The present paper argues that when thematic roles are restricted to judgments about causal properties of events, it falls short of accounting for cases where thematic roles reflect judgments about dispositional properties of objects. I develop my argument with a case study on a class of verbs that have been called ‘Emission Verbs’ and which are difficult to bring in line with the unaccusativity hypothesis put forward by Perlmutter. Reviewing two diametrically opposed accounts of Emission Verbs in the literature, I (...) show that the thematic-semantic relation between the events described by Emission Verbs and their single arguments cannot be characterized unambiguously in terms of causal properties of events but pertains to dispositional properties residing in the emitter argument. The paper develops a lexical-semantic analysis of Emission Verbs according to which the event described by an Emission Verb is the manifestation of the dispositional property of the emitter argument when appropriate external circumstances obtain. The paper concludes by outlining how the proposed dispositional analysis of Emission Verbs may inform the analysis of the causative alternation. (shrink)

What is the relationship between complexity in the world and complexity in the mind? Intuitively, increasingly complex objects and events should give rise to increasingly complex mental representations (or perhaps a plateau in complexity after a certain point). However, a counterintuitive possibility with roots in information theory is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the “objective” complexity of some stimulus and the complexity of its mental representation, because excessively complex patterns might be characterized by surprisingly short computational descriptions (e.g., if (...) they are represented as having been generated “randomly”). Here, we demonstrate that this is the case, using a novel approach that takes the notion of “description” literally. Subjects saw static and dynamic visual stimuli whose objective complexity could be carefully manipulated, and they described these stimuli in their own words by giving freeform spoken descriptions of them. Across three experiments totaling over 10,000 speech clips, spoken descriptions of shapes (Experiment 1), dot-arrays (Experiment 2), and dynamic motion-paths (Experiment 3) revealed a striking quadratic relationship between the raw complexity of these stimuli and the length of their spoken descriptions. In other words, the simplest and most complex stimuli received the shortest descriptions, while those stimuli with a “medium” degree of complexity received the longest descriptions. Follow-up analyses explored the particular words used by subjects, allowing us to further explore how such stimuli were represented. We suggest that the mind engages in a kind of lossy compression for overly complex stimuli, and we discuss the utility of such freeform responses for exploring foundational questions about mental representation. (shrink)

This chapter evaluates the defective verbal paradigms in the Hungarian language. The first section of the chapter provides an overview of the defectiveness in Hungarian, with emphasis on the systematic, phonotactically motivated defectiveness of the paradigms of some verbal stems. The aim of this section is to be as theoretically neutral and descriptive as possible to facilitate a good comparison with other types of defectiveness in other languages. The second section of the chapter discusses the results of the (...) experiments which are conducted in order to determine the various aspects of the defectiveness in the verbal paradigm. Some of the aspects tested include: the gap locations such as the occurrence and variation of forms in other designated cells of the verbal paradigm, and the correlations between the occurrence of forms in some designated cells; and the gap properties such as the differences in the classification of some verb stems into various stem-classes, and the range of variation exhibited by the forms that native Hungarian speakers accept as fill-ins for the gaps that are present in the paradigms of the defective verbs. (shrink)

By far the largest part of Nehemiah Grew?s account of a seventeenth?century collection of rarities, his Musæum Regalis Societatis (1685) is taken up with ?thick?, verbal descriptions of things in the Royal Society?s repository. Not only, Grew suggests, do his descriptions serve to signify the contents of his collection, but they enable us to discern among species and to think about the collection?s pieces in new ways. Verbal descriptions did not just signify things in the (...) Royal Society?s collection, but had the capacity to alter their meanings. The essay discusses the ?picturing? of natural things in Early Modern Europe with little direct reference to the contemporary media of graphic representation ? drawings, engravings, paintings etc. ? in order to highlight the role of the then most widely used, but now least discussed of these media, verbal descriptions. (shrink)

