confluence of the north and east branches of the Sydenham River, 30 miles (50 km) northeast of Detroit, Mich. The town was called The Forks until it was renamed Wallaceburg for Sir William Wallace, a medieval Scott...
  • forktail (insect)
    any of a group of about 800 species of small primitive wingless insects, considered by some entomologists to have features similar to ancestral insects. In some classification schemes, the order Diplura is considered to be in the subclass Apterygota of the class Insecta, while in others it is placed in its own subclass (Entognatha) of the superclass Hexapoda. Diplurans are blind, pale insects that...
  • forktail (bird)
    any of seven species of birds of the Asian, chiefly Himalayan, genus Enicurus. Forktails usually are placed among the Old World flycatchers Muscicapidae (order Passeriformes). Forktails pick insects from stones along mountain streams and have loud whistling calls. Most are strikingly patterned in black and white an...
  • Forlán, Diego (Uruguayan football player)
    Uruguayan football (soccer) player who was awarded the Golden Ball as the standout player at the 2010 World Cup....
  • Forlandet Nasjonalpark (national park, Norway)
    national park and bird sanctuary established in 1973 by Norway’s Environment Ministry for Svalbard. The Forlandet National Park has the greatest number of bird sanctuaries in the Svalbard archipelago: six in number, located throughout the southern and southeastern regions of the park. They include Kapp Linné, B...
  • Forlandet National Park (national park, Norway)
    national park and bird sanctuary established in 1973 by Norway’s Environment Ministry for Svalbard. The Forlandet National Park has the greatest number of bird sanctuaries in the Svalbard archipelago: six in number, located throughout the southern and southeastern regions of the park. They include Kapp Linné, B...
  • Forlanini, Carlo (Italian physician)
    ...European centres of medical scholarship. Among those who studied or worked in his laboratory were Edoardo Bassini, the surgeon who perfected the operation for inguinal hernia (Bassini’s operation); Carlo Forlanini, who introduced therapeutic pneumothorax in treating pulmonary tuberculosis; and Antonio Carle and Giorgio Rattone, who demonstrated the transmissibility of tetanus....
  • Forlanini, Enrico (Italian inventor)
    The first efficient manned hydrofoil ship was built in Italy about 1900 by Enrico Forlanini. Hydrofoils were not widely used until the 1950s, when military and commercial models were built. By the 1970s hydrofoil craft were in operation in many places, and speeds of up to 80 knots (nautical miles per hour) had been achieved....
  • Forlì (Italy)
    city, Emilia-Romagna regione, northern Italy, situated on the Montone River and the Via Aemilia, southeast of Bologna....
  • Forlot, Maxime (French inventor)
    ...In the mid-1930s, Alec Kramarenko patented an underwater gun in which the spear was propelled by a compressed spring. Shortly after, there appeared a spring-propulsion gun invented by a Frenchman, Maxime Forlot, and a popular spear gun designed by his compatriot Georges Beuchat that was propelled by a rubber elastic band. Other guns were designed that used gunpowder, carbon dioxide, or......
  • form (philosophy)
    the external shape, appearance, or configuration of an object, in contradistinction to the matter of which it is composed; in Aristotelian metaphysics, the active, determining principle of a thing as distinguished from matter, the potential principle....
  • form
    the structure of a musical composition. The term is regularly used in two senses: to denote a standard type, or genre, and to denote the procedures in a specific work. The nomenclature for the various musical formal types may be determined by the medium of performance, the technique of composition, or by function....
  • form (biology)
    ...nature with his theory that biological changes in species occur through the process of natural selection. The theory of evolution—that organisms are continuously evolving into highly adapted forms—required the rejection of the static view that all species are especially created and upset the Linnaean concept of species types. Darwin recognized that the principles of heredity must....
  • form (crystallography)
    in crystallography, all crystal faces having similar symmetry. Those forms that enclose space are called closed forms; those that do not, open forms. The faces that comprise a form will be similar in appearance, even though of different shapes and sizes; this similarity may be evident from natural striations, etchings, or growths, or it may be apparent only af...
  • form (art)
    ...Aesthetics”; Eng. trans., Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art), roughly as follows: Our sensuous appreciation of art concentrates upon the given “appearance”—the “form.” It is this that holds our attention and that gives to the work of art its peculiar individuality. Because it addresses itself to our sensory appreciation, the work of art is essenti...
