Why do we draw the boundaries between “blue” and “green”, where we do? One proposed answer to this question is that we categorize color the way we do because we perceive color categorically. Starting in the 1950’s, the phenomenon of “categorical perception” (CP) encouraged such a response. CP refers to the fact that adjacent color patches are more easily discriminated when they straddle a category boundary than when they belong to the same category. In this paper, I make three (...) related claims. (1) Although what seems to guide discrimination performances seems to indeed be categorical information, the evidence in favor of the fact that categorical perception infl uences the way we perceive color is not convincing. (2) That CP offers a useful account of categorization is not obvious.While aiming at accounting for categorization, CP itself requires an account of categories. This being said, CP remains an interesting phenomenon. Why and how is our discrimination behavior linked to our categories? It is suggested that linguistic labels determine CP through a naming strategy to which participants resort while discriminating colors. This paper’s fi nal point is (3) that the naming strategy account is not enough. Beyond category labels, what seems to guide discrimination performance is category structure. (shrink)

Many students at the secondary and even tertiary levels of education in Nigeria still perform lamentably poor in English both in examinations and even in daily usage. This has queried the quality of teachers of English and their teaching. Many teachers of English have the requisite qualifications and, possibly, experience to teach English in public schools, at least. However, students still perform poorly in English. Therefore, there is a need to examine other qualities, which teachers are expected to have from (...) the perspective of teacher educators, and post-secondary school students. Using the survey research design, data were collected through a semi-structured questionnaire. The participants were 33 purposively selected secondary school graduates and 24 College of Education lecturers. The lecturers were participants at a UNICEF-sponsored workshop for teacher trainers in Nigeria. They were from five states in South-Western Nigeria. A thematic analysis and frequency counts showed that the most frequent qualities participants expected of teachers of English Language were professional and pedagogical skills, relational skills, communication skills and ethical behaviour. (shrink)

Six hundred three people completed a survey measuring perceptions of traditional areas of philosophical inquiry and their relationship to empirical science. The ten areas studied were: aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, history of philosophy, logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and political philosophy. For each area, participants rated whether it is currently central to philosophy, whether its centrality depends on integration with science, and whether work in the area is sufficiently integrated with science. Centrality judgments tended (...) to be high. Participants viewed nine of the ten areas as central to philosophy, although they made this judgment more confidently for some areas. Dependence judgments were more varied, ranging from clear disagreement to clear agreement. Integration judgments were also varied but exhibited more uncertainty. Some areas whose centrality depended on integration were judged to be well integrated, but a central tendency for all other areas was ambivalence. Demographic factors had small but statistically significant effects on all three sorts of judgment. Higher age predicted higher centrality judgments and higher integration judgments. Higher socioeconomic status predicted lower dependence judgments and higher integration judgments. Men recorded higher integration judgments. (shrink)

The 1917 February Revolution led to the reshaping of the war-era image of the German enemy. Focusing on the former imperial borderland province of the Southwestern Krai, this article unveils the national, political, and cultural considerations of the local Ukrainian and Russian-language media that affected their attitude towards the Germans. It argues that the developments of the 1917–1918 Ukrainian Revolution presented a unique case of constructing the image of the Germans due to the ongoing rivalry between the respective Ukrainian (...) and Russian national projects. The study is based on the materials of prominent Kyivan daily newspapers, thus rendering the spectrum of the region’s political thought. Built upon the concept of imagology, the article apprehends the images of “otherness” in conjunction with the actor’s own identity. (shrink)

This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking (...) over spoken speech. However, there is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty is right to emphasize the priority, namely, in terms of the ontological priority of the speaking subject with respect to language understood as a constituted cultural ideality. The latter only maintains its ontological status insofar as it is taken up by a language community. I favorably contrast Merleau-Ponty’s views on this question to those of the late Heidegger and de Saussure, and suggest potential applications of this clarified position for contemporary discussions in philosophy of language. (shrink)

A belief in a firm correspondence between objects, ideas, and their representation in language pervaded the works of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot

(1727–1781) in 1750. This conviction is particularly manifest in Turgot’s sharp critique of Berkeley’s philosophical system and his remarks on Maupertuis’s reconstruction of the origin of language. During the 1750s Turgot’s epistemological views underwent a change, apparent in two of his contributions to the Encyclopédie: the entries Existence and Étymologie (1756). These articles included a reassessment of Berkeleyan (...) immaterialism, facing an ultimate crisis of definition and representation. A similar development may be traced in contemporary works by Condillac and Diderot. Turgot’s Encyclopédie entries also envisaged a new science, an archeology of the human mind aided by the examination of linguistic development and change. This entailed the scientific verification of conjectures in any historical account of ideas, turning etymological

and psychological inquiries into what Turgot termed ‘experimental metaphysics’. (shrink)

Code-switching is explained as switching between two languages at the same time while conversing in the same discourse. The aim of this study is to explore the perceptions of Afghan EFL lecturers toward code- switching. This study used a qualitative research approach in which the data was collected via semi-structured interviews with five EFL lecturers. The lecturers were interviewed to explore their perceptions and reasons for code-switching, and the extent to which they practice code-switching in their classrooms. The results revealed (...) that the lecturers in the study had positive perceptions of code-switching and believed it as a beneficial strategy in facilitating the learning process. However, they also conveyed that an excessive practice of code-switching should be avoided. The study results also disclosed that the lecturers practiced code-switching for various functions such as explaining difficult concepts (translation), explaining complex grammatical points, clarifications, and giving instructions. Finally, the paper provides recommendation for further research. (shrink)