: Erich Auerbach's famous comparative study of Homer and the Bible, "Odysseus' Scar," argues that their contrastive styles derive from the different possibilities available to oral tradition and literature. In support of this thesis, I invoke two theories of verbal art: Walter Benjamin's description of the storyteller's craft, and Victor Shklovsky's definition of art as "defamiliarization." Through a comparative analysis of the use of type-scenes in Homer and in biblical narrative, I demonstrate how Homer is a traditional storyteller, practicing (...) an "art of the familiar," whereas biblical narrative "defamiliarizes" traditional forms. (shrink)

This article argues that many, if not most, behavior descriptions and sequencing are in essence an interpretation of signs, and are evaluated as sequences of signs by researchers. Thus, narrative analysis, as developed by Barthes and others, seems best suited to be used in behavioral/biosemiotic studies rather than mathematical modeling, and is very similar to some classic ethology methods. As our brain interprets behaviors as signs and attributes meaning to them, narrative analysis seems more suitable than mathematical modeling to (...) describe and study behavior. Mathematical models are, on many occasions, extremely reductionist and simplifying because of computational and/or numerical representation limitations that lead to errors and straitjacketing interpretations of reality. Since actual animals are not as optimal in real life as our mathematical models, here it is proposed that we should consider logical/verbal models and semantic interpretations as equally or even better suited for behavioral analysis, and refrain from enforcing mathematical modeling as the only way to study and understand biological problems, especially those of a behavioral and biosemiotic nature. (shrink)

Nicholas and Joseph (this volume) identify a class of previously unnoticed compounds of the form V+V in modern Greek, and establish some significant descriptive generalizations about them. They argue that V+V compounds are true morphological compound words, the verbal analogs of nominal dvandva compounds, and not syntactic phrases or verb clusters. The existence of such compounds in Greek is interesting because true dvandva compounds in most languages (including all other Indo-European languages, it seems) are restricted to the nominal domain. (...) N&J present historical data which suggests that the first attested examples of verbal dvandvas come from postclassical nominal dvandvas by back-formation plus reanalysis. (shrink)

128 female Ss were asked to make 4 judgments about a young woman after reading her "job application portfolio." Five characteristics of the young woman were manipulated orthogonally. Ss were asked to report how each of the 5 manipulated factors had influenced each of their judgments. "Observer Ss," who had access only to very impoverished descriptions of each of the 5 factors, were asked to predict how each of the factors would influence each of the judgments. Results show that (...) S reports about the effects of the factors on the judgments were in general highly inaccurate; observer predictions were extremely similar to S reports; for the single judgment for which Ss showed substantial accuracy, observer predictions were as accurate as S reports. Results indicate that whatever introspective access to cognitive processes may exist, it is not sufficient to produce generally accurate reports about such processes, nor even to produce reports that differ much from those of poorly informed outside observers. (shrink)

Ensemble rehearsal in the European classical music tradition has a relatively homogenised format in which play-through, discussion, and practice of excerpts are employed to establish and agree on performance parameters of notated music. This research analyses patterns in such verbal communication during rehearsals and their development over time. Analysing two newly established ensembles that work over several months to a performance, it investigates the interaction dynamics of two closely collaborating groups and adaptation depending on task demands, familiarity with each (...) other and an upcoming deadline. A case study approach with two groups of five singers allowed in-depth exploration of individual behaviours and contributions; results are reported descriptively and supported by qualitative data. The results highlight changes over time that reflect the development of implicit interactions from explicit. They show a trajectory of opening up and closing down in terms of interactional flexibility, enabling members to significantly contribute to the group, followed by tightening the interaction to establish stability for performance. These findings and novel employment of T-pattern analysis contribute to the understanding of human group behaviour and interaction patterns leading to expert team performance. (shrink)

Recent proposals for a return to introspective methods make it necessary to review the central problems that led psychologists to abandon those methods as sources of scientific data in the early twentieth century. These problems and other related challenges to verbal reports collected during the cognitive revolution during the 1960s and 1970s were discussed in Ericsson and Simon's proposal for a theoretically motivated procedure to elicit valid and non- reactive concurrent verbalization of thoughts while subjects were performing tasks. The (...) same proposal explains why other verbal reports, such as introspections, detailed descriptions or explanations, require additional cognitive activity that often leads to reactivity and invalid reports. Finally, a new proposal is sketched for how the generation of introspective reports might be incorporated within a framework for non-reactive and valid verbalization of thoughts. (shrink)

