How do children acquire the meaning of words? And why are words such as know harder for learners to acquire than words such as dog or jump? We suggest that the chief limiting factor in acquiring the vocabulary of natural languages consists not in overcoming conceptual difficulties with abstract word meanings but rather in mapping these meanings onto their corresponding lexical forms. This opening premise of our position, while controversial, is shared with some prior approaches. The present discussion moves forward (...) from there to a detailed proposal for how the mapping problem for the lexicon is solved, as well as a presentation of experimental findings that support this account. We describe an overlapping series of steps through which novices move in representing the lexical forms and phrase structures of the exposure language, a probabilistic multiple-cue learning process known as syntactic bootstrapping. The machinery is set in motion by word-to-world pairing, a procedure available to novices from the.. (shrink)

How do we talk about events we perceive? And how tight is the connection between linguistic and non-linguistic representations of events? To address these questions, we experimentally compared motion descriptions produced by children and adults in two typologically distinct languages, Greek and English. Our findings confirm a well-known asymmetry between the two languages, such that English speakers are overall more likely to include manner of motion information than Greek speakers. However, mention of manner of motion in Greek speakers' descriptions increases (...) significantly when manner is not inferable; by contrast, inferability of manner has no measurable effect on motion descriptions in English, where manner is already preferentially encoded. These results show that speakers actively monitor aspects of event structure, which do not find their way into linguistic descriptions. We conclude that, in regard to the differential encoding of path and manner, which has sometimes been offered as a prime example of the effects of language encoding on non-linguistic thought, surface linguistic encoding neither faithfully represents nor strongly constrains our mental representation of events. (shrink)

The article proposes that the modern notion of the spiritual in art, which was theorized at the beginning of the twentieth century, although remains pivotal to the discourse of art and the spiritual, has radically shifted as a result of changing attitudes to the body–mind relations instigated by popular trends of contemporary spiritualities. This cultural tendency is demonstrated by the analysis of the networked art form of Moon Ribas, e.g., dance with earthquakes. Ribas performs a cyborg body and consciousness that, (...) as contended, could be holistically enhanced and develop a unique compassionate awareness. In addition, I reflect on two examples from my performative practice of Networked Rites that interplay with speculative metaphors, spiritual and shamanic techniques, networked aesthetic forms and technologies. The first invokes communitas as a collective, non-local, networked noetic field. The second utilizes a decision-making app as a mediating device between the body and mind for the making of a prototype cyborg noetic field instilled with auspicious resonance. The article mainly implies that spiritual art continues to evolve through technoetic aesthetics fusing emerging technologies, science and shamanic, spiritual insight. Current trends may develop into benevolent and experiential applications based on the interrelations of human and cyborg body and consciousness. (shrink)

Niccolò et Domenico Sandro, imprimeurs à Venise de 1505 à 1542, utilisèrent deux marques portant, l’une le monogramme trilittérale de Jésus, l’autre une figure représentant deux triangles appointés et sommée d’une croix. La première s’inspire des tablettes de saint Bernardin de Sienne, reprises par les Jésuates, pour lesquels les Sandro travaillèrent. La seconde, plus énigmatique, est susceptible de recevoir plusieurs interprétations : variation sur le chrisme, union des deux natures en Jésus, rencontre du cœur humain et de celui de Jésus.

Words that describe sensory perception give insight into how language mediates human experience, and the acquisition of these words is one way to examine how we learn to categorize and communicate sensation. We examine the differential predictions of the typological prevalence hypothesis and embodiment hypothesis regarding the acquisition of perception verbs. Studies 1 and 2 examine the acquisition trajectories of perception verbs across 12 languages using parent questionnaire responses, while Study 3 examines their relative frequencies in English corpus data. We (...) find the vision verbs see and look are acquired first, consistent with the typological prevalence hypothesis. However, for children at 12–23 months, touch—not audition—verbs take precedence in terms of their age of acquisition, frequency in child‐produced speech, and frequency in child‐directed speech, consistent with the embodiment hypothesis. Later at 24–35 months old, frequency rates are observably different and audition begins to align with what has previously been reported in adult English data. It seems the initial orientation to verbalizing touch over audition in child–caregiver interaction is especially related to the control of physically and socially appropriate behaviors. Taken together, the results indicate children's acquisition of perception verbs arises from the complex interplay of embodiment, language‐specific input, and child‐directed socialization routines. (shrink)