Human-centered explainable AI (HCXAI) advocates for the integration of social aspects into AI explanations. Central to the HCXAI discourse is the Social Transparency (ST) framework, which aims to make the socio-organizational context of AI systems accessible to their users. In this work, we suggest extending the ST framework to address the risks of social misattributions in Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in sensitive areas like mental health. In fact LLMs, which are remarkably capable of simulating roles and personas, may (...) lead to mismatches between designers' intentions and users' perceptions of social attributes, risking to promote emotional manipulation and dangerous behaviors, cases of epistemic injustice, and unwarranted trust. To address these issues, we propose enhancing the ST framework with a fifth 'W-question' to clarify the specific social attributions assigned to LLMs by its designers and users. This addition aims to bridge the gap between LLM capabilities and user perceptions, promoting the ethically responsible development and use of LLM-based technology. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, language is part of a social activity in both Wittgenstein and Xunzi 荀子, and for both clarification of language is central to their philosophical projects; the goal of this article is to explore the extent of resonance and discord that may be found when comparing these two philosophers. While for Xunzi, the rectification of names (zhengming 正名) is anchored in a regard for establishing, propagating, and/or restoring a harmonious social system, perspicuity is for Wittgenstein represented as (...) a philosophical end in itself. The article ventures study in particular the themes of perspicuity and aspect-perception in Wittgenstein together with the topics of correcting names and the cultivation of the heart-mind (xin 心) in the Xunzi. The aspiration of this project is to gain an overview of the role(s) of clarification projects in different philosophical traditions, all while not overlooking the different historical contexts and philosophical ends of these two philosophers. (shrink)

Cognitive Robotics can be defined as the study of cognitive phenomena by their modeling in physical artifacts such as robots. This is a very lively and fascinating field which has already given fundamental contributions to our understanding of natural cognition. Nonetheless, robotics has to date addressed mainly very basic, low­level cognitive phenomena like sensory­motor coordination, perception, and navigation, and it is not clear how the current approach might scale up to explain high­level human cognition. In this paper we argue (...) that a promising way to do that is to merge current ideas and methods of 'embodied cognition' with the Russian tradition of theoretical psychology which views language not only as a communication system but also as a cognitive tool, that is by developing a Vygotskyan Cognitive Robotics. We substantiate this idea by discussing several domains in which language can improve basic cognitive abilities and permit the development of high­level cognition: learning, categorization, abstraction, memory, voluntary control, and mental life. (shrink)

From Augustine’s (death) drive towards an imaginary time before speech to Marx’s drive toward an imaginary time after speech as we know it, we learn that we are always already within the bonds of the mother tongue. In the late twentieth-century, Derrida turns to both Augustine and Marx to repeat the fantasy of escaping the mother (tongue). Derrida responds to Marx’s analysis of our repeated failure to forget the mother tongue by turning to Augustine’s analysis of the mother’s touch: we (...) cannot forget the mother tongue because it is licked upon our skin. Drawing on Derrida’s relationship to Augustine and Marx on the topic of touch and language, I argue that although the bond of the mother tongue is inescapable, its very real grip upon our skin is founded upon a number of fantasies: the fantasy of the Mother, of a cut with the Mother by the Mother, which separates us from an original shared skin and binds us to the Mother tongue, the fantasy of self-articulation in the death of the Mother. I suggest that the symptoms of the fantasmatic foundation of our entrapment by the mother tongue-touch is expressed in barely perceptible glitches—a shiver passing over one’s skin, a stutter in one’s speech. (shrink)

Mental capacities for perceiving, remembering, thinking, and planning involve the processing of structured mental representations. A compositional semantics of such representations would explain how the content of any given representation is determined by the contents of its constituents and their mode of combination. While many have argued that semantic theories of mental representations would have broad value for understanding the mind, there have been few attempts to develop such theories in a systematic and empirically constrained way. This paper contributes to (...) that end by developing a semantics for a ‘fragment’ of our mental representational system: the visual system’s representations of the bounding contours of objects. At least three distinct kinds of composition are involved in such representations: ‘concatenation’, ‘feature composition’, and ‘contour composition’. I sketch the constraints on and semantics of each of these. This account has three principal payoffs. First, it models a working framework for compositionally ascribing structure and content to perceptual representations, while highlighting core kinds of evidence that bear on such ascriptions. Second, it shows how a compositional semantics of perception can be compatible with holistic, or Gestalt, phenomena, which are often taken to show that the whole percept is ‘other than the sum of its parts’. Finally, the account illuminates the format of a key type of perceptual representation, bringing out the ways in which contour representations exhibit domain-specific form of the sort that is typical of structured icons such as diagrams and maps, in contrast to typical discursive representations of logic and language. (shrink)

जागतिकीकरणामुळे आपण सारे भारतीय जगाशी पुन्हा नव्या संदर्भात जोडले गेलो आहोत. हा संबंध निखळ आर्थिक स्वरूपाचा असला तरी त्यास सांस्कृतिकदृष्ट्या सुद्धा महत्त्व आहे. भाषा हे संस्कृतीचे महत्वाचे अंग आहे. त्यामुळे जगाशी होणारा संवाद महत्वाचा ठरतो. या भूमिकेतून ‘भारताची ज्ञानभाषा कोणती?’ हा प्रश्न नव्याने उपस्थित करणे उचित ठरते. कारण हा प्रश्न अद्यापिही अनिर्णीत आहे. त्याचे नव्याने आकलन कसे होऊ शकेल, याचा वेध घेण्याचा एक प्रयत्न येथे केला आहे.