This study investigated whether brain neural activity that accompanied the processing of previously learned map information was influenced by the modality in which the spatial parameters of the maps were originally learned. Participants learned a map by either viewing it directly or by reading an equivalent verbal description. Following learning, the participants' ability to use their spatial knowledge was tested in a spatial orientation task. Electrophysiological recordings identified significant effects of prior learning modality on event‐related brain activity within 300 (...) ms following the presentation of map orientation instructions. The results indicate that modality‐specificity in spatial memory is present at a very early stage of processing. (shrink)

This study provides evidence that eye movements reflect the positions of objects while participants listen to a spoken description, retell a previously heard spoken description, and describe a previously seen picture. This effect is equally strong in retelling from memory, irrespective of whether the original elicitation was spoken or visual. In addition, this effect occurs both while watching a blank white board and while sitting in complete darkness. This study includes 4 experiments. The first 2 experiments measured eye movements of (...) participants looking at a blank white board. Experiment 1 monitors eye movements of participants on 2 occasions: first, when participants listened to a prerecorded spoken scene description; second, when participants were later retelling it from memory. Experiment 2 first monitored eye movements of participants as they studied a complex picture visually, and then later as they described it from memory. The second pair of experiments (Experiments 3 and 4) replicated Experiments 1 and 2 with the only difference being that they were executed in complete darkness. This method of analysis differentiated between eye movements that are categorically correct relative to the positions of the whole eye gaze pattern (global correspondence) and eye movements that are only locally correct (local correspondence). The discussion relates the findings to the current debate on mental imagery. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to examine some actual examples of written verbal irony that contain apposition. Meta-linguistic knowledge about apposition as a syntactic structure is claimed to be involved in the interpretation process of the utterance and especially in recognizing the victim of the irony. This discussion demonstrates the interdependence between apposition, its echoic quality in particular cases, and the victim of the irony. Since syntactic structure may serve as a cue to indirect meaning, pointing at the (...) specific meta-linguistic knowledge used for interpreting ironic utterances may enrich the discussion and enhance the description of the interpretation process. Different types of echoing are demonstrated and examined. The analysis also suggests that untruthfulness may serve mainly as a cue to the presence of irony, rather than as an essential component of this phenomenon. (shrink)

In this paper I intend to present a philosophical account of what is commonly called verbal or literary art. Starting from the Hegelian conception of language and of the aesthetic experience, I shall argue that literary, and more specifically poetic, discourse can be defined as the verbal completion of an aesthetic experience, and that this distinctive feature marks off literary discourse from other types of discourse, such as scientific and philosophical discourse. In his phenomenological description of the growth (...) of a subject's identity, Hegel situates the birth of language in the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness. In his Philosophy of Fine Art, this transition also marks the locus philosophicus of the artistic experience. (shrink)

The present article devoted to non-verbal means of describing main characters in fiction. On the basis of a gothic science fiction novel by A. Carter ‘Nights in the Circus‘, elements of character portrayal, namely descriptive, symbolic, and expressive means of non-verbal representation of a hero are analyzed. Their role in rendering the inner-states of a personage is also revealed in the article. During the analysis, it was discovered that descriptive non-verbal means of communication such as body movements (...) and gestures prevail in the text, which can be explained by the fact that emotional state of the character is revealed by her appearance and behavior. The second place is given to expressive and symbolic non-verbal elements describing heroine’s look, intonation, and mimics. Summing everything up, non-verbal means help to understand the plot fully and comprehend character’s inner-world better. (shrink)

