Extensions of ongoing research identified in the introduction to this special issue are discussed here with farther reaching objectives: researching more intensely psychological universals thought to underlie religion, taking a more inclusive approach to psychology of religion, and constructing more comprehensive models. All three involve conscious experience, to which some observations are devoted. Remarks about the relationships between these research areas conclude the article.

Does all understanding consist in our using concepts to relate to the things around us, or do we also possess a more direct, spontaneous, bodily way of doing so? I explore this second possibility via Bateson's notion of “double description.” These phenomena are dynamic phenomena, in that they have their existence only in our embodied relations to the temporal unfolding of events in the two or more relevant sources. As such, as Bateson put it, they are of a different “logical (...) type” to their source events. Bateson did not, however, extend this important insight out into the ways in which can make ourselves ready to relate to the others and othernesses around us, not only in such a way as to intertwine our outgoing activities towards them in with the incoming activities from them in a subtlety responsive manner, but also come to use the relational understandings created in such dynamic interplays in an anticipatory fashion—thus to provide us with embodied, perceptual skills that enable us to go out to meet familiar circumstances with appropriate kinds of response “at the ready”, so to speak. Below, following Todes and Merleau-Ponty , I outline the kind of preparing activities required if we are to acquire new embodied “readinesses” that enable us to become more “at home” in surroundings which are in fact in continual change—a process that connects with Bateson's account of abduction, the process in which we can sense the existence of a “pattern that connects.” Overall, my purpose in all of this is to bring to the fore the ineradicable role of our bodies in spontaneously arriving at what counts as real for us, and which although unnamable by us, determines that of “which knowledge always speaks”. (shrink)

Quantitative losses of memory content imply replicative processing; correspondence losses imply reconstructive processing. Research should focus on the relationship between these processes by obtaining accuracy- and quantity-based indicators of memory within the same framework. This approach will also yield information about the effects of task and individual-difference variables on loss and distortion, as well as the time course of each process.

The canonical history of mathematics suggests that the late 19th-century “arithmetization” of calculus marked a shift away from spatial-dynamic intuitions, grounding concepts in static, rigorous definitions. Instead, we argue that mathematicians, both historically and currently, rely on dynamic conceptualizations of mathematical concepts like continuity, limits, and functions. In this article, we present two studies of the role of dynamic conceptual systems in expert proof. The first is an analysis of co-speech gesture produced by mathematics graduate students while proving a theorem, (...) which reveals a reliance on dynamic conceptual resources. The second is a cognitive-historical case study of an incident in 19th-century mathematics that suggests a functional role for such dynamism in the reasoning of the renowned mathematician Augustin Cauchy. Taken together, these two studies indicate that essential concepts in calculus that have been defined entirely in abstract, static terms are nevertheless conceptualized dynamically, in both contemporary and historical practice. (shrink)

I this paper, I draw on recent research on the radically embodied and perceptual bases of conceptualization in linguistics and cognitive science to develop a new way of reading and evaluating abstract concepts in social theory. I call this approach Sociological Idea Analysis. I argue that, in contrast to the traditional view of abstract concepts, which conceives them as amodal “presuppositions” removed from experience, abstract concepts are irreducibly grounded in experience and partake of non-negotiable perceptual-symbolic features from which a non-propositional (...) “logic” naturally follows. This implies that uncovering the imagistic bases of allegedly abstract notions should be a key part of theoretical evaluation of concepts in social theory. I provide a case study of the general category of “structure” in the social and human sciences to demonstrate the analytic utility of the approach. (shrink)

The main purpose of the following inquiry is to emphasise the importance of a phenomenon long neglected by the majority of the human sciences, the artefact; each one of us, no matter what age, sex or culture, is in contact with artefacts every moment of our lives yet despite this they have received scant attention. The study begins by outlining a definition of the artefact, highlighting those characteristics which, in combination, ensure its centrality to social life before, through a discussion (...) of Popper's ideas, proceeding to see how material culture can be conceptualised as meaningful. In order to understand how meaning becomes attached to the artefact the notion of objectification will be analysed and, consequently, so shall the importance of both the type of activity and the physical nature of the materials involved in the artefact's production. Picking up on the theme of materiality this aspect of material culture will be shown to pose major problems to any interpretation of the artefact along semiological lines; language and material culture are evinced to possess fundamentally distinct characteristics which make comparisons between them far from straightforward. These differences will be analysed further, concentrating specifically on the role of context in the establishment of meaning. This leads on to the proposal that our understanding of artefacts can occur on three levels; three forms of knowledge are thus described of which a linguistically formulated type constitutes just one kind. The penultimate chapter tackles the ways in which artefacts affect us, how they are active elements in our relationships with them; therefore, a dialectical position is postulated in which both artefacts and agents take part. Finally, the study concludes by stressing some of its wider implications and suggests a few of the practical situations to which it can be applied. (shrink)

