The Gestalt principle of isomorphism reveals the primacy of subjective experience as a valid source of evidence for the information encoded neurophysiologically. This theory invalidates the abstractionist view that the neurophysiological representation can be of lower dimensionality than the percept to which it gives rise.

In this paper, I will argue in favor of a direct perception account of social cognition, focusing on the idea that we can directly grasp at least some mental states of others through their bodily expressions. I will investigate the way we should consider expressions and their relations to mental phenomena in order to defend DP. In order to do so, I will present Krueger and Overgaard’s idea of expressions as constitutive proper parts of the mental phenomena expressed and I (...) will show how this position can support DP. Then, I will present the way in which the authors seem to construe the relation of parthood between expressions and mental states – that is in terms of components of integral wholes, and I will introduce the possible issues that derive from this strategy. I will propose a different way to understand this parthood relation, referring to Husserl’s notion of moments as distinct from that of pieces. I will narrow my analysis to expressions of feelings, and I will try to argue that they can be described more aptly as moments of the feelings expressed. Finally, I will show how this account can support DP. (shrink)

This article focuses on situations and emotional perception. To this end, I start with the Kuleshov effect wherein identical shots of performers manifest different expressions when cut to different contexts. However, I conducted experiments with a twist, using Darth Vader and non-primates, and even here expressions varied with contexts. Building on historically and conceptually linked Gibsonian, Gestalt, phenomenological and pragmatic schools, along with consonant experimental work, I extrapolate these results to defend three interconnected points. First, I argue that while perceiving (...) expression is sometimes about reading minds, it is more squarely about perceiving solicitations or closures for action. Second, I frame expressions as a subcategory of Gibson’s affordances. This includes those showing up through context, in turn suggesting Kuleshov-like scenarios are not mere perceptual tricks. Third, I maintain that situations—with or without other human beings—have action-motivating expressive qualities or what Gestalt theorists called physiognomic characters, following Werner. These likewise emerge through ecological relations, and are very much like affordances and in the world as much as them. With resemblance theories, my account agrees that we perceive expression in the world. However, it indicates a broad range of cases in which expression shows up as consequences of overall situations that solicit or close actions, as opposed to mere resemblance between entities and human expressions. (shrink)

The affective challenge of interdisciplinary research: In this paper I analyze the affective problem related to interdisciplinary research using, as a guiding theme, some of my autobiographical memories linked to Mariano Artigas. Starting from a theory of feelings that connects emotions closely to reasons, I defend that many problems in developing interdisciplinary research are caused by the current divorce reason/emotion in which many researchers are educated. Secondly, I identify three types of feelings in a hierarchical relationship, whose scope may be (...) very extensive, in my opinion, for the good performance of interdisciplinary dynamic: eureka excitement, narrative catharsis, and ecstatic experience. In the last part of my paper, I offer some suggestions on how to return feelings to academic domains and, at the same time, keeping sources of funding, and avoiding present evils as commoditization of knowledge and students, clientelism, and cynicism. (shrink)

In this contribution, I refer to a discussion between Jürgen Habermas and Robert Brandom on the latter’s normative pragmatics as advanced in Making it Explicit. Parting with Habermas, I intend to show that though both normative pragmatics and formal pragmatics postulate similar discursive ideals, the former, as compared with the latter, is not a particularly well-calibrated critical tool. I argue that whereas Brandom focuses on making conceptual norms explicit, and takes mutual recognition among participants to a linguistic practice for granted, (...) Habermas proposes a universal frame of reference, which delineates what should be taken as a paradigm case of perception and action, and thus a normative standard according to which all kinds of human endeavors can be judged. Thus construed, the formal frame of reference points to possible perceptual distortions along any of the three dimensions: the subjective, social, and objective worlds. (shrink)

We tend to think of art and technology as having no important connection. What starker opposition than between the Artist and the Engineer: the irrational dreamer and the rigorous realist, the indulgent devotee of subjectivity and the austere technician? We tend not to think that engineering might be enhanced by the love of beauty, or that it is impossible to be a really good engineer without understanding art. Yet we depend on essentially aesthetic, artistic skills in engineers, the capacity to (...) feel technically and construct aesthetically. The creativity, the innovation, the invention of seriously new alternatives, is an aesthetic moment in art and technology alike. No design is ever determined by calculations or technical necessity. Choice pervades technological design, and is made, ultimately, on the basis of aesthetic invention, supplemented, of course, by careful tests. Engineering design is the analytical and imaginative synthesis of perception and technique that is also the ideal, the point, the idea of art. There is art in good engineering and good engineering in art. To stand up and last it has to be no less well put together than a bridge. (shrink)