In this paper I develop a novel account of the phenomenality of language by focusing on characteristics of perceived speech. I explore the extent to which the spoken word can be said to have a horizonal structure similar to that of spatiotemporal objects: our perception of each is informed by habitual associations and expectations formed through past experiences of the object or word and other associated objects and experiences. Specifically, the horizonal structure of speech in use can fruitfully (...) be compared to that of a tool in use. The comparison suggests an account of our linguistic faculty as continuous with more foundational faculties of perception and action. I provide empirical corroboration of this account by drawing on recent neuroimaging studies of the multimodal, sensorimotor bases of speech comprehension. I then discuss how such an understanding of our linguistic ability helps advocates of embodied, non-representationalist accounts of cognition respond to a common objection. Critics grant that embodied approaches may be adequate to account for lower-level, online modes of cognition, such as perception and action, which directly engage their object. But they question whether such approaches can “scale up” to higher modes of cognition, such as imagination, memory, thought, and language, which can entertain absent, non-existent, or abstract objects. By providing a plausible account of the continuity of lower cognition and language-involving cognition, my approach responds to this objection, at least where language is concerned. (shrink)

This essay aims to provide conceptual tools for the understanding of Wittgenstein’s theory of color as a grammar problem instead of a phenomenological or purely scientific one. From an introduction of his understanding of meaning in his early and late life, his notion of grammar will be analyzed to understand his rebuttal of scientific and phenomenological discourse as a proper means for dealing with the problem of color through his critique of Goethe. Then Wittgenstein’s take on color will become clear (...) as his sympathy for Runge, the painter that Goethe criticizes, is analyzed to understand color as a language-game regarding kinds of colors as numbers and geometrical figures, in that grammar rather than experience is used to acknowledge them. (shrink)

The Whorfian hypothesis has received support from recent findings in psychology, linguistics, and anthropology. This evidence has been interpreted as supporting the view that language modulates all stages of perception and cognition, in accordance with Whorf’s original proposal. In light of a much broader body of evidence on time perception, I propose to evaluate these findings with respect to their scope. When assessed collectively, the entire body of evidence on time perception shows that the Whorfian hypothesis (...) has a limited scope and that it does not affect early stages of time perception. In particular, all the available evidence shows that the scope of language modulation is limited in the case of time perception, and that the most important mechanisms for time perception are cognitive clocks and simultaneity windows, which we use to perceive the temporal properties of events. Language modulation has distorting effects, but only at later stages of processing or with respect to specific categorization tasks. The paper explains what is the role of these effects in the context of all the available evidence on time cognition and perception. (shrink)

The way Whitehead speaks of God in his "philosophy of organism," and the evaluation thereof, is the subject of this article. The background of this issue is the position—broadly shared in theology, and here represented by Aquinas—that one should not speak "carelessly" about God. Does Whitehead violate this rule, or does his language for God express God's otherness and relatedness to the world in a new, intriguing way? In order to answer this question, an introduction into Whitehead's philosophy is (...) given, and especially into his category of existence, the "actual entity." For Whitehead, God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence. His perception of the similarity and greater dissimilarity between God and the worldly actual entities (and clusters thereof) is analyzed. In the main and final section of this article, these insights are used as tools to decrypt Whitehead's God-language. Here, I compare the status of Whitehead's and Aquinas's statements about God, discuss Whitehead's ideas concerning the analogical character of concrete language, and argue that in Whitehead's philosophy too there is no discourse about God without a shift or breakdown of the "ordinary" meaning of language. (shrink)

This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers cannot (...) help making stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception, suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy. (shrink)

Through a close reading of Judith Butler's 1989 essay on Merleau-Ponty's “theory” of sexuality as well as the texts her argument hinges on, this paper addresses the debate about the relation between language and the living, gendered body as it is understood by defenders of poststructural theory on the one hand, and different interpretations of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology on the other. I claim that Butler, in her criticism of the French philosopher's analysis of the famous “Schneider case,” does not take (...) its wider context into account: either the case study that Merleau-Ponty's discussion is based upon, or its role in his phenomenology of perception. Yet, although Butler does point out certain blind spots in his descriptions regarding the gendered body, it is in the light of her questioning that the true radicality of Merleau-Ponty's ideas can be revealed. A further task for feminist phenomenology should be a thorough assessment of his philosophy from this angle, once the most obvious misunderstandings have been put to the side. (shrink)

George Berkeley's linguistic account of sense perception is one of the most central tenets of his philosophy. It is intended as a solution to a wide range of critical issues in both metaphysics and theology. However, it is not clear from Berkeley's writings just how this ‘universal language of the Author of Nature’ is to be interpreted. This paper discusses the nature of the theory of sense perception as language, together with its metaphysical and theological motivations, (...) then proceeds to develop an account of the semantics of the perceptual language, using Berkeley's theory of reference for human language as a guide. (shrink)