The author argues for three interconnected theses which provide a cognitive account for why humans intuitively believe that others survive death. The first thesis, from which the second and third theses follow, is that the acceptance of afterlife beliefs is predisposed by a specific, and already well-documented, imaginative process - the offline social reasoning process. The second thesis is that afterlife beliefs are social in nature. The third thesis is that the living imagine the deceased as socially embodied in such (...) a way as to continue to fulfill on-going social obligations with others. The author further suggests six reasons why the fantasy/reality distinction breaks down for the imaginer such that the continued existence of the decedent in the afterlife is believed to be real. Finally, the author suggests avenues for further research which would support this cognitive account. (shrink)

This article discusses an approach to characterizing movement patterns (paths/trajectories) of individual agents that allows for relating aspects of cognitive conceptualization of movement patterns with formal spatial characterizations. To this end, we adopt a perspective of characterizing movement patterns on the basis of perceptual and conceptual invariants that we term movement choremes (MCs). MCs are formally grounded by behaviorally validating qualitative spatio-temporal calculi. Relating perceptual and cognitive aspects of space and formal theories of spatial information has shown promise to foster (...) understanding of the semantics of movement patterns. Specifically, we discuss our approach in relation to existing qualitative formalisms such as the region connection calculus and the Egenhofer’s intersection formalisms. We show that the MC approach is compatible with these approaches but offers additional opportunities to improve the cognitive adequacy of these formalisms. We summarize this paper using a movement taxonomy that also provides guidance for future research. (shrink)

Abstract: This article aims at elucidating the ways in which philosophy may engage in cooperation with other disciplines through “philosophy with” (Hansson 2008). An exemplary investigation is undertaken of the roles of epistemology in investigating knowledge, that is, how epistemology may interact with sciences concerned with knowledge. Four possible roles are distinguished: provider of a priori conceptual analyses, clarifier of scientific concepts and their implications, interpreter of scientific results, and dialogue partner with a voice of its own. Each role is (...) illustrated by contemporary texts, and it is argued that the role of dialogue partner is the most fruitful. (shrink)

Both direct, and evolved, behavior-based approaches to mobile robots have yielded a number of interesting demonstrations of robots that navigate, map, plan and operate in the real world. The work can best be described as attempts to emulate insect level locomotion and navigation, with very little work on behavior-based non-trivial manipulation of the world. There have been some behavior-based attempts at exploring social interactions, but these too have been modeled after the sorts of social interactions we see in insects. But (...) thinking how to scale from all this insect level work to full human level intelligence and social interactions leads to a synthesis that is very di erent from that imagined in traditional Arti cial Intelligence and Cognitive Science. We report on work towards that goal. (shrink)

Koopman’s book revolves around the notion of transition, which he proposes is one of the central ideas of the pragmatist tradition but one which had not previously been fully articulated yet nevertheless shapes the pragmatist attitude in philosophy. Transition, according to Koopman, denotes “those temporal structures and historical shapes in virtue of which we get from here to there”. One of the consequences of transitionalism is the understanding of critique and inquiry as historical pro...

The human experience of meaning‐making lies at the roots of consciousness, creativity, and religious faith. It arises from the basic experience of separation from a loved object, suffered by all mammals, and, in general terms, from the experienced gap between ourselves and our environment. We fill the gap with transitional objects and symbols that reassure us of basic continuity in ourselves and in the world. These objects and symbols also serve the neurognostic function of demonstrating what the world is like. (...) Thus, humanity lives by faith, as manifested in its pattern‐making capacity, and not by literal sight. (shrink)