Summary The present article is a partly ontological, partly Gestalt-psychological discussion of the thinkability of structures in which parts and whole are interdependent (MI). In the first section, I show that in the framework of E. Husserl’s formal part–whole ontology, the conceptualization of such an interdependence leads to (mereo)logical problems. The second section turns to and affirms the experience of this interplay between parts and whole, exemplified with B. Pinna’s recent research on meaningful Gestalt perception. In the final section, I (...) take the experienceability of MI as a justification to suggest a way of rethinking it. This entails an implementation of the process of foregrounding and backgrounding displayed by reversible figures and originally described by E. Rubin. This can avoid both an identity relation between parts and whole and their mutual exclusion as well as hierarchization due to their apparent differences. It would also guarantee the inherent dynamics of interdependence. (shrink)

Many artists, art critics, and poets suggest that an aesthetic appreciation of artworks may modify our perception of the world, including quotidian things and scenes. I call this Art-to-World, AtW. Focusing on visual artworks, in this paper I articulate an empirically-informed account of AtW that is based on content related views of aesthetic experience, and on Goodman’s and Elgin’s concept of exemplification. An aesthetic encounter with artworks demands paying attention to its aesthetic, expressive, or design properties that realize its purpose. (...) Attention to these properties make percipients better able to spot them in other entities and scenes as well. The upshot is that an aesthetic commerce with artworks enlarges the scope of what we are able to see and has therefore momentous epistemic consequences. (shrink)

Complex systems are to be seen as typically having multiple levels of organization. For instance, in the behavioural and cognitive sciences, there has been a long lasting trend, promoted by the seminal work of David Marr, putting focus on three distinct levels of analysis: the computational level, accounting for the What and Why issues, the algorithmic and the implementational levels specifying the How problem. However, the tremendous developments in neuroscience knowledge about processes at different scales of organization together with the (...) complexity of today cognitive theories suggest that there will hardly be only three levels of explanation. Instead, there will be many different degrees of commitments corresponding to the different granularities—from high-level (behavioural) models to low-level (neural and molecular) models of the cognitive research program. For instance, Bayesian approaches, that are usually advocated for formalizing Marr’s computational level and rational behaviour, have even been adopted to model synaptic plasticity and axon guidance by molecular gradients. As a result, we can consider the behavioural scientist as dealing with models at a multiplicity of levels. The purpose of this Research Topic in Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology is to promote an approach to the role of the levels and explanation and models which is of interest for cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, behavioural scientists, and philosophers of science. (shrink)

The concept of microgenesis refers to the development on a brief present-time scale of a percept, a thought, an object of imagination, or an expression. It defines the occurrence of immediate experience as dynamic unfolding and differentiation in which the ‘germ’ of the final experience is already embodied in the early stages of its development. Immediate experience typically concerns the focal experience of an object that is thematized as a ‘figure’ in the global field of consciousness; this can involve a (...) percept, thought, object of imagination, or expression (verbal and/or gestural). Yet, whatever its modality or content, focal experience is postulated to develop and stabilize through dynamic differentiation and unfolding. Such a microgenetic description of immediate experience substantiates a phenomenological and genetic theory of cognition where any process of perception, thought, expression or imagination is primarily a process of genetic differentiation and development, rather than one of detection (of a stimulus array or information), transformation, and integration (of multiple primitive components) as theories of cognitivist kind have contended. My purpose in this essay is to provide an overview of the main constructs of microgenetic theory, to outline its potential avenues of future development in the field of cognitive science, and to illustrate an application of the theory to research, using visual processes in reading as an example. (shrink)

The analysis of works of visual art illustrates typical groups of elements and interrelations, which form semiotic systems of these works. Specific systems of connotations and their relations with semantic structures, paradigmatics, and typical signal structures are described. Like in linguistic texts, different levels are formed in complex images. The following basic level types are distinguished: sems and other units of semantic level; signs subdivided into: icons of represented objects and connotative sign formations; representamens of basic signs as interpreted by (...) Charles Peirce, including those of connotations, and signals referred to as basic perceptive integer units forming an individual level. (shrink)