Although Hume appeals to the representational features of perceptions in many arguments in the Treatise, his theory of representation has traditionally been regarded as a weak link in his epistemology. In particular, it has proven difficult to reconcile Hume's use of representation as causal derivation and resemblance (the Copy Principle) with his use of representation in the context of impressions and abstract ideas. This paper offers a unified interpretation of representation in Hume that draws on the resources of Berkeley's doctrine (...) of signs. On this account, while the Copy Principle still occupies the core of Hume's "content empiricism," the manner in which any perception represents is understood as involving a relation of sign to thing signified. A sign/signified interpretation has the virtue of allowing Hume to remain within the strictures of his empiricism, while underwriting the various senses in which an impression or idea could possess content. Such an interpretation is not only adequate to account for the role that mental representations play in everyday behavior, but also for the purposes of elaborating the foundations of civil society that are Hume's concern in Book 3 of the Treatise. (shrink)

Perceptual and recursion-based faculties have long been recognized to be vital constituents of human (and, in general, animal) cognition. However, certain faculties such as the visual and the linguistic faculty have come to receive far more academic and experimental attention, in recent decades, than other recognized categories of faculties. This paper seeks to highlight the imbalance in these studies and bring into sharper focus the need for further in-depth philosophical treatments of faculties such as especially hearing, touch, and proprioception, besides (...) other faculties such as the olfactory and gustatory ones. It also seeks to bring to bear the debate on the role of qualia in perception and overall in cognition in its thesis of the significance of these other modular faculties for genuine insights into cognition as a (now) technologically expanded domain. (shrink)

In the current philosophy of perception, a debate about whether concepts permeate perceptual states in constituting the perceptual object or not has been widely discussed. Analytic philosophers and phenomenologists participate in this debate likewise, but it is also a debate in Kantian scholarship since the conceptualists’ thesis goes back to Kant’s Criticism and neo-Kantians already discussing such theory against any philosophy of immediate experience long before Wilfrid Sellars had started his attack against the so-called myth of the given. In (...) light of this historical panorama, the article reconstructs Ernst Cassirer’s views on perception in order to systematically reject both Conceptualism and Non-Conceptualism. It can be shown that both positions are uncritical stances which make claims to either the absoluteness of language or perception and that much-discussed arguments such as the fineness of grain argument rely on a category mistake. The proposed solution is a view that upholds the criticism against the myth of the given, but replaces the idea of a conceptual mediation of perceptual experience with a symbolic mediation. As a consequence, perception must perform a paradoxical feat and has thus to be elastic. (shrink)

What do we see when we look at someone's expression of fear? I argue that one of the things that we see is fear itself. I support this view by developing a theory of affect perception. The theory involves two claims. One is that expressions are patterns of facial changes that carry information about affects. The other is that the visual system extracts and processes such information. In particular, I argue that the visual system functions to detect the affects (...) of others when they are expressed in the face. I develop my theory by drawing on empirical data from psychology and brain science. Finally, I outline a theory of the semantics of affect perception. (shrink)

Sentences such as 'Chocolate tastes good' have been widely discussed as sentences that give rise to faultless disagreement. As such, they actually belong to the more general class of impersonal perception reports, which include 'The violin sounds / looks strange' as well sentences that are about an agent-centered situation such as 'It feels / seems like it is going to rain'. I maintain the view that faultless disagreement is due to first person-based genericity, which, roughly, consists in attributing a (...) property to anyone the speaker (or described agent) identifies with (which generally requires a first-person experience) (Moltmann 2010). Unlike my previous analysis (and similar analyses), this paper no longer makes use of experiencers or judges as implicit arguments of taste predicates, but argues that impersonal perception verbs (taste, look, feel, seem), have a logophoric character. More precisely, such verbs describe perceptual occurrences whose experiencer is identical to the agent of the utterance situation, described attitudinal situation, or the situations a generic operator may range over. Perceptual occurrences are sharply distinguished ontologically from perceptual experiences as well as perceptual objects, entities we refer to as ‘the taste of chocolate’, ‘the sound of the violin’, ‘the look of the violin’. Sentences about perceptual objects ('the taste of chocolate is good', 'the sound of the violin is great', 'the look of the violin is beautiful') also give rise to faultless disagreement, but the source of that is a first-person-based attribution of an evaluative predicate to an (objective) perceptual object. (shrink)

Objective. Conceptualization of the definition of space as a semantic unit of language consciousness. -/- Materials & Methods. A structural-ontological approach is used in the work, the methodology of which has been tested and applied in order to analyze the subject matter area of psychology, psycholinguistics and other social sciences, as well as in interdisciplinary studies of complex systems. Mathematical representations of space as a set of parallel series of events (Alexandrov) were used as the initial theoretical basis of (...) the structural-ontological analysis. In this case, understanding of an event was considered in the context of the definition adopted in computer science – a change in the object properties registered by the observer. -/- Results. The negative nature of space realizes itself in the subject-object structure, the components interaction of which is characterized by a change – a key property of the system under study. Observer’s registration of changes is accompanied by spatial focusing (situational concretization of the field of changes) and relating of its results with the field of potentially distinguishable changes (subjective knowledge about «changing world»). The indicated correlation performs the function of space identification in terms of recognizing its properties and their subjective significance, depending on the features of the observer`s motivational sphere. As a result, the correction of the actual affective dynamics of the observer is carried out, which structures the current perception of space according to principle of the semantic fractal. Fractalization is a formation of such a subjective perception of space, which supposes the establishment of semantic accordance between the situational field of changes, on the one hand, and the worldview, as well as the motivational characteristics of the observer, on the other. -/- Conclusions. Performed structural-ontological analysis of the system formed by the interaction of the perceptual function of the psyche and the semantic field of the language made it possible to conceptualize the space as a field of changes potentially distinguishable by the observer, structurally organized according to the principle of the semantic fractal. The compositional features of the fractalization process consist in fact that the semantic fractal of space is relevant to the product of the difference between the situational field of changes and the field of potentially distinguishable changes, adjusted by the current configuration of the observer`s value-needs hierarchy and reduced by his actual affective dynamics. (shrink)

Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs: (i) discrete constituents; (ii) role-filler independence; (iii) predicate–argument structure; (iv) logical operators; (v) (...) inferential promiscuity; and (vi) abstract content. These properties cluster together throughout cognitive science. Bayesian computational modeling, compositional features of object perception, complex infant and animal reasoning, and automatic, intuitive cognition in adults all implicate LoT-like structures. Instead of regarding LoT as a relic of the previous century, researchers in cognitive science and philosophy-of-mind must take seriously the explanatory breadth of LoT-based architectures. We grant that the mind may harbor many formats and architectures, including iconic and associative structures as well as deep-neural-network-like architectures. However, as computational/representational approaches to the mind continue to advance, classical compositional symbolic structures – that is, LoTs – only prove more flexible and well-supported over time. (shrink)

This study proposes a framework by which grammatically and syntactically sound sentences are classified through the perceptual measurement in noise of multilinguals and monolinguals, using an objective measure called SPERI and an interpretivist measure called SPIn, with results evaluated using Shortlist models and the BLINCS model. Hereby filling a knowledge gap on the perception of sentences that combine in varying levels of contextual meaning, linguistic load and cognitive load, this study used sentence clustering methods to find limitations of the (...) proposed framework in determining an absolute and accurate prediction of performance between sentences in the proposed different categories, with factors such as sentence predictability and word frequency taking precedence. There were unintended findings including a relationship between the number of languages spoken and performance, proficiency in other languages decreasing performance despite being an English Native, and how mistakes by multilinguals were more semantically and phonetically influenced than monolinguals. (shrink)

A discussion of connections between modern language and the earliest artifacts of the emergence of the symbolic mind.

Traditional views concerning musical meaning, in the field of philosophy, quite often oscillate around the discussion of whether music can transfer meaning (and if so if it happens by a means similar to language). Philosophers have provided a wide range of views – according to some, music has no meaning whatsoever, or if there is any meaning involved, it is only of a formal/structural significance. According to the opposing views, music can contain meaning similarly to language and what (...) is more, sometimes it can be even richer than language, as in music we are – arguably – able to encode “emotional meanings”. In recent years, several approaches – also speculative – to the old philosophical question have been proposed by evolutionary psychologists, one of the most controversial views being that of Stephen Pinker’s famous metaphor for music as “auditory cheesecake”. This anti-adaptationist view has been challenged f. ex. by Geoffrey Miller or Ian Cross. In this chapter, I enlist some main philosophical views on the titular problem and investigate some evolutionary-paradigm-based propositions for its solution, to examine whether – both from explanatory and methodological standpoints – the philosophy of music could gain something from recent developments in evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

In this essay, our goal is to discover science in Martin Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, lecture notes for his 1935 summer semester course, because, after all, his subject is metaphysica generalis, or ontology, and this could be construed as a theory of the human brain. Here, by means of verbatim quotes from his text, we attempt to show that indeed these lectures can be viewed as suggestion for an objective scientific theory of human perception, the human capacity for deciphering (...) phenomena, ie. hermeneutics in its broadest sense. His added notes from the 1953 edition, all of which are comments, not corrections, imply that he never abandoned these thoughts on metaphysics, despite all of his utterances about a need to overcome it, and their popular interpretations to that effect. In his presentation, he further develops the colorful and intuitive style, an hermeneutic language, that he had created in his earlier work Being and Time. Of human existence he speaks in such expressions as being-there -- ``Dasein" -- and being-in-the-world, the latter term no longer explicit in the 1935 lectures. The lectures can be read as a pre-scientific analysis of how man, being-there, perceives his environment, artfully managing to deal with the manifold challenges posed by the phenomenal structures of the universe. Man attentively recognizes and deciphers their pre-linguistic contents and, while trying to make sense of it all, puts into words his awareness. There are numerous passages in Heidegger's work where he in fairly concrete terms provides us with hints for a perceptive science that, as it turns out and is demonstrated below in this essay, can be explained in terms of recent advances in neuroscience. It would be implausible, even unthinkable, unimaginable, for there not to be found essential agreement between on one hand his philosophical insights gained by hermeneutics of Dasein, into how our brain functions to let us know what's happening & on the other hand, scientific discoveries obtained through anatomy, EEG, fMRI, TMS, electrode implants, etc, of brain structures & functions employed in perception of the momentary scene. A nexus between science and philosophy is provided in Heidegger's definitive treatment of the Logos, here interpreted as a structural version of Platonic forms (Burchard, 2014). This allows for neurolinguistic brain functions to serve as meta-context for Heidegger's being-in-the-world. The logical functions of Dasein's anatomical brain are performed by the logos machine, formerly the human soul, using top-down processing based on a global context, the noumenal cosmos which humans maintain internally. Heidegger's 1942/43 winter semester lectures Parmenides extend in unbroken fashion his 1935 work, proving that he never abandoned, as is widely claimed, his metaphysical avenue of thought. (shrink)