To understand the dynamics of the verbalization of surprise, I will start with the philosophical theoretical place that is, in my opinion, the most remarkable in terms of the descriptive phenomenology of surprise, namely, its approach by Paul Ricœur in Freedom and Nature in terms of what he calls “emotion-surprise.” This theoretical position will lead me to retrace, in a second step, the archeology of what Ricoeur calls the “circular phenomenon” or the “circular process” of surprise, which includes body language (...) in a burst of "shaking" and the language of cognitive as well as aesthetic "shock". There is an a priori antinomy here that is based on a post-Cartesian duality of the body and the mind, but it is circularized by Ricoeur. On the basis of this dual model of surprise, I will retrace its genealogy in a number of authors and will analyze some first-person descriptions that come from “microphenomenological interviews” [ entretiens d’explicitation ]. (shrink)

Depression is ranked as most common type of mental illness by the World Health Organization. Although cognitive behavioural therapy is recommended as the evidence-based psychological treatment of choice, this applies mostly to youthful, attractive, verbal, intelligent and successful persons with medical aid support in high income countries. More holistic counselling that includes holistic, verbal and non-verbal, expressive therapeutic modalities are more suitable for the planetary majority. Consequently, this study describes the process and effectiveness of philophonetics counselling with (...) a sample of ten depressed clients seeking clinical psychological services in Zululand, South Africa, a region and country beset with considerable violence, crime illness and unemployment. Client reports of effectiveness of philophonetics counselling warrants further intervention and evaluative research, with special reference to wider community psychological applications of this expressive therapeutic modality via primary health care facilities, online courses and mobile technology. (shrink)

Scientific psychology involves both identifying and classifying phenomena of interest (description) and revealing the causes and mechanisms that contribute towards these phenomena arising (explanation). Within personality psychology, some propose that aspects of behavior and cognition can be explained with reference to personality traits. However, certain conceptual and logical issues cast doubt upon the adequacy of traits as coherent explanatory constructs. This paper discusses ?explanation? in psychology and the problems of circularity and reification. An analysis of relations and intrinsic properties is (...) then developed to address the logical requirements necessary for circumventing these problems. An examination of McCrae and Costa's defense of traits as explanatory constructs, in terms of ?tendencies? and ?dispositions? highlights logical issues that prevent traits, so defined, from explaining trait-like behaviors and cognitions. The logical requirements for a coherent trait-explanatory account are outlined and possible explanatory directions in trait-approaches are discussed. The ongoing tendency towards fallacious reasoning in psychology and suggestions for preventing this are further examined. (shrink)

Through the comparison with famous statues, Lycinus, in Lucian’s „Imagines“, makes a verbal portrait of a beautiful woman he has caught sight of. The portrait of her virtues is preceeded by a section where she appears with a book in her hands, while talking to someone. This paper argues that such a description is modelled on a specific iconographic scheme: after Lycinus’ verbal sculpture, the woman has actually become a statue. But she also has the limits of a (...) sculpture: although she is speaking, she cannot be heard. The following revelation of the woman’s identity, conveyed through an allusion to Xenophon’s tale of Panthea, serves the purpose of showing the superiority of literature over the visual arts: Xenophon’s account − a literary work − is said to be able to create what visual arts cannot, i. e. the illusion of sound. (shrink)

The aim of this note is to analyze the problems connected with con- straints on descriptions imposed by limitations of knowledge and/or observability, and constraints imposed by the language used.

The article defines a new referential problem of ethnographic description: the verbalization of the “silent” dimension of the social. As a documentary procedure, description has been devalued by more advanced recording techniques that set a naturalistic standard concerning the reification of qualitative “data.” I discuss this standard from the perspective of the sociology of knowledge and replace it by a challenge unknown to all empirical procedures relying on primary verbalizations of informants. Descriptions have to solve the problems of the (...) voiceless, the silent, the unspeakable, the pre-linguistic, and the indescribable. Ethnography puts something into words, which did not exist in language before. To respond to this task, descriptions have to turn away from the logic of recording and develop into a theory-oriented research practice. (shrink)