Based on the field of aesthetics, for centuries philosophers and more recently scientists have been concerned with understanding the artistic experience focusing on emotional responses to the perception of artworks. By contrast, in the last decades, evolutionary biology has been concerned with explaining the artistic experience by focusing on the cognitive processes underlying this experience. Up until now, the cognitive mechanisms that allow humans to experience objects and events as art remain largely unexplored and there is still no conventional use (...) of terms for referring to the processes which may explain why the artistic experience is characteristically human and universal to human beings (Dissanayake, 1992, p. 24; Donald, 2006, p. 4). In this paper, I will first question whether it is productive to understand the artistic experience in terms of perception and emotion, and I will subsequently propose a possible alternative explanation to understand this experience. Drawing upon the work of Ellen Dissanayake (1992, 2000, 2015), Merlin Donald (2001, 2006, 2013), Antonio Damasio (1994, 2000, 2003, 2010), Barend van Heusden (2004, 2009, 2010), and Alejandra Wah (2014), I will argue that this experience is characterized by particular degrees of imagination and consciousness. (shrink)

Through advances in production and treatment technologies, transparent glass has become an increasingly versatile material and a global hallmark of modern architecture. In the shape of invisible barriers, it defines spaces while simultaneously shaping their lighting, noise, and climate conditions. Despite these unique architectural qualities, little is known regarding the human experience with glass barriers. Is a material that has been described as being simultaneously there and not there from an architectural perspective, actually there and/or not there from perceptual, behavioral, (...) and social points of view? In this article, we review systematic observations and experimental studies that explore the impact of transparent barriers on human cognition and action. In doing so, the importance of empirical and multidisciplinary approaches to inform the use of glass in contemporary architecture is highlighted and key questions for future inquiry are identified. (shrink)

Summary The present paper introduces the theoretical conceptualization of perceptual communication through expressive qualities. Initially, the difference with respect to the modality of perceptual communication mediated by signs is analyzed. Conversely, the theory of expressive qualities reflects the psychological conception of direct perception: any assumption of a cognitive stage of representation is excluded. Perceptual communication immediately expresses the specific character of the structural essence of the object. The structural essence is well studied by the perceptual paradigms of Experimental Phenomenology. Plurivocity, (...) the case in which the same objects can share many expressive characters, is also considered. (shrink)

Sculptors, architects, and painters are three professional groups that require a comprehensive understanding of how to manipulate spatial structures. While it has been speculated that they may differ in the way they conceive of space due to the different professional demands, this has not been empirically tested. To achieve this, we asked architects, painters, sculptors, and a control group questions about spatially complex pictures. Verbalizations elicited were examined using cognitive discourse analysis. We found significant differences between each group. Only painters (...) shifted consistently between 2D and 3D concepts, architects were concerned with paths and spatial physical boundedness, and sculptors produced responses that fell between architects and painters. All three differed from controls, whose verbalizations were generally less elaborate and detailed. Thus, for the case of sculptors, architects, and painters, profession appears to relate to a different spatial conceptualization manifested through a systematically contrasting way of talking about space. (shrink)

The paper presents color as a case study for the analysis of phenomena that pertain to several levels of reality and are typically framed by different sciences and disciplines. Color, in fact, is studied by physics, biology, phenomenology, and esthetics, among others. Our thesis is that color is a different entity for each level of reality, and that for this reason color generates different observables in the epistemologies of the different sciences. By analyzing color as a paradigmatic case of an (...) entity naturally spreading over different levels of reality, the paper raises the question as to whether making explicit the usually implicit ontological assumptions embedded within the different observables exploited by the different sciences may eventually clarify some of the difficulties of developing a comprehensive theory of color. (shrink)

Since the beginning of history humans have attempted to represent nature and culture through mimesis. This article focuses on the teleologicalaspects of mimesis and offers a different perspective that transcends the notion of sustainability into an eco-humanistic metamorphosis of culture and nature.Drawing from semiotics, phenomenology and architectural design the article challenges the polarization of mimetic representations of nature and culture,which are inclusive and homomorphic phenomena, and offers insight into the mutual mimesis of nature and culture. Two different empirical observationssubstantiate the (...) theoretical perspective: 1) a tradition advanced by the Egyptians’ stylization of visual representations of the mimicry of nature and culture; and 2) acurrent architectural design activity that integrates the mimesis of nature and culture. The article makes the case for a theoretical approach that integratesmimetic principles in creating a sustainable environment and an authentic ecoliving. The article concludes with ethical implications on the way we perceive themutual resemblances in nature and culture, and on our semiotic understanding of the teleological aspects of mimesis. (shrink)