Ritual consciousness is an altered state of consciousness that transpires beyond the boundaries of the known and gives rise to a duration referred to as time out of time. This extraordinary duration encompasses three interrelated factors: digital as opposed to analogue conduct of time, tempo and communitas. Under specific formal conditions, these factors may emerge in the context of networked rituals and outside their traditional and earthbound religious or spiritual settings. In this article, the three factors are analysed in relation (...) to the author’s networked rites on the Waterwheel platform. The rites are designed to explore ritual consciousness and produce prototype morphic fields of compassion, which are aimed at counteracting the prevalent narrative of violence. There is an emphasis on communitas, a liminal and nonhierarchical communal state of oneness that could generate compassion. Based on researches in anthropology, biogenetic structuralism, cognitive neuroscience and morphic resonance, communitas is metaphorically envisioned as the communion of non-local brains within a networked mind and morphic field. The article postulates that the virtual and organic hybridity of the rites involve the participants’ body, brain and fields of the mind in the explorations of ritual consciousness. (shrink)

The acquisition of a new skill usually proceeds through five stages, from novice to expert, with a sixth stage of mastery available for highly motivated performers. In this chapter, we re-state the six stages of the Dreyfus Skill Model, paying new attention to the transitions and interrelations between them. While discussing the fifth stage, expertise, we unpack the claim that, “when things are proceeding normally, experts don’t solve problems and don’t make decisions; they do what normally works” (Dreyfus & Dreyfus, (...) 1988, pp. 30 – 31). This leads us to offer an account of the “perspectival deliberation” that arises for experts and masters and that is distinct from the calculative deliberation characteristic of the lower stages of skillfulness. (shrink)

What is the significance of the Father in psychoanalysis today? This book constructs a much needed framework to allow psychoanalysts to consider the difficulties of a generation without a solid anchor in the Father. _The Dead Father: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry_ provides a necessary addition to decades of work on the role of the mother in development. The editors bring together world renowned scholars to discuss current observations in their fields, in terms of the Father’s changing but essential functions, both in (...) the lives of the individual and collective. Divided into four parts, chapters focus on: The Lost Father The Father Embodied The Father in Theory Father Culture. Exploring the role of the father in individual psychology, everyday interpersonal and social experience and cultural phenomena writ large, this book will be essential reading for psychoanalysts, as well as psychologists, social workers and scholars in the humanities. (shrink)

THERE IS GREAT MOTIVATION WITHIN FREGE'S THEORY TO\nCONSTRUE THE CARDINAL NUMBERS AS QUANTIFIERS, WHICH ARE\nHIGHER LEVEL CONCEPTS. BUT FREGE ARGUED THAT THE CARDINAL\nNUMBERS ARE OBJECTS, NOT CONCEPTS, AND DEFINED THEM\nACCORDINGLY. MOREOVER, FREGE'S HIERARCHY OF CONCEPTS\nPREVENTED HIM FROM CONSTRUING THE NUMBERS AS CONCEPTS. MY\nPURPOSE IS TO BRING OUT THE QUANTIFICATIONAL NATURE OF THE\nNUMBERS IN THE FACE OF THESE OBSTACLES. THE PAPER PRESSES\nTHE QUANTIFICATIONAL VIEW ONTO FREGE'S CONCEPT OF NUMBER AS\nIT TRACES ITS DEVELOPMENT FROM THE "BEGRIFFSSCHRIFT",\nTHROUGH THE 1880S, INTO ITS FORMALIZATION IN (...) THE\n"GRUNDGESETZE". THE THEORY YIELDS SURPRISINGLY EASILY UNDER\nPRESSURE FROM THE QUANTIFICATIONAL VIEW, AND ONE\nSYMPATHETIC WITH THAT VIEW MAY TAKE ENCOURAGEMENT FROM THE\nFACT THAT IT WAS FREGE'S HIERARCHY OF CONCEPTS, NOT HIS\nACTUAL ARGUMENTS, THAT PREVENTED HIS CONSTRUING NUMBERS AS\nQUANTIFIERS. (shrink)