Nineteen teachers took part in a brief, one session, in?service course in which they were trained in behavioural techniques with the main aim of helping them increase their rates of approval contingent upon required behaviours from their pupils and to decrease their rates of disapproval. Subsidiary aims were that the teachers would be enabled to alter the balance of approval/disapproval given to academic and social behaviours, to increase the rate of approval given to group behaviours, to increase the rate of (...) description given to behaviours approved/disapproved, to use pupils' names more frequently and increase redirections given to behaviours following disapproval. From observations taken before and after training, it was seen that the main aim was achieved, with teachers showing increased levels of approval contingent upon required behaviour and decreased levels of disapproval, these changes being accompanied by increased pupil on?task behaviour. For the subsidiary aims, the data showed an encouraging shift in the balance of the teachers' verbal behaviour towards social and academic behaviours but the results were rather mixed for the other subsidiary aims. (shrink)

Somatic awareness is bodily sensation imbued with consciousness. Directing and cultivating somatic awareness is a practice fundamental to many therapeutic and spiritual enterprises. Recent developments in neuroscience attempt to explain the operational aspects of somatic awareness. But it has long been a topic of conversation in other paradigms, from philosophy to health care. Somatic input provides information for use in wellness treatment applications, including therapeutic bodywork. Yet few massage therapy scholarly investigations aim to capture the quality of body awareness experience. (...) The essence of the experience and its associated language remain imprecise and under-explored holistically.This article implements the therapeutic practice technique of the Body Scan to capture the essence of an inner body exploration (proprioception and interoception). Based on a narrative collected during a verbally self-directed exercise, a phenomenological description is explicated to represent one incidentof internal body experience. The pilot study suggests that the Body Scan offers potential as a research tool, as well as a modality for therapeutic intervention. (shrink)

This article presents a unified theory of irony which claims, with the help of Fauconnier’s (1985) mental space theory, that an ironical utterance refers to the mental space of a mutually manifest expectation. According to this view, what a typical ironical speaker does is to say without any distinct space builders that something is the case in the mental space of expectation in order to make it mutually manifest that it is not so in the initial reality space. This expectation (...) space theory of irony integrates the explanatory power of Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) echoic interpretation theory with the descriptive power of the view of irony as relevant inappropriateness. (shrink)

This paper should be read against the backdrop of three lines of linguistic investigation: the investigation of the Perfect construction, which has received considerable attention, going back to Reichenbach ; the working hypothesis that certain verbal constructions can be described in terms of the semantics of determiners on nominal expressions, with which we are more familiar; the common observation that we talk about time the way we talk about space. The focus of the paper is a particular construction in (...) Greek. As always, however, the search for the solution of a particular question reveals many other questions in the process and this paper should be seen as being also about a number of related puzzles in English and other languages. (shrink)

Human instructors often refer to objects and actions involved in a task description using both linguistic and non-linguistic means of communication. Hence, for robots to engage in natural human-robot interactions, we need to better understand the various relevant aspects of human multi-modal task descriptions. We analyse reference resolution to objects in a data collection comprising two object manipulation tasks and find that 78.76% of all referring expressions to the objects relevant in Task 1 are verbally underspecified and 88.64% of (...) all referring expressions are verbally underspecified in Task 2. The data strongly suggests that a language processing module for robots must be genuinely multi-modal, allowing for seamless integration of information transmitted in the verbal and the visual channel, whereby tracking the speaker’s eye gaze and gestures as well as object recognition are necessary preconditions. (shrink)

Advertising is one of the commonly visible elements of the urban landscape (real and virtual). It also does not require proof that advertisements of cities as such are also part of their “cityscape.” Since at least the nineteenth century, cities have advertised themselves as attractive places to live, visit, or do business. Therefore, the following research question can be asked: How do Polish cities present themselves in advertisements one can find in the landscape? The study assumes that each advertisement should (...) clearly identify the sender and indicate its specific characteristics, distinguishing itself from its competitors. Polish cities began to use logos and slogans as a mecha­nism of description and distinction after 1990, when socioeconomic changes started. There are quite a few studies on this activity, but most of them are single case studies. Therefore, the authors decided to examine a relatively large sample of Polish cities, which allows for statistical analysis. Analysis of the logo and slogan content allows the authors to examine the desired image or the projected identity of Polish cities. The methods were chosen because they admit qualitative and quantitative analysis, especially when there is a sufficiently large sample. Therefore, the survey covered all towns and cities with more than 20,000 inhabitants in Poland. There are 218 such towns in total. The analysis was carried out in the first half of 2021. In conclusion, the authors find that the advertising of Polish cities is embedded in the past, promotes resources (substance), sometimes geographical location, but rarely refers to famous characters and human potential. And such a picture of these cities one may find on outdoor advertisements, which sometimes produce dissonance when accompanying modern buildings or new transport solutions in the city. (shrink)