Body experience can be seen as the basis for the formation of the self-concept. The relation between body experience and self-concept is fundamental for human existence and is especially in focus in the fields of psychotherapy and movement activities . But body experience is a "data source" which is difficult to handle scientifically. Body experiences are based on "internal physical sensations" - which Gendlin also describes as the felt meaning or the felt sense, and is not in opposition to phenomenology. (...) To bridge the gap between internal sensations - which are the foundation of the creation of meaning - and language as the medium in both everyday and scientific communication, a form of visualisation technique is introduced to help to evoke descriptions and metaphors that are able to transform body experiences as the pre-reflective mode of information into language as the digital mode of information. Metaphors are the source domain for the target domain body experience . Through the presentation of an empirical project in the field of movement and sport, the theoretical reflections on the process of transforming body experience into language will be exemplified. (shrink)

Nell’ultimo trentennio, le scienze cognitive hanno proposto una teoria alternativa a quelle che intendevano la metafora come strumento linguistico, cioè che il processo metaforico si potesse ridurre al livello letterale, semantico o pragmatico. Secondo la teoria della metafora concettuale, la metafora è un modo di rappresentare ed organizzare il nostro mondo, piuttosto che uno strumento semplicemente decorativo del linguaggio avente un ruolo puramente comunicativo. Questo shift paradigmatico ha influenzato anche altri aspetti delle scienze cognitive. In questo contributo si vuole delineare (...) lo stato attuale della teoria esposta da Lakoff e Johnson e la maturazione del pensiero rispetto alla prima pubblicazione di Metaphors We Live By (1980/1998). Dopo avere illustrato i principi teorici, si daranno degli esempi di metafore culturali e multimodali e si puntualizzerà il ruolo analogo, ma distinto, alla metafora che la metonimia copre nell’ambito dei nostri sistemi concettuali. (shrink)

The environmental degradation caused by industrial agriculture, as well as the resulting social and health consequences, creates an urgency to rethink food production by expanding the moral imagination to include agricultural practices. Agricultural practices presume human use of the earth and acknowledge human dependence on the biotic community, and these relations mean that agriculture presents a separate set of considerations in the broader field of environmental ethics. Many scholars and activists have argued persuasively that we need new stories to rethink (...) agricultural practice, however, the link—the story that does and can shape agricultural practice—has not yet been fully articulated in environmental discourse. My analysis explores how language has shaped existing agricultural models and, more important, the potential of story to influence agricultural practice. To do this, I draw upon cognitive theory to illustrate how metaphoric and narrative language structures thought and influences practice, beginning with my contention that industrial agriculture relies on a discourse of mechanistic relations between humans and a passive earth, language that has naturalized the chemically intensive monocultures prevalent in much of the American Midwest. However, alternative agricultures, including organic agriculture, agro-ecology, and ecological agriculture, emphasize qualities such as interdependence and reciprocity and do so as a deliberate response to the perceived inadequacies of industrial agriculture and its governing narrative. Exploring the different discourses of agricultural systems can help us think through different modalities for human relations with the biotic community and demonstrate story’s potential role in altering practice. (shrink)

This essay reconstructs the steps by which Cassirer moved from the philosophy of language in the early 1920s to his more general theory of symbolism. The linguistic turn in philosophy overcame idealism without falling into naturalism or psychologism, but according to Cassirer proclaiming the primacy of language was one-sided. He claimed that language is but one symbolic form among many and, what is more, it is not the most fundamental kind of symbolism. The basic function of symbolism is neither "reference" (...) nor "pure signification," but the unification of sensory phenomena in perception, a function he termed symbolic "Prägnanz." The essay explains how Cassirer argued for a continuity of symbolic processes linking expressive perceptual qualities with scientific theory. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reconsider certain assumptions about conceptual structure which have become influential in recent Cognitive Science and which are associated in particular with the Cognitive Linguistics research agenda. I will outline three areas within the Cognitive Linguistics theory of concepts which seem to create some difficulties in their present formulation: the 'embodied cognition' idea, the function of imagery and the role of metaphor in the structure of concepts.