Theorems of arithmetic are used, perhaps essentially, to reach conclusions about the natural world. This applicability can be explained in a natural way by analogy with the applicability of statements of law to the world. ;In order to carry out an ontological argument for my thesis, I assume the existence of universals as a working hypothesis. I motivate a theory of laws according to which statements of law are singular statements about scientific properties. Such statements entail generalizations about instances of (...) those properties. My task, then, is to show that theorems of arithmetic, in application, are similar to statements of law in this respect. On the basis of my working hypothesis, I argue that there are inclining reasons to think that cardinal numbers are scientific properties whose instances occur in the natural world. The works of Mill, Frege and Benacerraf play central roles in these arguments. ;In general, I urge that there are no conclusive epistemological or ontological factors which preclude arithmetical truths from being laws of nature. Consequently, I think we can extend any semantic theory which is adequate for statements of law to theorems of arithmetic. This would apply even to a theory of predication which does not involve commitment to universals. So, to the degree that my argument succeeds with the working hypothesis, it also supports the unconditioned thesis that arithmetical truths are laws of nature. (shrink)

Este artigo tem como objetivo principal investigar as ideias do senso comum de jovens brasileiros e franceses acerca das relações entre justiça e injustiça. Para tanto, utilizou-se o conceito de tematas. As tematas são concebidas como fatores organizadores de conjuntos temáticos de diferentes repres..

In this paper, I argue that self-awareness is intertwined with one's awareness of possibilities for action. I show this by critically examining Dan Zahavi's multidimensional account of the self. I argue that the distinction Zahavi makes among 'pre-reflective minimal', 'interpersonal', and 'normative' dimensions of selfhood needs to be refined in order to accommodate what I call 'pre-reflective self-understanding'. The latter is a normative dimension of selfhood manifest not in reflection and deliberation, but in the habits and style of a person’s (...) pre-reflective absorption in the world. After reviewing Zahavi's multidimensional account and revealing this gap in his explanatory taxonomy, I draw upon Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Frankfurt in order to sketch an account of pre-reflective self-understanding. I end by raising an objection to Zahavi’s claim for the primitive and foundational status of pre-reflective self-awareness. To carve off self-awareness from the self’s practical immersion in a situation where things and possibilities already matter and draw one to act is to distort the phenomena. A more careful phenomenology of pre-reflective action shows that pre-reflective self-awareness and pre-reflective self-understanding are co-constitutive, both mutually for each other and jointly for everyday experience. (shrink)

According to Heidegger's Being and Time, social relations are constitutive of the core features of human agency. On this view, which I call a ‘strong conception’ of sociality, the core features of human agency cannot obtain in an individual subject independently of social relations to others. I explain the strong conception of sociality captured by Heidegger's underdeveloped notion of ‘being-with’ by reconstructing Heidegger's critique of the ‘weak conception’ of sociality characteristic of Kant's theory of agency. According to a weak conception, (...) sociality is a mere aggregation of individual subjects and the core features of human agency are built into each individual mind. The weak conception of sociality remains today widely taken for granted. I show that Christine Korsgaard, one of the most creative contemporary appropriators of Kant, operates with a weak conception of sociality and that this produces a problematic explanatory deficiency in her view: she is unable to explain the peculiar motivational efficacy of shared social norms. Heidegger's view is tailor made to explain this phenomenon. I end by sketching how Heidegger provides a social explanation of a major systematic concern animating Korsgaard, the concern with the importance of individual autonomy and answerability in human life. (shrink)

