This article, taking a social semiotic approach, analyses two pieces of music written, shared and exalted by two pre-1945 European fascist movements – the German NSDAP and the British Union of Fascists. These movements, both political and cultural, employed mythologies of unity, common identity and purpose in order to elide the realities of social distinction and political–economic inequalities between bourgeois and proletarian groups in capitalist societies. Visually and inter-personally, the fascist cultural project communicated a machine-like certainty about a vision for (...) a new society based on discipline, conformity and the might of the nation. In this article, we are interested in the ways that these very same discourses are also communicated through sound and music in two songs: The Horst Wessel Lied and the BUF marching song, two songs that used the same melody. We analyse the discourses communicated by the semiotic choices made in melody, arrangements, sound qualities, rhythms as well as in lyrics. The article first identifies some of the underlying semiotic resources for meaning making in sound and then shows how these are used in order to communicate specific ideas, values and attitudes. (shrink)

Summary This article questions certain assumptions concerning film form made by the recent psychological film research and compares them to those of precursors of film psychology like Hugo Münsterberg and Rudolf Arnheim, as well as the principles of Gestalt psychology. It is argued that principles of Gestalt psychology such as those of ‘good form’ and good continuation are still underlying the psychological research of film, becoming particularly apparent in its approach to continuity editing. Following an alternative Gestalt genealogy that links (...) Gestalt theory with more recent dynamic models of brain activity and with accounts of brain complexity and neuronal synchronisation, the article concludes that psychological research on film needs to shift the focus from form to transformation, both in conceiving the perceptual and cognitive processing of films and in approaching film aesthetics more broadly. (shrink)

Agnes Arber (1879-1960) was a British botanist who was a leading plant morphologist during the first half of the 20th century. She also wrote on the history and philosophy of botany. I argue in this article that her philosophical work on form and on how the work of the mind and the eye relate to each other in morphological research are relevant to the science of today. Arber's unusual blend of interests - in botany, history, philosophy, and art - put (...) her in a unique position to examine issues of form. Even her unorthodox ideas on evolution can now be seen as fitting in well with discussions of natural selection as the predominant engine of evolutionary change. Arber's views also throw light on present work dealing with developmental plant genetics and with the study of protein form. I will further argue that her marginal position relative to institutional science, while it may have left her vulnerable to criticism, also made possible her deep philosophical reflections on morphology. (shrink)

Taking the example of two 1960s popular spy films this paper explores how social semiotics can make a contribution to the analysis of film music. Followingother scholars who have sought to create inventories of sound meanings to help us break down the way that music communicates, this paper explores how wecan draw on the principles of Hallidayan functional grammar to present an inventory of meaning potentials in sound. This provides one useful way to describe thesemiotic resources available to composers to (...) allow them to communicate quite specific ideas, attitudes and identities through combinations of different sounds and sound qualities, by presenting them as systems of meaning rather than as lists of connotations. Here we apply this to the different uses of music and sound in Dr No and The Ipcress Files which allows us to show how we can reveal different ideologies of spying. (shrink)

The authors examined cultural preferences for formal versus intuitive reasoning among East Asian (Chinese and Korean), Asian American, and European American university students. We investigated categorization (Studies 1 and 2), conceptual structure (Study 3), and deductive reasoning (Studies 3 and 4). In each study a cognitive conflict was activated between formal and intuitive strategies of reasoning. European Americans, more than Chinese and Koreans, set aside intuition in favor of formal reasoning. Conversely, Chinese and Koreans relied on intuitive strategies more than (...) European Americans. Asian Americans' reasoning was either identical to that of European Americans, or intermediate. Differences emerged against a background of similar reasoning tendencies across cultures in the absence of conflict between formal and intuitive strategies. (shrink)

his essay explores the universal nature of aesthetic, creative, and mystical experience, tracing some essential interrelations among the three. Enlarging upon the work of anthropologist Jacques Maquet, I speculate that “sensory fixedness” is both necessary and sufficient to achieve aesthetic experience, and that the unification of mind engendered by sensory fixedness is the essential source of aesthetic power. Therefore, the role of the aesthetic object (construed broadly) is either as an arbitrary sensory focusing mechanism, or as the physical embodiment of (...) a gestalt facilitating fixedness; the first category is merely attractive, while the second contains all that is truly great in art (visual and auditory). I suggest further that as both creative inspiration and mystical experience result from fixedness, both are related to aesthetic experience. However, while aesthetic experience is rooted in sensation, mystical and creative experience, though often prepared by sensory fixedness, may transcend the sensory domain altogether toward more abstract forms of mental fixedness. (shrink)