Traditional approaches tend to regard figuration (and by extension, deference in general) as an essentially marked or playful use of language, which is associated with a pronounced stylistic effect. For linguistic purposes, however, there is no reason for assigning a special place to deferred uses that are stylistically notable — the sorts of usages that people sometimes qualify with a phrase like "figuratively speaking." There is no important linguistic difference between using redcoat to refer to a British soldier and using (...) suit to refer to a corporate executive (as in "A couple of suits stopped by to talk about the new products"). What creates the stylistic effect of the latter is not the mechanism that generates it, but the marked background assumptions that license it — here, the playful presupposition that.. (shrink)

Of articles which are submitted for publication in Philosophy, a surprisingly large proportion are about the views of Richard Rorty. Some, indeed, we have published. They, along with pretty well all the articles we receive on Professor Rorty, are highly critical. On the perverse assumption that there must be something to be said for anyone who attracts widespread hostility, it is only right to see what can be said in favour of Rorty's latest collection of papers, entitled, Truth and Progress,.

This paper opens with a presentation of the philosophical underpinning and rationale of the concept of physical literacy. This is followed by an articulation of the concept of physical literacy. Three subsequent sections then consider aspects of the concept in a little more detail. The first investigates the relationship of the physical literacy to the development of a sense of self and to establishing interaction with others. Here the philosophical approach is informed by writings on cognitive development and recent neurological (...) insights. The second considers the universality of the concept and looks briefly at the views of existentialists and of contemporary sociologists. The third section addresses the place of propositional knowledge in being physically literate. The implications of objectifying the body in descriptive language are weighed against the fact that verbally expressed understanding and knowledge are an integral part of Western culture. The debate presented is one of a series that has, over the last five years, mapped the author's work on developing the concept of physical literacy. The aspects chosen to be discussed here are three that have generated considerable interest and debate. In conclusion, there is a short reflection on the implications of the views discussed for education and physical education. (shrink)

In his novel Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust argues that conventional descriptions of the phenomenology of consciousness are incomplete because they focus too much on the highly-salient sensory information that dominates each moment of awareness and ignore the network of associations that lies in the background. In this paper, I explicate Proust’s theory of conscious experience and show how it leads him directly to a theory of aesthetic perception. Proust’s division of awareness into two components roughly corresponds to William (...) James’ division of the stream of thought into a “nucleus” and “fringe.” Proust argues that the function of art is to evoke the underlying associative network indirectly in the mind of the observer by using carefully chosen sensory surfaces to control the stream of thought. I propose a possible neural basis for this Proustian/Jamesian phenomenology, and argue that the general principles of Proustian aesthetics can be applied to all forms of art. I conclude that a scientific theory of art should follow in a straightforward manner from a scientific theory of consciousness. (shrink)

The language of emotions is culturally conditioned and a conceptualization of emotions is determined by the value systems adopted in given cultures, as well as by personal experiences in recognizing, valuing, and communicating those emotions. It is believed that sometimes certain emotions have no lexical equivalents in particular languages. Even within one culture and one language, we can observe a gray area in the meaning of terms from this field. This is not surprising, given the subjective perception of the world (...) by each member of a specific community, as well as the multitude of emotions themselves. Although most information about other people’s emotions comes to the recipients through language, talking or writing about them is not simple. Emotions are among the concepts that are not very clearly delineated in our experience and therefore other, more comprehensible concepts, such as spatial orientations or objects, should be used when referring to them. In the novel The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya, emotions are conceptualized and represented for instance by liquids, small animals, natural forces, and substances with some specific taste (sour, bitter, etc.). Our goal was to figure out which emotions and their linguistic instantiations are only typical for the Russian language and which ones would fall in the universal category. The paper will focus on the description and the way emotions are conceptualized from a cognitive linguistic perspective, drawing on CMT (Conceptual Metaphor Theory), conceptual metonymies, and cognitive models. (shrink)

In contrast to symbol-manipulation approaches, Cognitive Linguistics offers a modal rather than an amodal account of meaning in language. From this perspective, the meanings attached to linguistic expressions, in the form of conceptualisations, have various properties in common with visual forms of representation. This makes Cognitive Linguistics a potentially useful framework for identifying and analysing language-image relations in multimodal texts. In this paper, we investigate language-image relations with a specific focus on intersemiotic convergence. Analogous with research on gesture, we extend (...) the notion of co-text images and argue that images and language usages which are proximal to one another in a multimodal text can be expected to exhibit the same or consistent construals of the target scene. We outline some of the dimensions of conceptualisation along which intersemiotic convergence may be enacted in texts, including event-structure, viewpoint, distribution of attention and metaphor. We take as illustrative data photographs and their captions in online news texts covering a range of topics including immigration, political protests, and inter-state conflict. Our analysis suggests the utility of Cognitive Linguistics in allowing new potential sites of intersemiotic convergence to be identified and in proffering an account of language-image relations that is based in language cognition. (shrink)