Responding to calls for more substantive studies into ethical and responsible lobbying, we analyze data collected over a 5-year period in Brussels to explore how individual lobbyists understand the ethical dimensions of their work. Mobilizing insights from the sociology of the professions, we expose an emerging lobbying professionalism and unpack practitioners’ understandings of what being a professional lobbyist entails, focusing in particular on their espoused values of transparency and honesty. While expectations to lobby more transparently and honestly stem from political (...) institutions, we find individual lobbyists—acting as conduits—attempt to disseminate these expectations by setting limits that incite their clients to embrace what policymakers consider professional lobbying practice. Our study contributes to corporate political activity (CPA) scholarship by providing a professions-based understanding of ethical and responsible approaches to lobbying. We provide new insights into contextual and individual-level factors behind the emergence of such approaches, and elucidate implications of lobbying professionalism for business and European Union (EU) governance. (shrink)

Deep brain stimulation of the subthalamic nucleus is a clinically effective tool for treating medically refractory Parkinson’s disease, but its neural mechanisms remain debated. Previous work has demonstrated that STN DBS results in evoked potentials in the primary motor cortex, suggesting that modulation of cortical physiology may be involved in its therapeutic effects. Due to technical challenges presented by high-amplitude DBS artifacts, these EPs are often measured in response to low-frequency stimulation, which is generally ineffective at PD symptom management. This (...) study aims to characterize STN-to-cortex EPs seen during clinically relevant high-frequency STN DBS for PD. Intraoperatively, we applied STN DBS to 6 PD patients while recording electrocorticography from an electrode strip over the ipsilateral central sulcus. Using recently published techniques, we removed large stimulation artifacts to enable quantification of STN-to-cortex EPs. Two cortical EPs were observed – one synchronized with DBS onset and persisting during ongoing stimulation, and one immediately following DBS offset, here termed the “start” and the “end” EPs respectively. The start EP is, to our knowledge, the first long-latency cortical EP reported during ongoing high-frequency DBS. The start and end EPs differ in magnitude and latency, and the end, but not the start, EP magnitude has a significant relationship to ongoing high gamma power during the EP. These contrasts may suggest mechanistic or circuit differences in EP production during the two time periods. This represents a potential framework for relating DBS clinical efficacy to the effects of a variety of stimulation parameters on EPs. (shrink)

Both Martin Heidegger and Harry Frankfurt have argued that the fundamental feature of human identity is care. Both contend that caring is bound up with the fact that we are finite beings related to our own impending death, and both argue that caring has a distinctive, circular and non-instantaneous, temporal structure. In this paper, I explore the way Heidegger and Frankfurt each understand the relations among care, death, and time, and I argue for the superiority of Heideggerian version of this (...) nest of claims. Frankfurt claims that we should conceive of the most basic commitments which practically orient a person in the world and define his identity (“volitional necessities”) as naturalistic facts, foundational for and located completely without the normative space of reasons. In support of this he appeals to the supposedly foundational role played in human life by the instinct for self-preservation, what Frankfurt calls the “love of living.” The claim is that in questions of practical identity there is a definite priority of the factual over the normative. Frankfurt’s naturalistic model of volitional necessity is motivated by a misunderstanding of the temporal structure of care, a misunderstanding that helps lead him to an implausible conception of the basic structures of human identity. Heidegger advances an anti-naturalistic conception of caring, one bound up with his way of understanding how human beings relate to their own future. I argue that the existential, temporal, and normative significance that Frankfurt attributes to the naturalized “love of living” is better captured by the Heideggerian claim that human identity is defined by being “for-the-sake-of” certain projects and commitments, a way of being lived out in the way Heidegger calls “being-towards-death.”. (shrink)

Early Heidegger argues that a “homogenous space of nature” can be revealed by stripping away the intelligibility of Dasein's everyday world, a process he calls “deworlding.” Given this, some interpreters have suggested that Heidegger, despite not having worked out the details himself, is also committed to a notion of deworlded time. Such a “natural time” would amount to an endogenous sequentiality in which events are ordered independently of Dasein and the stand it takes on its being. I show that Heidegger (...) was indeed committed to such a temporal realism even though his treatment of these issues is somewhat scattered and pulled in different directions. In the course of my reconstruction, I renew an interpretation of Heidegger that stresses Dasein's thrownness into nature and I answer William Blattner's powerful interpretation of Heidegger as a failed temporal idealist who was unable to derive the sequentiality of ordinary time from Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality. Heidegger did not attempt to derive sequentiality; instead, he understood it as a built-in feature of the natural universe by which Dasein's activities are constrained. World-time turns out to be a co-production of Dasein's non-sequential originary temporality and the endogenous sequentiality of events in nature. (shrink)