Dignāga’s theory of semantics called the “theory of apoha ” has been criticized by those who state that it may lead to a circular argument wherein “exclusion of others” is understood as mere double negation. Dignāga, however, does not intend mere double negation by anyāpoha. In his view, the word “cow” for instance, excludes those that do not have the set of features such as a dewlap, horns, and so on, by applying the semantic method called componential analysis. The present (...) paper aims to prove this by referring to the fragments quoted by Jinendrabuddhi and Siddhasenagaṇi. Dignāga logically proves that the denotation of the referent Q by the word “P” cannot be derived from the joint presence of “P” with Q. Instead, he derives it from the joint absence of “P” with the nonexistence of Q. Anyāpoha is nothing but verbal vyatireka. Componential analysis is used for describing what is to be excluded. Dignāga draws taxonomic hierarchies of words based on their customary use, and assumes componential analysis to operate in the background of the hierarchies formed in semantic fields, stating that a general term is restricted to having the same reference with one of its specific terms insofar as the former is connected with the characteristics of the latter’s referent. Moreover, he states that a proper name also denotes its referent by excluding those that do not have the cluster of a certain number of qualities. (shrink)

In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based triads matching with and without verbal interference. Results showed between-group differences in verbal descriptions and in memory-based triads matching. However, no differences were found in online triads (...) matching and in memory-based triads matching with verbal interference. These findings need to be interpreted in the context of the overall pattern of performance, which indicated that both groups based their similarity judgments on common perceptual characteristics of motion events. These results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging. (shrink)

