In this two-part essay I develop a theory of natural signs. Since even primordial signs signify values, in the first part I develop the theory’s valuative aspect. Goods are as primary in nature as facts are, and together facts and values generate semeiosis in all life without excess extrapolation from human psychology. To ward off over-extrapolating on values, I defend a major discontinuity between man and nature on the goods of ethics. In the essay’s second part I develop the semeiotic (...) dimensions of the negative feedback model of purposive systems. I provide tests for the truth and falsity of the primitive representations in these systems. I account for the holism of representational systems and their non-extensionality, and I define functions. I solve this important definitional problem by inverting the usual mode of thinking: Functions do not explain signs; signs explain functions. Finally I defend this theory’s way of understanding the continuity between human beings and the rest of living nature against several criticisms. (shrink)

To become sovereign, one must be seen as sovereign. In other words, a sovereign must appear-philosophically, politically, and aesthetically-on the stage of power, both to themselves and to others, in order to assume authority. In this sense, sovereignty is a theatrical phenomenon from the very beginning. This book explores the relationship between theater and sovereignty in modern political theory, philosophy, and performance. Arthur Bradley considers the theatricality of power-its forms, dramas, and iconography-and examines sovereignty's modes of appearance: thrones, insignia, (...) regalia, ritual, ceremony, spectacle, marvels, fictions, and phantasmagoria. He weaves together political theory and literature, reading figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schmitt, Benjamin, Derrida, and Agamben alongside writers including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Schiller, Melville, Valéry, Kafka, Ionesco, and Genet. Formally inventive and deeply interdisciplinary, Staging Sovereignty offers a surprising and original narrative of political modernity from early modern political theology to the age of neoliberal capitalism. (shrink)

La musique occupe une place singulière au sein de la philosophie de G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716). Si les développements que ce dernier y consacre sont peu nombreux et dispersés à travers son œuvre, ils n'en dessinent pas moins les contours d'une philosophie de la musique aussi pénétrante que méconnue. Celle-ci apparait tout à la fois comme l'expression et le modèle privilégié de sa métaphysique générale, dont la portée esthétique reste largement à explorer. Une œuvre en particulier, cependant, semble avoir déjà donné (...) corps à cette esthétique musicale. Cette œuvre est celle de Jean-Sébastien Bach (1685-1750), dont l'écriture contrapuntique manifeste plus que toute autre une parenté structurelle avec la philosophie de Leibniz. À scruter l'architecture complexe de ses compositions, on peut y déceler comme un miroir de l'univers leibnizien, une expression sensible des principes mêmes de l'harmonie universelle. Au vu du contexte intellectuel dans lequel évoluait J.-S. Bach, cette parenté n'est du reste pas sans fondement historique. Il n'est ici que de mentionner l'implication du Cantor dans la société philosophique dirigée par Lorenz Mizler (1711-1778), élève de Wolff et héritier de Leibniz, à laquelle il dédia plusieurs de ses œuvres les plus hautement formelles, dont la dernière, inachevée, devait être 'L'Art de la fugue'. À travers l'étude de la conception leibnizienne de la musique, envisagée dans son rapport à la pensée musicale de J.-S. Bach, cet ouvrage explore les relations entre métaphysique et musique à la lumière du concept d'harmonie comme "unité dans la diversité. (shrink)

: It is often assumed that the best way to learn about an object involves observing it. That is why teachers bring live ferrets to the nature table. However, what is often assumed may not always be true. Why visit a place when you can watch a film about it? A film is cheaper and might do a better job of delivering the salient information.This article discusses the impact of this issue on the role of live performances in disseminating music. (...) Suppose you want to get to know some unimprovised musical work intended for concert performance. Must you see it live? Or would a decent recording do?The author argues that, most of the time, recording technology offers a mode of access to the work's musical properties that is at least as good as the access that a live performance can offer. This does not mean that concert performances are a waste of breath. But it means that we should be careful about the claims we make for them, especially in music education. It also means that musicologists and music educators should channel more energy than they do into understanding and promoting the distinctive analytical tools that the playback experience provides. (shrink)