Deletions, duplications, insertions, inversions, and translocations, collectively called structural variations (SVs), affect more base pairs of the genome than any other sequence variant. The recent technological advancements in genome sequencing have enabled the discovery of tens of thousands of SVs per human genome. These SVs primarily affect non‐coding DNA sequences, but the difficulties in interpreting their impact limit our understanding of human disease etiology. The functional annotation of non‐coding DNA sequences and methodologies to characterize their three‐dimensional (3D) organization in the (...) nucleus have greatly expanded our understanding of the basic mechanisms underlying gene regulation, thereby improving the interpretation of SVs for their pathogenic impact. Here, we discuss the various mechanisms by which SVs can result in altered gene regulation and how these mechanisms can result in rare genetic disorders. Beyond changing gene expression, SVs can produce novel gene‐intergenic fusion transcripts at the SV breakpoints. (shrink)

Gleitman and Trueswell’s “The easy words” forms a pair with their earlier paper, “Hard words,” completing a circle in which the authors ask how “easy” words (e.g., concrete nouns) are learned. They take up the hypothesis of “cross‐situational learning,” and argue that accumulating observations actually hinders learning if the mechanism requires holding all exemplars in memory over time. They present an alternative hypothesis, “Propose but Verify,” wherein people use one‐trial learning to confirm or disconfirm their current hypothesis—a mechanism distinctly different (...) from cross‐situational learning. (shrink)

This article offers an underexplored resistance strategy to gender norms, based on a feminist and queer reading of the work of French thinker Roland Barthes. Building on Barthes’s peculiar conception of what he calls “the Neutral” and revisiting his work in light of feminist and queer scholarship on sexual (in)difference, my main goal is to reshape our understanding of what it means to be gender neutral. In opposition to classical conceptions of neutrality associated with passivity, indifference, and blandness, I show (...) that Barthes’s Neutral can be conceived as an active gesture, which alters common systems of meanings and power, including the gender binary. But this conception of the Neutral, I argue, neither refers to a call for an androgynous, queer, or nonbinary gender experience. It does not target gender embodiments but gender regulations—that is, the social enforcement of gender categories (by way, for instance, of administrative forms, single-sex bathrooms, or normalizing attitudes toward others). A gender-neutral arrangement, therefore, refers to an ethical, administrative, social, or spatial relation in which subjects are not assigned based on gender categories. This practice of gender suspension, I show, has two main transformative effects. First, it opens a space of freedom and livability for gender-nonconforming subjects. Second, it contributes to lessening the significance of sexual difference in social life and therefore alleviating its symbolic and normative weight for everyone. (shrink)

To what extent does perceptual language reflect universals of experience and cognition, and to what extent is it shaped by particular cultural preoccupations? This paper investigates the universality~relativity of perceptual language by examining the use of basic perception terms in spontaneous conversation across 13 diverse languages and cultures. We analyze the frequency of perception words to test two universalist hypotheses: that sight is always a dominant sense, and that the relative ranking of the senses will be the same across different (...) cultures. We find that references to sight outstrip references to the other senses, suggesting a pan-human preoccupation with visual phenomena. However, the relative frequency of the other senses was found to vary cross-linguistically. Cultural relativity was conspicuous as exemplified by the high ranking of smell in Semai, an Aslian language. Together these results suggest a place for both universal constraints and cultural shaping of the language of perception. (shrink)