Sense-perceptions do not have to be deciphered if their contents are to be uploaded, the reason being that they are presentations, not representations. Linguistic expressions do have to be deciphered if their contents are to be uploaded, the reason being that they are representations, not presentations. It is viciously regressive to suppose that information-bearing mental entities are categorically in the nature of representations, as opposed to presentations, and it is therefore incoherent to suppose that thought is mediated by expressions or, (...) therefore, by linguistic entities. Attempts to neutralize this criticism inevitably overextend the concept of what it is to be a linguistic symbol, the result being that such attempts eviscerate the very position that it is their purpose to defend. Also, it is inherent in the nature of such attempts that they assume the truth of the view that for a given mental entity to bear this as opposed to that information is for that entity to have this as opposed to that causal role. This view is demonstrably false, dooming to failure the just-mentioned attempts to defend the contention that thought is in all cases mediated by linguistic symbols. (shrink)

Remembering a cat sleeping (specifically, recollecting the way the cat looked), perceiving (specifically, seeing) a cat sleeping, and imagining (specifically, visualizing) a cat sleeping are of course importantly different. Nonetheless, from the first-person perspective they are palpably alike. The paper addresses two questions: Q1. What are these similarities (and differences)? Q2. How does one tell that one is recalling (and so not perceiving or imagining)?

In her ‘Spracherwerb’(2012) Ruth Millikan gives a compelling account of language acquisition based on our ability to track objects. I argue that, and how, it is undermined by her insistence on equating understanding language utterances and sense perception, point to idealist hazards, and plead against propositionality and for imagism in order to safeguard the account’s important potential for giving a comprehensive explication of meaning.

In this chapter, I critically examine two of the main approaches to colour categorization in cognitive science: the perceptual salience theory and linguistic relativism. I then turn to reviewing several decades of psychological research on colour categorical perception (CP). A careful assessment of relevant findings suggests that most of the experimental effects that have been understood in terms of CP actually fall on the cognition side of the perception-cognition divide: they are effects of colour language, for example, (...) on memory or decision-making. (shrink)

We face reality presented with the data of conscious experience and nothing else. The project of early modern philosophy was to build a complete theory of the world from this starting point, with no cheating. Crucial to this starting point is the data of conscious sensory experience – sense data. Attempts to avoid this project often argue that the very idea of sense data is confused. But the sense-data way of talking, the sense-data language, can be freed from every (...) blemish using ideas from contemporary metaontology. We can adopt a sense-data framework that vindicates the traditional claims of sense-data theories and leads to plausible theories of perception and color. We can, we should, and in a sense, we must. Yet when we do, we face the traditional problem of external world skepticism, head-on. The real challenge of skepticism is forced upon us; it cannot honestly be avoided using externalist tricks, burden of proof shifting, or other razzle dazzle. But the challenge can be met: we are rational to posit the external world as the best explanation of the many synchronic and diachronic patterns over our sense-data. This paper argues for all of these points and ends with a plea for analytic empiricism – a traditional sense-data version of empiricism that uses all of the tools of analytic philosophy while avoiding the more questionable doctrines of the Vienna Circle (phenomenalism, verificationism). Analytic empiricism is our last best hope for completing the great philosophical project of early modern philosophy. (shrink)

Non-representational approaches to cognition have struggled to provide accounts of long-term planning that forgo the use of representations. An explanation comes easier for cognitivist accounts, which hold that we concoct and use contentful mental representations as guides to coordinate a series of actions towards an end state. One non-representational approach, ecological-enactivism, has recently seen several proposals that account for “high-level” or “representation-hungry” capacities, including long-term planning and action coordination. In this paper, we demonstrate the explanatory gap in these accounts that (...) stems from avoiding the incorporation of long-term intentions, as they play an important role both in action coordination and perception on the ecological account. Using recent enactive accounts of language, we argue for a non-representational conception of intentions, their formation, and their role in coordinating pre-reflective action. We provide an account for the coordination of our present actions towards a distant goal, a skill we call distal engagement. Rather than positing intentions as an actual cognitive entity in need of explanation, we argue that we take them up in this way as a practice due to linguistically scaffolded attitudes towards language use. (shrink)

At first blush, phenomenology seems to be concerned preeminently with questions of knowledge, truth, and perception, and yet closer inspection reveals that the analyses of these phenomena remain bound up with language and that consequently phenomenology is, inextricably, a philosophy of language. Drawing on the insights of a variety of phenomenological authors, including Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, this collection of essays by leading scholars articulates the distinctively phenomenological contribution to language by examining two sets (...) of questions. The first set of questions concerns the relatedness of language to experience. Studies exhibit the first-person character of the philosophy of language by focusing on lived experience, the issue of reference, and disclosive speech. The second set of questions concerns the relatedness of language to intersubjective experience. Studies exhibit the second-person character of the philosophy of language by focusing on language acquisition, culture, and conversation. This book will be of interest to scholars of phenomenology and philosophy of language. (shrink)

Quilty-Dunn et al.'s wide-ranging defense of the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH) argues that vision traffics in abstract, structured representational formats. We agree: Vision, like language, is compositional – just as words compose into phrases, many visual representations contain discrete constituents that combine in systematic ways. Here, we amass evidence extending this proposal, and explore its implications for how vision interfaces with the rest of the mind.