Modelling became one of the primary tools of economic research in the 20th century and economists understand their mathematical models as giving some kind of representation of the economic world, one adequate enough for the purpose of reasoning about that world. But when we look at examples of how non-analogical models were first built in economics, both the process of making representations and aspects of the representing relation remain opaque. Like early astronomers, economists have to imagine how the hidden parts (...) of their world are arranged and to make images, that is, create models, to represent how they work. The case of the Edgeworth Box, a widely used model in 20th century economics, provides a good example to explore the role of imagination and images in the process of making representations of the economy. (shrink)

Speakers frequently perform representational gestures to depict concepts in an iconic fashion. For example, a speaker may hold her index finger and thumb apart to indicate the size of a matchstick. However, the process by which a physical handshape is mentally transformed into abstract spatial information is not well understood. We present a series of experiments that investigate how people decode the physical form of an articulator to derive imaginary geometrical constructs, which we call “gesture form.” We provide quantitative evidence (...) for several key properties that play a role in this process. First, “profiling,” the ability to focus on a structural subunit within the complex form of the physical hand. Second, “perspective,” for which we show that one and the same handshape seen from different perspectives can lead to different spatial interpretations. Third, “selectivity,” the fact that gestures focus on specific spatial features at the expense of others. Our results provide a first step toward mapping out the process of how representational gestures make the communication of spatial information possible. (shrink)

To analyze the relations between art and science, philosophers and historians have developed different lines of inquiry. A first type of inquiry considers how artistic and scientific practices have interacted over human history. Another project aims to determine the contributions that scientific research can make to our understanding of art, including the contributions that cognitive science can make to philosophical questions about the nature of art. We rely on contributions made to these projects in order to demonstrate that art and (...) science are codependent phenomena. Specifically, we explore the codependence of art and science in the context of a historical analysis of their interactions and in the context of contemporary debates on the cognitive science of art. (shrink)

The author of the present paper argues that while trying to explain the institutional success of the science and its broad social impact, it is worth throwing aside the arguments concerning the universal traits of human nature, changes in the human mentality, or transformation of the culture and civilization, such as the development of capitalism or bureaucratic power. In the 16th century no new man emerged, and no mutants with overgrown brains work in modern laboratories. So one must also reject (...) the Great Divide between the cultures of the scientific and pre-scientific and replace it with multiple, uncertain and unexpected ‘not-so-great divides’, which can be described in meticulous anthropological studies. Although the achievements of science are certainly spectacular, and the gap between scientific practice and other areas of activity is so obvious, this does not mean that one must look for the \"great\" reasons behind this situation. One should rather focus on quite down-to-earth practices and tools used by scientists. A significant part of their activities can be described by referring to the craft of writing, reading and transforming of various types of inscriptions (records), and broadly understood visualization – their combining, performing, interpreting, confronting, comparing, shifting, shuffling etc. The important role of these tools and methods is especially visible in situations of scientific controversy. It is so because scientific controversies are won by the one able to muster on the spot the largest number of well aligned and faithful allies, and the technology of writing, printing and visualizing play a special role in mobilizing them. These are necessary to ensure that certain factors can be mobile – easy to move from place to place, and yet, immutable – not undergoing deformation as a result of the movement. This way, scientists are able to not only diffuse different types of factors relevant to the dispute and the process of constituting science, but also concentrate them in the centers of calculation, where, through accumulation, one can take actions not available elsewhere. (shrink)

The Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications (GTA) is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. The task of this article was to give a selection of gestalt theoretical research, which was created within the framework of the GTA. After a brief introduction to the theory, recent developments that have emerged since the founding of the Society and have found expression in the journal Gestalt Theory, as well as in many other publications, have been discussed. A number of contributions to (...) the fundamental area could be cited: consciousness research, multifield approach, synergetics, language, development, and so on. The transfer of basic knowledge to a number of application-oriented disciplines, namely, psychotherapy, education, arts, culture, nation and society, organizations, and so on, has been presented. The article has shown that Gestalt theory has great relevance in both basic and application-related areas and can cover a wide range of issues. (shrink)

Is visual argumentation possible? My personal opinion is that it is, despite of the burden of verbal argumentation and the numerous critiques made against visual arguments. Insofar as most of these critiques are related to the difference between words and images, I will focus my paper on this issue, which is a theoretical one, as it seems to me that taking these critiques seriously is a first step before analyzing concretely how visual arguments work.

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.