We evaluate here the performance of four models of cross-situational word learning: two global models, which extract and retain multiple referential alternatives from each word occurrence; and two local models, which extract just a single referent from each occurrence. One of these local models, dubbed Pursuit, uses an associative learning mechanism to estimate word-referent probability but pursues and tests the best referent-meaning at any given time. Pursuit is found to perform as well as global models under many conditions extracted from (...) naturalistic corpora of parent-child interactions, even though the model maintains far less information than global models. Moreover, Pursuit is found to best capture human experimental findings from several relevant cross-situational word-learning experiments, including those of Yu and Smith (), the paradigm example of a finding believed to support fully global cross-situational models. Implications and limitations of these results are discussed, most notably that the model characterizes only the earliest stages of word learning, when reliance on the co-occurring referent world is at its greatest. (shrink)

This paper provides an interpretation of the existential conception of selfhood that follows from Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception. On this view, people relate to themselves not by “looking within” in acts of introspection but, first, by “looking without” at the field of solicitations in which they are immersed and, eventually, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, by “making explicit” the “melodic unity” or “immanent sense” of their behavior. To make sense of this, I draw out a distinction latent in Merleau-Ponty’s view between a (...) pre-reflective sense of self and a reflective self-interpretation. The former is a suite of abilities and dispositions in light of which a person is aware of and drawn to act in a situation. This sense of self undergoes transitions over time, is constitutively susceptible to moments of disorientation, and tends toward but never achieves full coherence. Reflective self-interpretation is an activity whereby someone—provisionally and defeasibly—clarifies, articulates, and gets a better “grip” on how they are prereflectively drawn to act. I ground this interpretation in a detailed reading of Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of romantic love and I corroborate it by examining his account of the emergence of class-consciousness in the self-interpretation of a worker. (shrink)

This chapter presents some reflections by Lila Gleitman on the development of her thinking and her research – in concert with a host of esteemed collaborators over the years – on issues of language and mind, focusing on how language is acquired. Gleitman entered the field of linguistics as a student of Zellig Harris, and learned firsthand of Noam Chomsky's early work. The chapter points out that Goldin‐Meadow's first looks at isolate language, and deaf language, transmuted into her life's (...) work on gesture and sign. Linguists, including particularly Anne Senghas, had the opportunity to look at a remarkable case of a language rising in a hithertofore‐isolated deaf community. Behaviorist psychology saw language learning as an instance of more general principles of operant conditioning, a relatively straightforward distillation and organization of experience. Chomsky continues to frame and expatiate upon the central questions of language learning and knowledge. (shrink)

Apart from references to perception, words such asseeandlistenhave shared, non-literal meanings across diverse languages. Such cross-linguistic meanings have not been systematically investigated as they appear in their natural home — informal spoken interaction. We present a qualitative examination of the semantic associations of perception verbs based on recorded everyday conversation in thirteen diverse languages. Across these diverse communities, spontaneous interaction provides evidence for two commonly-discussed extensions of perception verbs — perception~cognition, hearing~linguistic communication — as well as illustrating other meanings and (...) functions (e.g., the use of perception verbs as discourse markers) that have been less appreciated heretofore. The range of usage that is readily observable in informal conversation makes it clear that this type of data must take center stage for the empirically grounded study of semantics. Moreover, these data suggest that commonalities in polysemous meanings may rely not only on universal cognition, but also on the universal exigencies of social interaction. (shrink)

Movies have a striking aesthetic power: they can draw us in and induce a peculiar mode of involvement in their images – they absorb us. While absorbed in a movie, we lose track both of the passage of time and of the fact that we are sitting in a dark room with other people watching the play of light upon a screen. What is the source of the power of movies? Noël Carroll, who cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty as an influence on (...) his account of the power of movies, agrees with Merleau-Ponty that our perceptual experience of movies draws on many of the capacities at work in our perceptual experience of everyday situations. Yet Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception shows that Carroll’s emphasis on intellectual inference and the entertaining of unasserted thoughts is a distortion of the phenomenology of cinematic absorption. According to Merleau-Ponty, such intellectual operations come into play in cases of breakdown but should not be read back into the primary absorbed experience as being implicitly operative all along. After presenting and criticizing Carroll’s view, I interpret and expand upon Merleau-Ponty’s position, showing that his version of the analogy between cinematic perception and everyday perception is more convincing than Carroll’s. (shrink)