This paper refines a controversial proposal: that core systems belong to a perceptual kind, marked out by the format of its representational outputs. Following Susan Carey, this proposal has been understood in terms of core representations having an iconic format, like certain paradigmatically perceptual outputs. I argue that they don’t, but suggest that the proposal may be better formulated in terms of a broader analogue format type. Formulated in this way, the proposal accommodates the existence of genuine icons in (...) class='Hi'>perception, and avoids otherwise troubling objections. (shrink)

The paper builds on a methodological idea from experimental philosophy and on findings from psycholinguistics, to develop and defend ordinary language analysis (OLA) as practiced in J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. That attack on sense-datum theories of perception focuses on the argument from illusion. Through a case-study on this paradoxical argument, the present paper argues for a form of OLA which is psychologically informed, seeks to expose epistemic, rather than semantic, defects in paradoxical arguments, and is immune to (...) the main objections to ordinary language philosophising, including those arising from the semantic/pragmatics distinction: A key project in current experimental philosophy is to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions that help us determine what warrant thinkers have for accepting them. Psycholinguistic work on the role of stereotypes in verb-comprehension has shown that intuitive judgments can be generated by automatic cognitive processes that duplicate both semantic and pragmatic inferences and are shaped by dominant uses of words. For systematic reasons, philosophers are prone to unwittingly deviate from such dominant uses. Where this happens, they are liable to automatically infer unwarranted conclusions that strike them as intuitively compelling. OLA helps us to determine those dominant uses, to identify unwitting deviations from them, and thus to expose unwarranted intuitions – e.g., in the premises of paradoxical arguments. Ordinary language does not determine the bounds of sense but shapes our leaps of thought. The paper shows how this enables its ‘Austinian’ analysis to contribute to a novel, epistemic, resolution of philosophical paradoxes and problems. (shrink)

This article starts from the assumption that there is a connection between art and language and responsibility. What is it based on? It follows on from the research of the Hamburg Circle in the 1920s by Ernst Cassirer and Aby M. Warburg, and was strengthened in the 2000s by Hartmut Böhme. Their joint starting point is the emotional life of human beings. Thus, they assume that already the perception is shaped by it and can be increased in rituals. (...) Comparably hardly noticed by us, it continues to have an effect in art and language and thus influences the recipient. From this derives the demand that both the one who speaks and the one who is creatively active bears responsibility for his or her doing. With the knowledge of the effect of art and language, however, the recipient is also required to take responsibility for his actions influenced by it. The article aims to show this connection, which is deeply rooted in the nature of human beings. -/- The article was originally published in German. It has now been translated by the author with the kind permission of the Evangelical Church in Germany. Additions were made only in the notes and in the bibliography. The concept for the text goes back to a conference of the Evangelical Academy of the Martin Luther City of Wittenberg (Saxony). On this basis, the author was invited to contribute to the publication of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) Mitteilungen—Zur Erneuerung evangelischer Predigtkultur (Kirche im Aufbruch 5), edited by Kathrin Oxen and Dietrich Sagert. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2013. The selection of the text for this issue of Art Style Magazine was based on one of the fundamental ideals of Metropolis, which sees itself as democratic and based on the responsibility of each member in dealing with art and language. (shrink)

Sight is a capacity, and seeing is its exercise. Reflection on the sense in which sight is for the sake of seeing reveals distinct relations of dependence between sight and seeing, the capacity and its exercise. Moreover, these relations of dependence in turn reveal the nature of our perceptual capacities and their exercise. Specifically, if sight is for the sake of seeing, then sight will depend, in a certain sense, upon seeing, in a manner inconsistent with experiential monism. Thus reflection (...) on the power of perception forms the basis of an argument for experiential pluralism. (shrink)

In his initial lecture course at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty attempted to develop a new analysis of rational thought in order to clarify its link with corporeal-perceptive life. The formulation of thought in language as the most elaborate human activity of expression explicitly takes over what we already observe in perception as the implicit and mutual reference between the perceiving subject and that which is perceived.The article reconstructs Merleau-Ponty’s argumentation, based on his preparatory notes for the lectures, (...) and provides an interpretation of the key concepts of “expression” and “body schema”. [In Czech Language]. (shrink)

Many studies have been conducted to investigate the implementation of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in ESL and EFL contexts, but those conducted in EFL context, have reported that the application of CLT was challenging. Still, as far as the Afghan EFL context is concerned, there is a lack of empirical research investigating the issue. Hence, the purpose of this study is to explore afghan EFL lecturers’ perceived challenges in practicing CLT. The study also aims to examine if there is (...) any significant relationship among teachers use of CLT, the perceived challenges, and their demographic profiles. This study uses a quantitative research approach in which a survey questionnaire was given to EFL lecturers teaching in a public university. The results of the study revealed that the EFL lecturers had positive perceptions of using CLT activities, as there were evidence of a number of major CLT activities conducted in their classrooms. The results also revealed that they faced certain challenges that prevented them from implementing CLT effectively. Furthermore, significant correlation was found between students’ related challenges and teachers’ perceptions of using CLT; however, no significant correlations were found among teachers’ demographic profiles and CLT perceived challenges. This research is significant since it could be used as a resource presenting a comprehensive picture of CLT implementation in EFL classrooms in Afghanistan. (shrink)