Progress in understanding the mind-body problem can be made without attempting to solve it as one unified problem, which it is not. Pepper's "Identity Theory" solution to the problem is now seen as not necessarily clarifying for the question of dualism. Residual asymmetrical dualism is proposed as a theory offering one very good way to think about this set of problems in a variety of modes of inquiry. These include neurophysiological research on the amygdala by LeDoux, research in the phenonenon (...) of hearing and learning while under general anesthetic, Gendlin's methods of focusing upon the body during therapeutic procedures and during creative composition of poetry, and Dewey's position concerning "primary experience" versus a "secondary pseudo-environment" inhabited by the civilized human. Residual asymmetrical dualism is not a value-neutral theory: it is based on a determination that bodily intelligence must ultimately guide mental functioning if survival and well-being are to be secured. It leads to take actions within society to carry out whatever steps are needed to alleviate the mind-body split whenever such a split is harmful to human interaction. (shrink)

The essays in this collection, on stratification, organization and the discipline of sociology, all bear upon a general theoretical question: what models of rationality are necessary or suitable to explain individual and collective action in institutional contexts? Professor Stinchcombe was one of the first sociologists to write on this question; and this collection includes a new essay which takes account of recent work done in the tradition Stinchcombe did much to institute. The first group of essays - on class, stratification (...) and mobility - addresses core problems of the discipline and offers imaginative conceptualizations with interesting empirical consequences. The second section - essays on the sociology of organizations - displays, like the first, Stinchcombe's wide knowledge of sociological traditions from structuralism to Marxism. The final section, 'comments on the discipline', deepens the readers understanding of sociological theorizing by presenting different modes of analysis of universities and research institutions and providing challenging, and often funny, insights into the subject. (shrink)

What does it mean to ‘know’ in the Nik?yas such that simply ‘knowing’ certain things ‘as they really are’ has the power to liberate one from sa?s?ra? In an effort to characterize such ‘knowing’ while minimizing the pr ojection of modern-western pr esupp ositions, the pr esent paper expl ores parallels between concepts of transformational and liberating knowledge in the Nik?yas and the early Upani?ads in an effort to identify epistemological pr esupp ositions curr ent in ancient India. The characterization (...) is contrasted with modern-western common sense notions of factual knowledge in order to highlight features that we may tend to miss or to overl ook. It is arg ued that for the authors of both sets of literature, ordinary opinion is deluded while genuine knowledge holds directly effective power, and that transformative knowledge is a reflexive mode of comportment towards the known, concerned as much with relations as with the entities related. This understanding help s to acc ount for the transformative power of ‘knowledge’ and may have impl ications for the ways we interpr et central doctrines. (shrink)

In recent decades it has become increasingly clear that a substantial amount of cognitive work goes on independent of consciousness. The research has been carried out largely under two rubrics, implicit learning and implicit memory. The former has been concerned primarily with the acquisition of knowledge independent of awareness and the latter with the manner in which memories not readily available to conscious recall or recognition play a role in behavior; collectively these operations comprise the essential functions of the cognitive (...) unconscious. This paper reviews the recent history of work on these issues, identifies some of the problems confronting researchers, and introduces a theoretical framework based on principles of evolutionary biology within which to view them. The argument is that the cognitive unconscious, despite its apparent sophistication, is of considerable evolutionary antiquity and antedates conscious cognitive systems by a considerable amount of time. Various entailments of this evolutionary perspective are explored including such issues as phylogeny and ontogeny of implicit processes, the robustness of the implicit functions as displayed by the capacity to resist disruptions from psychological and neurological disorders, the relationship between implicit cognition and intelligence, and individual differences in implicit cognitive abilities. (shrink)

The Cellular Basis of Consciousness theory places the first appearance of sentience at the emergence of life. It makes the radical, and previously unexplored, claim that prokaryotes, like bacteria, possess a primitive form of consciousness. The implications of the theory for the philosophy of mind, cell-biology, and cognitive neurosciences are explored.

This paper is an attempt to put the work of the past several decades on the problems of implicit learning and unconscious cognition into an evolutionary context. Implicit learning is an inductive process whereby knowledge of a complex environment is acquired and used largely independently of awareness of either the process of acquisition or the nature of that which has been learned. Characterized this way, implicit learning theory can be viewed as an attempt to come to grips with the classic (...) epistemological issues of knowledge acquisition, representation and use. The argument is made that the process, despite its seeming cognitive sophistication, is of considerable evolutionary antiquity and that it antedates awareness and the capacity for conscious control of mentation. Various classic heuristics from evolutionary biology are used to substantiate this claim and several specific entailments of this line of argument are outlined. (shrink)