This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘lawofthe Anthropocene’ with an imaginary reaching towards ‘law/sforthe Anthropocene’. It does so primarily by contrasting two imaginaries of human embodiment—law’s existing imaginary of quasi-disembodiment and an alternative imaginary of embodiment as co-woven with the lively incipiencies and tendencies of matter. It draws on ‘transcorporeality’ and ‘sympoiesis’ as inspiration for ‘sympoietic normativities’ as ways of co-living and co-organizing in the face of the catastrophic implications of the Anthropocene emergency.

Our main considerations take as a starting point the educational policy demand for a model of competence of text comprehension, which should make it possible to measure and systematically increase comprehension accomplishments and competences. The approach of classical cognitive psychology appears particularly suitable for this purpose, which determines comprehension as a rule-guided transfer of a sign complex into a mental representation. However, such representationalism tends to be aporetic in character. A way out of this problem is offered by recent concepts (...) of understanding from the area ofEmbodied Cognition, according to which all mental operations are embedded in physical interaction processes. Comprehension means, in this sense, letting physical primary experiences be reproduced in a trial-action fashion. This approach is, in this paper, reconsidered in relation to the role of subjectivity and affect: Physical experiences are meaning-generating because they exhibit a subjectively perceived affective valence between pleasure and suffering. The beginning of all understanding therefore is to be located within the emotional sphere.Such a conception of understanding is supposed to have a considerable impact upon language- and literature teaching in schools. For example, training of reading skills should always be embedded in body-bound experiences. Moreover, learning and understanding both mean cultivating an alert ear for affective undertones, needs and irritations, which might even lead to drawing the curricular benchmarks and competency targets into question. Finally, as art and literature establish areas of freedom and play, literature teaching, especially, needs to be founded on affective awareness, discursive openness and proceeding voluntariness. (shrink)

It is argued that the capacity to focus attention is crucial for intentional communication. Intentional communication is goal-intended; directed at changing mental states and as a consequence behaviour; about a referential object common to sender and recipient; and about objects that may be context-and referent-independent. Three different kinds of attention is discerned: scanning, attention attraction, and attention-focusing. The focus of attention can, depending on the abilities of the subject, be on objects or subjects that either are contextual or stable, and (...) it can be individual or shared. For language use, subject-subject focusing along with shared attention are necessary. This does not require Gricean metarepresentations, but basically only attention contact between the subjects and behavioral co-ordination. Language use can be compared with tool use to bring out the characteristics that distinguish informational from intentional communication. The capacities required for tool use are in several cases similar to those required for language use. A basic similarity is that both activities are used as means to an end. (shrink)

In the search for the foundations of cognition philosophers often encounter a familiar problem - the problem of content. The problem of content is essentially the problem of how content, whether experiential or intentional, is possible. In practice providing a response to this problem involves providing an account of how an active self-consciousness is able to conceive/perceive, or in some way be consciousness ofx. The unique nature of this problem imposes significant constraints on the field of explanatory possibilities. Since the (...) x which is to be accounted for is essentially the possibility of absolutely any x there is no y which is not also an x. Hence, nothing remains outside of the explanandum which can be appealed to in order to account for it without, to some extent, presupposing that which needs to be explained. In many of the theories we will examine overcoming this problem involves appealing to a transcendental “structure of awareness” which more often than not is composed of “universal-like” transcendental “entities” of indeterminate nature and ontological status. A major appeal of transcendental entities is that they can at least appear to provide a way of supplying the power of objective “determinateness” necessary to account for the possibility of determination without themselves being determinates. The general strategy of appealing to such transcendental “entities” has, however, for some time been suspiciously regarded as it is unclear how such an appeal is able to avoid the aforementioned presupposition of content. But if the appeal to transcendental cognizing intermediates is to be ‘ dismissed we may be left to face up to the fact that content simply “happens”- that the process of determination, of “judgment”, is a mysterious talent that can neither be taught nor understood. Through a critical examination of both Western and Eastern philosophical approaches to the problem of content this dissertation identifies and describes, insofar as is possible, “that” through which content is rendered possible. In so doing it draws attention to previously neglected points of contact between major philosophical traditions and clarifies the central issues surrounding the problem. The dissertation supports the conclusion that, although there is a need to acknowledge a particular role for a transcendental “self- consciousness” in providing a coherent response to the problem of content, the attempt to articulate a mechanism through which this role is fulfilled most likely misguided. Although it appears to be possible both to know something about this “self-consciousness”, and even to know it more directly, it cannot be understood in the usual sense. (shrink)