The dual-aspect monist conjecture launched by Pauli and Jung in the mid-20th century will be couched in somewhat formal terms to characterize it more concisely than by verbal description alone. After some background material situating the Pauli–Jung conjecture among other conceptual approaches to the mind–matter problem, the main body of this paper outlines its general framework of a basic psychophysically neutral reality with its derivative mental and physical aspects and the nature of the correlations that connect these aspects. Some (...) related approaches are discussed to identify key similarities to and deviations from the Pauli–Jung framework that may be useful for cross-fertilization. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Know-How of Musical PerformanceStephen DaviesMusicians make music; that is, the performance of music involves applied knowledge or know-how. Can we attain a discursive understanding of what the musician does, and does the attempt to achieve this put at risk the very art it aims to capture? In other words, what can be said of the nature of performance and does what we say turn a living practice into (...) a dead object? In this discussion, I aim to clarify the issues in terms of which these questions can be developed.Consider acquired practical knowledge or'knowing how.'1 It involves a learned skill or capacity to do something-typically, to perform an action-as in "I know how to ride a unicycle."2 'Knowing how'can be subdivided into types. A first variety is always conscious. For most people, mental arithmetic is of this kind. It is not mental arithmetic they are doing if they do not follow an appropriate rule, algorithm, procedure, or principle, even if they fluke the right answer. Many practical skills are of this sort. I know how to fill in tax forms, immigration documents, and hire purchase agreements. In all these cases, the working of the skill and the steps through which it is exercised are held inevitably before my mind. A second type of 'knowing how' might be termed "retrievable." I know how to drive a car. Most of the time, I am not aware of the processes, judgments, and procedures that are [End Page 154] involved. I do not have to think about my driving as I drive. Nevertheless, if I reflect on what I do, I can describe the steps or routines I go through. A third type of 'knowing how' is cognitively impenetrable. Cognitively impenetrable processes are opaque to introspection. Some bit of neurological hardware receives an input, processes it, and outputs some result, but the nature of that processing is not retrievable by consciousness. The skill is learned but the many computational, muscular, kinaesthetic, or other activities involved in the skill's application or execution are not available to the agent's awareness. From my own case, typical examples are of knowing how to walk, how to pick up a glass, and how to speak English.3 When a person intends to perform an action of this kind, he aims at it directly, as it were. He intends to turn his skateboard to the left, say, not to flex this muscle here and so. He can intend to produce a certain action as output, but the intermediate steps and movements involved in this, to the extent that they are controlled in an irretrievable fashion, are not what he can intend. Similarly, where 'knowing how' is retrievable but automatic, the action is intended directly. The intermediary steps and movements are not what are intended so long as the action remains automatic.In what ways is practical knowledge acquired? In some cases it can be learned from verbal descriptions of the appropriate basic actions and their sequences-"put the left leg in and shake it all about"-or of the relevant rules or algorithms-"multiply by π r2." In others, learning is by example, copying, or experimenting. Some procedures work better for some skills than others. Generally speaking, when we encourage children and stroke victims to walk we do not provide them with examples. By contrast, language skills are often conveyed via paradigm instances. And while it is possible to learn to drive a plane from an instruction manual alone, one is more likely to be successful by following and being assisted by an instructor. Always conscious skills are often acquired by memorizing the procedure or rule that must be kept in mind, whereas automatic but retrievable skills, because their application is unconscious, are usually acquired through physical repetition until the routine becomes unthinking. Nevertheless, even cognitively impenetrable skills might be learned by first following written instructions. What makes the skill impenetrable is not the method by which it is acquired but the inability to recall or describe the relevant steps, rules, or procedures when the skill is entrenched.4A given skill might be cognitively impenetrable for... (shrink)

When looking at a scene, observers feel that they see its entire structure in great detail and can immediately notice any changes in it. However, when brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking failure of perception is induced: identification of changes becomes extremely difficult, even when changes are large and made repeatedly. Identification is much faster when a verbal cue is provided, showing that poor visibility is not the cause (...) of this difficulty. Identification is also faster for objects mentioned in brief verbal descriptions of the scene. These results support the idea that observers never form a complete, detailed representation of their surroundings. In addition, results also indicate that attention is required to perceive change, and that in the absence of localized motion signals it is guided on the basis of high-level interest. (shrink)

A theory is presented which proposes that knowledge acquisition involves direct perception of schematic information in the form of structural and transformational invariances. Individual components with salient verbal descriptions are considered conscious place-holders for non-conscious invariant schemes. It is speculated that theories positing mental construction have three related causes: The first is a lack of consciousness of the schema processing capacities of the right hemisphere; the second is the paucity of adequate words to express schematic relationships; and the (...) last involves the dominance of verbal processes in consciousness. Philosophical theories are reviewed and schematic data relevant to biological survival is offered. Applications to education are suggested. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate (...) how plausibility ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness. (shrink)

Herodotus uses the encounter between the Milesian tyrant Aristagoras and the Spartan king Cleomenes to further his authorial self-presentation. He contrasts his own aims and methods as an inquirer with those of Aristagoras, who becomes a “rival” inquirer for Herodotus in this passage. Seeking military aid from Cleomenes for the Ionian Revolt, Aristagoras points to his bronze map of the world and gives an ethnographical and geographical account of the peoples and land of Asia, from Ionia to Susa. Aristagoras accordingly (...) takes on many of the characteristics of Herodotus himself, including the use of shared ethnographical language. Aristagoras' ethnographical account is marred, however, by a rhetorical strategy that depicts the Asians as wealthy, but weak adversaries. While careful not to criticize Aristagoras' map itself, Herodotus is able to exploit Aristagoras' verbal description of his map to illustrate his own forthcoming account of the Persian Royal Road , which Herodotus assures readers is even more “accurate” than Aristagoras' account had been . Aristagoras is “deceiving” Cleomenes “well,” says Herodotus, until he tells the “truth” about the length of the journey to Susa . Telling the truth is a mistake for the deceiver Aristagoras, but an obligation for the inquirer Herodotus. (shrink)