Our comment is based on a simple but, we believe, compelling principle. The proposed cognitive processes and functions that are components of Jablonka and Ginsburg’s Unlimited Associative Learning (UAL) are real and are fundamental elements in the varieties of consciousness, cognition, problem solving, and sentience in the species they identify. But, from our perspective, they didn’t function as the metaphoric biomolecular ship that brought consciousness into being. The UAL functions are, and should be viewed as, evolutionary steps that built upon (...) a deeper and much older cognitive foundation. The appearance of UAL didn’t allow consciousness to emerge. It allowed it to change the manner in which sentience was instantiated − just as a host of other evolutionary developments did. In short, the emergence of UAL is a _token_ on a continuum of mental experience and not a distinct _type_ of mentation. (shrink)

Both individuals and organizations can engage in unethical behaviors. Across six experiments, we examine how people’s ethical judgments are affected by whether the agent engaging in unethical action is a person or an organization. People believe organizations are more unethical than individuals, even when both agents engage in identical behaviors. Using both mediation and moderation analytical approaches, we find that this effect is explained by people’s beliefs that organizations produce more harm when behaving unethically, even when they do not, as (...) well as people’s perceptions that organizations are relatively more blameworthy agents. We then explore how these judgments manifest across different kinds of organizations as well as how they produce discrepant punishments following ethically questionable business activities. Although society and the law often treat individuals and organizations as equivalent, people believe for-profit organizations’ behaviors are less ethical than identical individual behaviors. We discuss the ethical implications of this discrepancy, as well as additional implications concerning reputation management, punishment, and signaling in organizational contexts. (shrink)

We are sympathic with LeDoux’s primary goal here ─ to get a solid scientific grip on what has been dubbed one of the most elusive, important questions in scientific discourse, to identify the underlying biomolecular processes that give rise to consciousness. However, we have issues with the way he goes about it and have tried to present them in a constructive manner. Our commentary is built around our theory of the origins of minds, dubbed the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), (...) and the empirical research that supports it. The CBC is based on the proposition that life and sentience are co-terminous, that life without subjectivity, feeling, without valenced perception, without the capacity to learn and lay down memories would have been an evolutionary dead-end. It could not have survived in the hostile, chaotic world in flux that dominated our planet four billion years ago. The biological sciences operate on the principle that all species, extant and extinct, evolved from the first prokaryotes. The CBC theory is founded on the principle that all expressions of emotion, perception, and cognition did as well. (shrink)

The material in "TCU," as we've come to refer to this volume, began as a Master's Thesis that examined the manner in which knowledge of fairly complex, patterned material could be acquired without any conscious effort to learn it and with little to no awareness of what had been learned. It was dubbed implicit learning and, over a fifty-plus year span, became a vigorously researched area in the social sciences. TCU brings together several dozen scientists from a variety of backgrounds (...) and presents a broad (and deep) overview of how the exploration of the cognitive unconscious grew from that first study to a domain of research to which contributions have been made by sociologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, modelers, social and organizational psychologists, sport psychologists, primatologists, developmentalists, linguists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists, and measurement and assessment researchers. The core message seems fairly straightforward. Unconscious, implicit cognitive processes play a role in virtually everything interesting that human beings do. The implicit and explicit elements of cognition form a rich and complex interactive framework that make up who we are. The volume has contributions from over 30 distinguished authors from nine different countries and gives a balanced and thorough overview of where the field is today, a bit over a half-century since the first experiments were run. (shrink)

The dominant position in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is computationalism where the operative principle is that cognition in general and consciousness in particular can be captured by identification of the proper set of computations. This position has been attacked from several angles, most effectively, in my opinion, by John Searle in his now famous Chinese Room thought experiment. I critique this Searlean perspective on the grounds that, while it is probably correct in its essentials, it does not go (...) far enough. Quite simply, it runs afoul of the problem of emergentism. The proffered solution to this problem is that consciousness (or very rudimentary forms of it) needs to be viewed as an inherent property of organic form. While this recasting of the problem solves the emergentist dilemma it opens up a number of other issues. However, the new problems, unlike the old, appear in principle to be amenable to scientific analysis. (shrink)

Psycholinguistics re-emerged in an almost explosive fashion during the 1950s and 1960s. It then underwent an equally abrupt decline as an independent sub-discipline. This paper charts this fall and identifies five general factors which, it is argued, were responsible for its demise. These are: (a) an uncompromisingly strong version of nativism; (b) a growing isolation of psycholinguistics from the body psychology; (c) a preference for formal theory over empirical data; (d) several abrupt modifications in the Standard Theory in linguistics; and (...) (e) a failure to appreciate the strong commitment to functionalism that characterizes experimental psychology. In short, what looked like a revolution two decades ago turned out to be merely a local reformation that occurred along side of and largely independent from the real revolution in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