The practices of the arts—plastic and performing—deal in direct sensorial engagement with the body, with materiality, with artifacts and tools, with spaces, and with other people. The arts are centrally concerned with intelligent doing. Conventional explanations of the cognitive dimensions of arts practices have been unsatisfying because internalist paradigms provides few useful tools to discuss embodied dimensions of cognition.

My paper sets out to compare neuroaesthetics and transcendental philosophy, concerning the perception of schemes of imitation in aesthetic experience. The argument is structured in four steps: first, I will introduce the function of schemes in mirror-neuron-based processes and in general in the embodiment theory of Mark Johnson and George Lakoff; second, I will consider some analogical relations between a transcendental approach and neuroaesthetics concerning semantics; third, starting with the statement that one open question in neuroaesthetics is how creativity emerges, (...) I would like to propose a transcendental account about sensible schemes as a possible foundation of creativity. I will conclude my paper with some examples from visual arts and aesthetic practices in general. (shrink)

Over the past three decades, cognitive science has been making a turn towards pragmatism. Here we outline steps towards completing this turn. As a handful of cognitive scientists and philosophers have been arguing more recently, the insights of William James, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead are not only being re-discovered, they are also proving rather prescient in light of growing research. The new field of neuropragmatism aims to take these insights seriously and further into new directions for both pragmatism (...) and cognitive science. In this manifesto, a brief history of the relationship between classical pragmatism and the sciences of life and mind is offered as a background for twelve proposed theses of neuropragmatism. These theses serve as general guidelines for further philosophical and scientific research. To illustrate the possibilities and consequences of this neuropragmatic framework, neuropragmatist views on traditional questions of philosophy of mind, such as the mind-body relationship, are situated among other leading philosophical perspectives, like enactive, embodied, and embedded theories of cognition and mentation. Such views, however, when taken from a neuropragmatist perspecitve, have significant consequences for the philosophical project of reconciliation be- tween what Wilfrid Sellars called the scientific and manifest images of humanity. The difference in conceptions of experience and subesequently science are crucial for understanding the difference between Sellarsian neurophilosophy and neuropragmatism, as well as how to reach rapprochement between the sciences and the humanities. (shrink)

Rhythm should be regarded as a perceptional category rather than as a property of the work of art. Rhythm might be classified according to three principles, serial rhythm, sequential rhythm and dynamic rhythm, three basic sets of gestalt qualities that lay the foundation for versification systems.Two schemas decide the rhythm of a poem: direction and balance. ‘Direction’ refers to rising and falling movements in the line. ‘Balance’ refers to repetitions in a play between symmetry and asymmetry as well as a (...) moment of rest.Rhythms produce meaning, probably due to the fact that rhythms activate internalized bodily experiences as well as conventional meaning patterns. This is demonstrated on the basis of a poem by Sylvia Plath. (shrink)

Sport and game metaphors are ubiquitous in the culture and language of business. As evocative linguistic devices, such metaphors are morally neutral; however, if they are indicative of a deep structure of understanding that filters experience, then they have the potential to be ethically problematic. This article argues that there exists a danger for those who forget or confuse metaphor with definition: the metaphoric fallacy. Accordingly, business is like a game, but it is not the equivalent of a game. If (...) business is equated to a game, then the potentially negative implications for ethical content and the application of ethical theories are numerous. This article suggests a fresh approach to issues of contemporary business ethics discourse, by attending to the business-as-game metaphor. (shrink)

This essay reconstructs the steps by which Cassirer moved from the philosophy of language in the early 1920s to his more general theory of symbolism. The linguistic turn in philosophy overcame idealism without falling into naturalism or psychologism, but according to Cassirer proclaiming the primacy of language was one-sided. He claimed that language is but one symbolic form among many and, what is more, it is not the most fundamental kind of symbolism. The basic function of symbolism is neither “reference” (...) nor “pure signification,” but the unification of sensory phenomena in perception, a function he termed symbolic “Prägnanz.” The essay explains how Cassirer argued for a continuity of symbolic processes linking expressive perceptual qualities with scientific theory. (shrink)