  • form class (linguistics)
    Syntax, for Bloomfield, was the study of free forms that were composed entirely of free forms. Central to his theory of syntax were the notions of form classes and constituent structure. (These notions were also relevant, though less central, in the theory of morphology.) Bloomfield defined form classes, rather imprecisely, in terms of some common “recognizable phonetic or grammatical......
  • form criticism (biblical literature)
    a method of biblical criticism that seeks to classify units of scripture into literary patterns (such as love poems, parables, sayings, elegies, legends) and that attempts to trace each type to its period of o...
  • form gauge (measurement device)
    Flush-pin gauges have one moving part and are used to gauge the depth of shoulders or holes. Form gauges are used to check the profile of objects; two of the most common types are radius gauges, which are packs of blades with both concave and convex circular profiles that are used to check the radii of grooves and corners, and screw-thread pitch gauges, which are blades with triangular......
  • Form in Modern Poetry (work by Read)
    Important to Read’s theories of art and literature is the distinction that he first made in Form in Modern Poetry (1932) between organic and abstract form. He favoured organic form, which takes shape to meet the needs of a particular expression, rather than abstract form, which he defined as being superimposed on a given content. The concept of the organic was centr...
  • form, logical
    ...and abilities. The linking of logic with mathematics was an especially characteristic theme in the modern era. Finally, in the modern era came an intense consciousness of the importance of logical form (forms of sentences, as well as forms or patterns of arguments). Although the medievals made many distinctions among patterns of sentences and arguments, the modern logical notion of......
  • Form of Cury, The (cookbook)
    Medieval Europe also produced cookbooks. Among the earliest in English was The Form of Cury (the word cury is an obsolete term for cooked food), compiled in the 12th century. It consists of 196 recipes, many of which reveal their French origin in names such as “Blank Manng” and “Payn Fondewe.” One of the first French books, called La Ménagier de....
  • Form of Government (Swedish reform [1634])
    ...the Chancery as permanent administrative boards (1618), and by the end of the reign an Admiralty and a War Office had been created—each presided over by one of the great officers of state. The Form of Government of 1634 summed up these reforms in a general statute giving Sweden a central administration more modern and efficient than that of any other European country. Stockholm became a....
  • Form, Platonic
    For Aristotle, form was one of the constituent “causes” of a particular entity. (The word Form, when used to refer to Forms or Ideas as Plato conceived them, is often capitalized in the scholarly literature; when used to refer to forms as Aristotle conceived them, it is conventionally lowercased.) Even amid all the accidents and changes in the world of space and time that......
  • Form, William (American sociologist)
    ...drew on the traits of these 12 classes to explain income inequality. The nuanced differences between social groups were further investigated in Divided We Stand (1985) by William Form, whose analysis of labour markets revealed deep permanent fissures within working classes previously thought to be uniform....
  • form-cutting method (machinery)
    Three basic cutting methods are used for machining gears: (1) form cutting, (2) template cutting, and (3) generating. The form-cutting method uses a cutting tool that has the same form as the space between two adjacent teeth on a gear. This method is used for cutting gear teeth on a milling machine. The template-cutting method uses a template to guide a single-point cutter on large bevel-gear......
  • Formal and Transcendental Logic (work by Husserl)
    ...analysis of consciousness and his research into the grounding of logic, which he published as the Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (1929; Formal and Transcendental Logic, 1969)....
  • formal autobiography (narrative genre)
    This category offers a special kind of biographical truth: a life, reshaped by recollection, with all of recollection’s conscious and unconscious omissions and distortions. The novelist Graham Greene says that, for this reason, an autobiography is only “a sort of life” and uses the phrase as the title for his own autobiography (1971). Any such work is a true picture of what, a...
  • formal cause (philosophy)
    ...material cause. Second, there is the form or pattern of a thing, which may be expressed in its definition; Aristotle’s example is the proportion of the length of two strings in a lyre, which is the formal cause of one note’s being the octave of another. The third type of cause is the origin of a change or state of rest in something; this is often called the “efficient cause...
  • formal discipline theory (education)
    The earliest mental-discipline theories of teaching were based on a premise that the main justification for teaching anything is not for itself but for what it trains—intelligence, attitudes, and values. By choosing the right material and by emphasizing rote methods of learning, according to this theory, one disciplines the mind and produces a better intellect....
  • formal fallacy (logic)
    Formal fallacies are deductively invalid arguments that typically commit an easily recognizable logical error. A classic case is Aristotle’s fallacy of the consequent, relating to reasoning from premises of the form “If p1, then p2.” The fallacy has two forms: (1) denial of the antecedent, in which one mistakenly argues from the premises ...