Although the scribbling stage of drawing has been historically regarded as meaningless and transitional, a sort of prelude to the "actual" drawing phase of childhood, recent studies have begun to re-evaluate this important moment of a child's development and find meaning in what was once considered mere motor activity and nothing more. The present study analyzes scribbling in all its subphases and discovers a clear intention behind young children's gestures. From expressing the dynamic qualities of an object and the child's (...) relationship with it, to gradually reducing itself to a simple contour of a content no more "alive" on the paper, but only in the child's own imagination, we trace the evolution of the line as a tool that toddlers use to communicate feelings and intentions to the world that surrounds them. We will provide a selected number of graphical examples that are representative of our theory. These drawings (13 in total) were extracted from a much wider sample derived from our studies on children's graphical-pictorial abilities, conducted on children aged 0 to 3 years in various Italian nurseries. Our results appear to indicate that scribbling evolves through a series of stages, and that early graphical activity in children is sparked and maintained by their relationship with their caregivers and the desire to communicate with them. (shrink)

Morphogenesis is one of the fundamental processes of developing life. Gastrulation, especially, marks a period of major translocations and bustling rearrangements of cells that give rise to the three germ layers. It was also one of the earliest fields in biology where cell movement and behaviour in living specimens were investigated. This article examines scientific attempts to understand gastrulation from the point of view of cells in motion. It argues that the study of morphogenesis in the twentieth century faced a (...) major dilemma, both epistemological and pictorial: representing form and understanding movement are mutually exclusive, as are understanding form and representing movement. The article follows various ways of modelling, imaging, and simulating gastrular processes, from the early twentieth century to present-day systems biology. The first section examines the tactile modelling of shape changes, the second cell cinematography, mainly the pioneering work of the German embryologists Friedrich Kopsch and Ernst Ludwig Gräper in the 1920s but also a series of classic, yet not widely known, studies of the 1960s. The third section deals with the changes that computer simulation and live-cell imaging introduced to the modelling of shape change and the study of cell movement at the turn of the twenty-first century. Although live-cell imaging promises to experiment upon and represent the living body simultaneously, I argue that the new visuals are an obstacle rather than a solution to the puzzle of understanding cell motion. (shrink)

The pragmatic semiotic theory of Charles Sanders Peirce has a lot of practical benefits for enhancing visual communication in illustrations. His triadic theory of Semiosis focuses on the dynamic interrelationships between the concept to be communicated, how it is represented through a semiotic sign, and how this affects the success of how the concept is eventually interpreted. Peirce's pragmatic semiotic theory uses complex language, and although Peirce is embraced in some design disciplines, the language that defines Semiosis is problematic beyond (...) academia. This paper is an attempt to address this by providing illustrators with a basic introduction to how Semiosis can help to enhance the success of the visual communication in their illustrations. This is done by translating Peircean terminology into illustrator-centric language and providing an example of how the Semiosis is implemented in an illustration. Within the limits of a short paper, illustrators can begin to understand how the triadic nature of concept/representation/interpretation can benefit them during their ideation and sketching phase to author effective images. In doing this, this paper will mostly discuss iconic, indexical, and symbolic semiotic representation within pragmatic semiotic signs of the intended concept to be communicated in an illustration. This paper's aim is to enact a pragmatic turn in illustrators, in which Semiosis theory becomes more integrated within their practical work, by providing a more illustrator-centric dissemination of Peirce's semiotic theory. (shrink)

The experimental approach to aesthetics, proposed by Gustav Fechner, was discussed in Italy at the beginning of the Twentieth century from different point of views. Benedetto Croce severely criticized experimental aesthetics by considering it as reductionist and naturalist. In contrast, the psychologist Agostino Gemelli stated the experimental validity and the theoretical relevance of this research perspective in determining the laws of aesthetic preference and judgment.

Within cultural history there is a widespread eschewal of speculative reasoning. This article notes the complicity of the general postmodern avoidance of metanarratives with Anglo-Saxon empiricism and locates the major problem facing cultural history in postmodernism's conflation of trajectories and teleologies. Any discussion of the directionality of history is imputed to be a full-blown teleology. Using previous discussions from different fields, the difference between a teleology and trajectory is defended and, after clarifying certain confusions, it is argued that trajectories, as (...) following the working of generative mechanisms, are necessary to theorize in order to make interesting progress within the field of cultural history. (shrink)

Rapport d'expériences portant sur la reconnaissance, dans des photogrammes, des photographies ou des dessins, d'une action humaine filmée. Les résultats sont analysés à la lumière de certaines interprétations psychologiques de ce que l'on appelle le mouvement dans l'image. La reconnaissance ne pouvant pleinement rendre compte du phénomène perceptif en question, il est proposé d'y voir une forme de perception dans laquelle la dimension temporelle serait dominante.