In this new volume in the Oxford Psychology Series, the author presents a highly readable account of the cognitive unconscious, focusing in particular on the problem of implicit learning. Implicit learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes place independently of the conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired. One of the core assumptions of this argument is that implicit learning is a fundamental, "root" process, one that lies at (...) the very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism. The author's goals are to outline the essential features of implicit learning that have emerged from the many studies that have been carried out in a variety of experimental laboratories over the past several decades; to present the various alternative perspectives on this issue that have been proposed by other researchers and to try to accommodate these views with his own; to structure the literature so that it can be seen in the context of standard heuristics of evolutionary biology; to present the material within a functionalist approach and to try to show why the experimental data should be seen as entailing particular epistemological perspectives; and to present implicit processing as encompassing a general and ubiquitous set of operations that have wide currency and several possible applications. Chapter 1 begins with the core problem under consideration in this book, a characterization of "implicit learning" as it has come to be used in the literature. Reber puts this seemingly specialized topic into a general framework and suggests a theoretical model based on standard heuristics of evolutionary biology. In his account, Reber weaves a capsule history of interest in and work on the cognitive unconscious. Chapter 2 turns to a detailed overview of the experimental work on the acquisition of implicit knowledge, which currently is of great interest. Chapter 3 develops the evolutionary model within which one can see learning and cognition as richly intertwining issues and not as two distinct fields with one dominating the other. Finally, Chapter 4 explores a variety of entailments and speculations concerning implicit cognitive processes and their general role in the larger scope of human performance. (shrink)

Companies often benefit from others’ attributions of moral conviction for prosocial behavior, for example, attributions that a company has a sincere moral desire to improve the environment when behaving sustainably. Across four studies, we explored how organizations’ changing resource positions influenced people’s attributions for the motivations underlying prosocial organizational behaviors. Observers attributed less moral conviction following prosocial behavior when they believed an organization was losing economic resources. This effect was primarily a “penalty” assessed against organizations that were losing resources, as (...) opposed to a “reward” given to organizations gaining resources. Finally, we found that this effect occurred because people perceive organizations that are losing resources as more situationally constrained, leading them to attribute less dispositional moral conviction. We discuss theoretical and practical implications stemming from how changes in resource access can lead people to be more skeptical of organizations’ motivations following prosocial behavior. (shrink)

Considerable progress has been made toward understanding the involvement of recoverin in a cancer-associated retinopathy (CAR) that results in blindness. We describe the expression of recoverin in tumors of individuals afflicted with CAR, characterize the immunological response towards recoverin in these patients, and demonstrate how the disease can be induced in rodents using recoverin as an immunogen.

Recently, American Psychologist published a review of the evidence for parapsychology that supported the general claims of psi (the umbrella term often used for anomalous or paranormal phenomena). We present an opposing perspective and a broad-based critique of the entire parapsychology enterprise. Our position is straightforward. Claims made by parapsychologists cannot be true. The effects reported can have no ontological status; the data have no existential value. We examine a variety of reasons for this conclusion based on well-understood scientific principles. (...) In the classic English adynaton, “pigs cannot fly.” Hence, data that suggest that they can are necessarily flawed and result from weak methodology or improper data analyses or are Type I errors. So it must be with psi effects. What we find particularly intriguing is that, despite the existential impossibility of psi phenomena and the nearly 150 years of efforts during which there has been, literally, no progress, there are still scientists who continue to embrace the pursuit. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

All species, extant and extinct, from the simplest unicellular prokaryotes to humans, have an existential consciousness. Without sentience, the first cells that emerged some 4 billion years ago would have been evolutionary dead-ends, unable to survive in the chaotic, dangerous environment in which life first appeared and evolved. In this book, Arthur Reber's theory, the Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC), is outlined and distinguished from those models that argue that minds could be instantiated on artificial entities and those that (...) maintain consciousness requires a nervous system. The CBC framework takes a novel approach to classic topics such as the origin-of-life, philosophy of mind, the role of genes, the impact of cognition, and how biological information is processed by all species. It also calls for a rethinking of a variety of issues including the moral implications of the sentient capacities of all species, how welfare concerns need to be expanded beyond where they currently are, and critically, how all life is intertwined in a coordinated cognitive ecology. The Sentient Cell explores this revolutionary model, which updates the standard neo-Darwinian framework within which current approaches operate and examines the underlying biomolecular features that are the likely candidates for the "invention" of consciousness and outline their role in cellular life. (shrink)