The ways human behavior is conceptualized need to be refined. Major stumbling blocks have been the reification of verbal descriptions of behavior and the construction of ill-defined clusters of dissimilar problems. The effect of behavior-modifying drugs can be completely dependent on situational details. Behavior is a complex product of many interacting factors and cannot be rigorously predictable as the same behavior may be arrived at in different ways. Thus similar-looking behaviors can be functionally different and conversely different-looking behaviors (...) can be functionally identical. More answerable questions about behavior need to be formulated. (shrink)

Kant seems to have been the first to notice that there is something peculiar about the difference between right and left, but he failed to say exactly what the peculiarity is. His clearest account of the matter is in his inaugural lecture (see Bibliography at the end of the paper): We cannot describe [in general terms] the distinction in a given space between things which lie towards one quarter, and things which are turned towards the opposite quarter. Thus if we (...) take solids which are completely equal and similar but incongruent, such as the right and left hands . . . . although in every respect which admits of being stated in terms intelligible to the mind through a verbal description they can be substituted for one another, there is yet a diversity which makes it impossible for their boundaries to coincide. (shrink)

When people talk about kinship systems, they often use co-speech gestures and other representations to elaborate. This paper investigates such polysemiotic (spoken, gestured, and drawn) descriptions of kinship relations, to see if they display recurring patterns of conventionalization that capture specific social structures. We present an exploratory hypothesis-generating study of descriptions produced by a lesser-known ethnolinguistic community to the cognitive sciences: the Paamese people of Vanuatu. Forty Paamese speakers were asked to talk about their family in semi-guided kinship (...) interviews. Analyses of the speech, gesture, and drawings produced during these interviews revealed that lineality (i.e., mother's side vs. father's side) is lateralized in the speaker's gesture space. In other words, kinship members of the speaker's matriline are placed on the left side of the speaker's body and those of the patriline are placed on their right side, when they are mentioned in speech. Moreover, we find that the gesture produced by Paamese participants during verbal descriptions of marital relations are performed significantly more often on two diagonal directions of the sagittal axis. We show that these diagonals are also found in the few diagrams that participants drew on the ground to augment their verbo-gestural descriptions of marriage practices with drawing. We interpret this behavior as evidence of a spatial template, which Paamese speakers activate to think and communicate about family relations. We therefore argue that extending investigations of kinship structures beyond kinship terminologies alone can unveil additional key factors that shape kinship cognition and communication and hereby provide further insights into the diversity of social structures. (shrink)

Philosophers long have noted that some sensations (particularly those of color) seem to be ineffable, or refractory to verbal description. Some proposed neurophysiological explanations of this ineffability deny the intuitive view that sensations have inherently indescribable content. The present paper suggests a new explanation of ineffability that does not have this deflationary consequence. According to the hypothesis presented here, feedback modulation of information flow in the cortex interferes with the production of narratives about sensations, thereby causing the subject to (...) assess as inadequate his or her own verbal descriptions of sensations. (shrink)

Over the last decades, understanding the sources of the difficulty of Bayesian problem solving has been an important research goal, with the effects of numerical format and individual numeracy being widely studied. However, the focus on the comprehension of probability numbers has overshadowed the relational reasoning demand of the Bayesian task. This is particularly the case when the statistical data are verbally described since the requested quantitative relation (posterior ratio) is misaligned with the presented ones (prior and likelihood ratios). In (...) this regard, here I develop the proposal that research on Bayesian reasoning might improve by considering the notational alignment framework of mathematical problem-solving. Specifically, this framework can help to understand the sources of the main difficulties underlying Bayesian inferences based on verbal descriptions. In essence, the present proposal supports the general claim in math education regarding the need to foster relational comprehension to avoid misleading alignments and improve problem solving. (shrink)