Like cognition, the language in which the cognition finds expression has, in principle, a function of synthesis, that is, a function of connecting the cognizing subject with the object of cognition. The language enables the human subject to have epistemic access to the object; in its form and function this epistemic access constitutes the necessary referentiality of the language itself. Cognition must inevitably refer to the object of knowledge in the mode of pre-linguistic sensory and abstract-conceptual accesses, (...) as clearly highlighted by Kant in his basic notion of the synthetic nature and structure of conceptual knowledge. This points to an aporetic ambiguity of the epistemic referentiality of language. In the process of cognition the subject should have an epistemic access to the particular. However, the conceptual cognition departs from the particular and is directed to a general universal idea. The ambiguity between the referential access and the referential departure in cognition necessarily requires a supplementation of the abstractlogical through the pre-linguistic-sensory or aesthetic knowledge, as emphasized by Alexander G. Baumgarten in his doctrine of sensory cognition (cognitio sensitiva) and the aesthetic-logical truth. Such a supplementation within the framework of a theory of perception seems to establish a unique form of epistemological reference, in which the subjective-epistemic access to the particular object does not terminate in the ontological finality of a concept or conceptual cognition, but transcends the cognition into the infinity of an aesthetic perception. (shrink)

Apart from what (little) OpenAI may be concealing from us, we all know (roughly) how ChatGPT works (its huge text database, its statistics, its vector representations, and their huge number of parameters, its next-word training, and so on). But none of us can say (hand on heart) that we are not surprised by what ChatGPT has proved to be able to do with these resources. This has even driven some of us to conclude that ChatGPT actually understands. It is not (...) true that it understands. But it is also not true that we understand how it can do what it can do. I will suggest some hunches about benign biases: convergent constraints that emerge at LLM scale that may be helping ChatGPT do so much better than we would have expected. These biases are inherent in the nature of language itself, at LLM scale, and they are closely linked to what it is that ChatGPT lacks, which is direct sensorimotor grounding to connect its words to their referents and its propositions to their meanings. These convergent biases are related to (1) the parasitism of indirect verbal grounding on direct sensorimotor grounding, (2) the circularity of verbal definition, (3) the mirroring of language production and comprehension, (4) iconicity in propositions at LLM scale, (5) computational counterparts of human categorical perception in category learning by neural nets, and perhaps also (6) a conjecture by Chomsky about the laws of thought. The exposition will be in the form of a dialogue with ChatGPT-4. (shrink)

As so often in philosophy, the title not only lays down the battle line but exposes the author’s biases and mistakes, since whether or not we can make sense of the language game ‘Seeing things as they are’ and whether it’s possible to have a ‘philosophical’ ‘theory of perception’ (which can only be about how the language of perception works), as opposed to a scientific one, which is a theory about how the brain works, are exactly (...) the issues. This is classic Searle—superb and probably at least as good as anyone else can produce, but lacking a full understanding of the fundamental insights of the later Wittgenstein and with no grasp of the two systems of thought framework, which could have made it brilliant. As in his previous work, Searle largely avoids scientism but there are frequent lapses and he does not grasp that the issues are always about language games, a failing he shares with nearly everyone. After providing a framework consisting of a Table of Intentionality based on the two systems of thought and thinking and decision research, I give a detailed analysis of the book. -/- Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019). (shrink)

Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue (...) are artefacts of fallacious reasoning. The approach is capable, and in need of, empirical development. Proceeding from a case-study on Austin’s paradigmatic treatment of the problem of perception, this paper identifies the key empirical assumptions informing the approach, assesses them in the light of empirical findings about default inferences, contextualisation failures, and belief fragmentation, and explores how these findings can be deployed to address the problem of perception. This facilitates a novel resolution of the problem of perception. Proceeding from this paradigm, the paper proposes ‘experimental critical OLP’ as a new research program in experimental philosophy that avoids apparent non-sequiturs of OLP, extends and transforms experimental philosophy’s ‘sources program’, and provides a promising new strategy for deploying empirical findings about how people ordinarily talk and think about phenomena, to address longstanding philosophical problems. (shrink)

This essay characterizes the perception of the visual hybrid as nonconceptual, introducing the terminology of nonconceptual content theory to aesthetics. The visual hybrid possesses a radical but nonetheless exemplary aesthetic composition and is well established in culture, art, and even design. The essay supplies a philosophical analysis of the results of cross-cultural experiments, showing that while categorization or conceptual hierarchization kicks in when the visual hybrids are juxtaposed with linguistic descriptions, no conceptual scheme takes effect when participants are presented (...) with mere visual hybrids. In isolation, the hybrids do not lend themselves to classification. I draw four conclusions from these experimental outcomes: 1. The perception of visual hybrids follows the structure of a nonconceptual mental content, because the original categories or concepts of the hybrids’ components are not combined into one, and their properties are not applied to one another, therefore none of the components reconstructs the other such that it is introduced to a new category. 2. Language freezes the hybridity of the visual hybrid into conceptuality. 3. Given that language has a freezing effect in the case of an extreme visual phenomenon such as the hybrid, it is all the more restraining in moderate artistic compositions, such as visual metaphors, in which properties of one component (the source) are applied to the other (the target). In those, nonconceptuality emerges from relatively organized compositions, forms, and relations, and from the dependence of objects and their properties on perceptual context. 4. Thus, the nonconceptualist terminology is suitable for the analysis of aesthetic perception in general and aesthetic perception’s relation to language. Keywords aesthetics, perception, nonconceptual content, hybrids, visual metaphors. (shrink)