  • formal language (logic)
    the study and analysis of the semantics (relations between expressions and meanings) and syntax (relations among expressions) of formal languages and formal systems. It is related to, but does not include, the formal treatment of natural languages. (For a discussion of the syntax and semantics of natural languages, see linguistics and semantics.)...
  • formal logic
    the abstract study of propositions, statements, or assertively used sentences and of deductive arguments. The discipline abstracts from the content of these elements the structures or logical forms that they embody. The logician customarily uses a symbolic notation to express such structures clearly and unambiguously and t...
  • Formal Logic; or, the Calculus of Inference, Necessary and Probable (work by De Morgan)
    ...the modern logical notion of “form” perhaps first crystallized in the work of Sir William Rowan Hamilton and the English mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan (De Morgan’s Formal Logic of 1847). The now standard discussions of validity, invalidity, and the self-conscious separation of “formal” from nonformal aspects of sentences and arguments al...
  • formal modeling theory (political science and economics)
    The dominant school of thought in political science in the late 20th century was rational choice theory. For rational choice theorists, history and culture are irrelevant to understanding political behaviour; instead, it is sufficient to know the actors’ interests and to assume that they pursue them rationally. Whereas the earlier decision-making approach sought to explain the decisions of....
  • formal operational stage (psychology)
    ...given by Piaget are (1) the sensorimotor stage from birth to 2 years, (2) the preoperational stage from 2 to 7 years, (3) the concrete-operational stage from 7 to 12 years, and (4) the stage of formal operations that characterizes the adolescent and the adult. One of Piaget’s fundamental assumptions is that early intellectual growth arises primarily out of the child’s interactions...
  • formal predication (logic)
    ...or many subjects of a kind. The predication is identical if it characterizes every referent (x); it is disparate if it fails to characterize some or all of the referents. The predication is formal if the subject necessarily entails (or excludes) the predicate; it is material if the entailment is contingent....
  • formal region (geography)
    Regions may be nodal, defined by the organization of activity about some central place (e.g., a town and its hinterland, or tributary area), or uniform, defined by the homogeneous distribution of some phenomena within it (e.g., a tropical rain forest)....
  • formal semantics (logic)
    Model theory...
  • formal sin (theology)
    Actual sin is also subdivided into material and formal. Formal sin is both wrong in itself and known by the sinner to be wrong; it therefore involves him in personal guilt. Material sin consists of an act that is wrong in itself (because contrary to God’s law and human moral nature) but which the sinner does not know to be wrong and for which he is therefore not personally culpable....
  • formal sociology (sociology)
    ...in inequality. In the study of these phenomena, sociologists analyze organizations, social categories (such as age groups), or rates (such as of crime or birth). This approach, sometimes called formal sociology, does not refer directly to individual behaviour or interpersonal interaction. Therefore, the study of social structure is not considered a behavioral science; at this level, the......
  • formal system (logic)
    in logic and mathematics, abstract, theoretical organization of terms and implicit relationships that is used as a tool for the analysis of the concept of deduction. Models—structures that interpret the symbols of a formal system—are often used in conjunction with formal systems....
  • formal will (law)
    Both Anglo-American and civil-law jurisdictions also make use of a formal will, derived from the Roman testament. The characteristic of such a will is that it must be witnessed by a certain number (generally two or three in modern law) of disinterested witnesses. It is normally prepared by a professional, a notary on the Continent or a solicitor or other lawyer in the Anglo-American......
  • formaldehyde (chemical compound)
    an organic compound, the simplest of the aldehydes, used in large amounts in a variety of chemical manufacturing processes. It is produced principally by the vapour-phase oxidation of methanol and is commonly sold as formalin, a 37 percent aqueous solution. Formalin may be dehydrated to trioxane, a crystal...
  • formaldehyde polymer (chemical compound)
    ...important polymers have oxygen or nitrogen atoms, along with those of carbon, in the backbone chain. Among such macromolecular materials with oxygen atoms are polyacetals. The simplest polyacetal is polyformaldehyde. It has a high melting point and is crystalline and resistant to abrasion and the action of solvents. Acetal resins are more like metal than are any other plastics and are used in.....
  • “Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft” (work by Husserl)
    ...analysis of consciousness and his research into the grounding of logic, which he published as the Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (1929; Formal and Transcendental Logic, 1969)....
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