Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a “true” knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind’s interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been (...) to discover how we achieve “reality,” that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, “there to be observed.”This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the “real world.” Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world “as it is.” There have always been dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices. Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning, appeared in 1990. In 1987 he received the Balzan Prize for “a lifetime contribution to the study of human psychology.”. (shrink)

‘Valence’ is used in many different ways in emotion theory. It generally refers to the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ character of an emotion, as well as to the ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ character of some aspect of emotion. After reviewing these different uses, I point to the conceptual problems that come with them. In particular, I dis- tinguish: problems that arise from conflating the valence of an emotion with the valence of its aspects, and problems that arise from the very idea that (...) an emotion (and/or its aspects) can be divided into mutually exclusive opposites. The first group of problems does not question the classic dichotomous notion of valence, but the second does. In order to do justice to the richness of daily emotions, emo- tion science needs more complex conceptual tools. (shrink)

A story does more than recount events; it recounts events in a way that renders them intelligible, thus conveying not just information but also understanding. We might therefore be tempted to describe narrative as a genre of explanation. When the police invite a suspect to “tell his story,” they are asking him to explain the blood on his shirt or his absence from home on the night of the murder; and whether he is judged to have a “good story” will (...) depend on its adequacy as an explanation. Can we account for the explanatory force of narrative with the models of explanation available in the philosophy of science? Or does narrative convey a different kind of understanding, which requires a different model and perhaps even a term other than ‘explanation’? (shrink)

Emotions are Janus‐faced. They tell us something about the world, and they tell us something about ourselves. This suggests that we might speak of a truth, or perhaps two kinds of truths of emotions, one of which is about self and the other about conditions in the world. On some views, the latter comes by means of the former. Insofar as emotions manifest our inner life, however, we are more inclined to speak of authenticity rather than truth. What is the (...) difference? We need to distinguish the criteria of correspondence or appropriateness suitable for authenticity from those that embody the criterion of truth. Furthermore there is also a question about the transitions – among states of mind, and between states of mind and behaviour – that emotions encourage. This realm of transitions concerns rationality. After sketching the relevant distinctions, I will endeavour to justify the view that emotions should be appraised in terms of all three terms. (shrink)

Who hasn't wondered what it's like to be a dog or bird? Such questions seem unanswerable because we have no way of getting into an animal's mind. Marc Bekoff's work on animal behavior and mind draws world-wide attention for its originality and its probing into what animals might know as well as what skills are needed to live life successfully as a member of a particular species. Convinced that individuals of every species have some level of self-awareness, Bekoff embarks on (...) fascinating observations of animals playing, leaving and detecting scent-marks, solving problems, and behaving fairly toward each other.Animal Passions and Beastly Virtuesbrings together some of his path-breaking research papers, essays on science and ethics, and popular articles in order to reveal a remarkable range of animal behaviors but also to argue that the ethical treatment of animals is an especially significant issue now. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that widespread, serious errors in the self-assessment of affect are a genuine possibility—one worth taking very seriously. For we are subject to a variety of errors concerning the character of our present and past affective states, or “affective ignorance.” For example, some affects, particularly moods, can greatly affect the quality of our experience even when we are unable to discern them. I note several implications of these arguments. First, we may be less competent pursuers of (...) happiness than is commonly believed, raising difficult questions for political thought. Second, some of the errors discussed ramify for our understanding of consciousness, including Ned Block’s controversial distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Third, empirical results based on self-reports about affect may be systematically misleading in certain ways. (shrink)

We outline a theory of one puzzling aspect of human cognition: a tendency to exaggerate the degree to which agency is manifested in the world. We call this over‐coherent thinking. We use Pylyshyn's idea of cognitive penetrability to help characterize this notion. We argue that this kind of thinking is essentially narrative in form rather than theoretical. We develop a theory of the relation between the degree of narrativity in a representation and its aptness to represent, and to express, mind. (...) We review the prospects for several theories about how over‐coherent thinking gains a purchase on motivation. We argue that progress in this difficult area may require the abandonment of a categorical belief/imagination distinction in favour of vaguely specified clusterings in a many‐dimensional cognitive space. We conclude with the idea that an error‐prone system for the retention of ideas that are low in some of the characteristics generally thought desirable in belief might emerge as a result of an arms‐race between deceivers and deceiver‐detectors. (shrink)

We generally have a dim view of educating the emotions. Our reasons are presumably these: we think we don't choose our emotions; they just happen to us. Therefore, we believe we have no control over them, and would be unable to learn such control even if we wanted to; we are ignorant of any feasible scheme for emotional education; and any likely scheme promises to be more difficult than it would be worth.

A perfectly matched layer (PML) absorbing material composed of a uniaxial anisotropic material is presented for the truncation of finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) lattices. It is shown that the uniaxial PML material formulation is mathematically equivalent to the perfectly matched layer method published by Berenger (see J. Computat. Phys., Oct. 1994). However, unlike Berenger's technique, the uniaxial PML absorbing medium presented in this paper is based on a Maxwellian formulation. Numerical examples demonstrate that the FDTD implementation of the uniaxial PML medium (...) is stable, equal in effectiveness as compared to Berenger's PML medium, while being more computationally efficient. (shrink)

The paper offers a mildly deflationary account of narrative, drawing attention to the minimal, thus easily satisfied, conditions of narrativity and showing that many of the more striking claims about narrative are either poorly supported or refer to distinct classes of narrative—usually literary or fictional—which provide a misleading paradigm for narration in general. An enquiry into structural, referential, pragmatic, and valuebased features of narrative helps circumscribe the limits of narration and the test case of the narrative definition of the self (...) is examined and shown to yield rather less that is often claimed. (shrink)