This article focuses on the intimate relationship between German aesthetic theory, particularly the philosophies of Kant and Schiller, and the pragmatic tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that many aspects of Kantian aesthetic theory – his development of reflective judgement, genius, and common sense – are reflected in the thinking of C. S. Peirce. I conclude, however, that such a comparison risks selling short the way that German idealism influenced American thinkers and instead suggest that it (...) is more fruitful to concentrate on ‘aesthetic experience’. I argue that attending to the aesthetic dimensions of experience might re-orient contemporary approaches to pragmatism that continue to focus on the way that pragmatism might intervene in debates in epistemology and philosophy of language. (shrink)

This book is a synthesis of more than three decades of research into the concept of time and its semiotic nature. If traditional philosophy – and philosophy of time should be no exception – in the shadow of advancing biology can be said to have reached an impasse, one important reason for this, in harmony with Wittgenstein’s vision, appears to have been its lack of appropriate tools for explicating language. The present theory of time proceeds, accordingly, from the exploration of (...) temporal expressions in language as an evolutionary fact. It derives in a hypothetical, coherent feedback process of hierarchically ordered distinctions the semantics of time from its biologically dictated perceptual and cognitive-pragmatic origins. The corresponding abductive-regulative model is anchored in the assumption of biological rhythmization as the very foundation of perception and mental/physical action. Understood to originate in space and spatial perspective, time reveals itself as an instrument for temporal perspective on motion (events and situations) in a process of analysis, i.e., discontinuation of chaos made divisible and continuous by the rhythmical screen. Whereas traditional philosophy of time paid attention almost exclusively to the temporal category of tense, the biopragmatic model sees strong evidence in the perspectival nature of time for ascribing the decisive, and probably universal, role in temporal analysis to the linguistic category of aspect. Aspect may, according to the present findings, be assumed to partake already of change-of-state and cause-effect analysis without which man’s adaptation to new situations – and precondition for survival – would be inconceivable. The proposed model of space/time cognition, inspired by Hegelian dialectics, Heidegger-Gadamer’s hermeneutic circle and Peircean logic, makes Kantian a priori superfluous and liberates time from its enigmatic appearance. For the first time in temporal studies it thus appears possible to derive hypothetically linguistic expressions of time all the way from pretemporal, homogeneous continuity effected by biological rhythmization, via pretemporal metonymic (Gestalt), chunk-wise partitioning – as a general precondition for the perception and, based on primary metaphorization, the cognition of things, space and motion – to temporal analysis/discontinuation proper, primarily by aspectual perspective, and the subsequent synthesized, heterogeneous continuity of temporally ordered events. The conception of time, so disastrous for modern temporal logic, i.e., as moving object assigned extension, divisible continuity (‛linearity’) and direction, can be shown to have emerged as a result of secondary metaphorization. (shrink)

Christian Smith's What Is a Person? provides an account of the person from the perceptive of critical realism. As a fellow critical realist, I support that philosophical position and in this response I seek to support it by connecting it to the embodied realism developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In order to bring the two forms of realism together, I critique both the relativism of embodied realism and the idea, found in Smith, that the person's awareness of the (...) world is mediated by her experience. The goal of this paper, then, is an embodied critical realism, a more coherent realist position that combines the best parts of each. (shrink)

Purely parallel neural networks can model object recognition in brief displays – the same conditions under which illusory conjunctions have been demonstrated empirically. Correcting errors of illusory conjunction is the “tag-assignment” problem for a purely parallel processor: the problem of assigning a spatial tag to nonspatial features, feature combinations, and objects. This problem must be solved to model human object recognition over a longer time scale. Our model simulates both the parallel processes that may underlie illusory conjunctions and the serial (...) processes that may solve the tag-assignment problem in normal perception. One component of the model extracts pooled features and another provides attentional tags that correct illusory conjunctions. Our approach addresses two questions: How can objects be identified from simultaneously attended features in a parallel, distributed representation? How can the spatial selectional requirements of such an attentional process be met by a separation of pathways for spatial and nonspatial processing? Our analysis of these questions yields a neurally plausible simulation of tag assignment based on synchronizing feature processing activity in a spatial focus of attention. (shrink)