On the origins of the conceptual system

Contrary to the conventional view of infancy as a sensorimotor period without conceptual thought, research over the past 20 years has shown that preverbal infants are capable of at least 3 conceptual functions: forming concepts with which to interpret the world, recall of the past, and engaging in conceptual generalization. Research is described indicating that the 1st concepts tend to be global in scope, such as animal or container, and that the course of conceptual development in the first 2 years is largely one of differentiating global concepts into more detailed concepts, such as dog or cup. A theory of how the 1st global concepts are formed from spatial information is briefly presented, including (a) a mechanism that redescribes spatial information into simpler but accessible form and (b) the primitives it uses for this purpose. Finally, the way concepts become more complex by means of language and analogical extension to nonspatial information is discussed.     

Conceptual Hierarchies in a Flat Attractor Network: Dynamics of Learning and Computations

The structure of people's conceptual knowledge of concrete nouns has traditionally been viewed as hierarchical ( Collins & Quillian, 1969 ). For example, superordinate concepts ( vegetable ) are assumed to reside at a higher level than basic-level concepts ( carrot ). A feature-based attractor network with a single layer of semantic features developed representations of both basic-level and superordinate concepts. No hierarchical structure was built into the network. In Experiment and Simulation 1, the graded structure of categories (typicality ratings) is accounted for by the flat attractor network. Experiment and Simulation 2 show that, as with basic-level concepts, such a network predicts feature verification latencies for superordinate concepts ( vegetable ). In Experiment and Simulation 3, counterintuitive results regarding the temporal dynamics of similarity in semantic priming are explained by the model. By treating both types of concepts the same in terms of representation, learning, and computations, the model provides new insights into semantic memory.     

“Scaffolding” and “affordance” as integrative concepts in the cognitive sciences

There are (at least) two ways to think of the differences in basic concepts and typologies that one can find in the different scientific practices that constitute a research tradition. One is the fundamentalist view: the fewer the better. The other is a non-fundamentalist view of science whereby the integration of different concepts into the right abstraction grounds an explanation that is not grounded as the sum of the explanations supported by the parts. Integrative concepts are often associated with idealizations that can successfully set the stage for different phenomena to be compared or for explanations of different phenomena to be considered as jointly increasing our understanding of reality beyond that which each explanation provides separately. In this paper, our aim is to argue for the importance of the notions of an “affordance” and “scaffolding” as integrative concepts in the cognitive sciences. The integrational role of the concept of affordance is closely related with the capacity of affordances to generate the scaffoldings leading to the integration. The capacities of affordances that turn them into (stable) scaffoldings explain why such notions are often used interchangeably (as we shall see). On this basis, we aim to show that the concepts of affordance and scaffolding provide the sort of epistemic perspective that can overcome common complaints about the limits and unity of the cognitive sciences once claims about extended cognition are taken seriously.     

Categorizing objects in isolation and in scenes: what a superordinate is good for

Many studies have shown that subjects are faster at categorizing objects into "basic" concepts than into more general superordinate concepts. However, all of these studies have used a categorization task in which single, isolated objects are identified. There is good reason to believe that superordinate concepts are typically used to refer to collections of objects rather than to individual objects. For example, people more often use the term furniture to refer to a number of pieces of furniture rather than to name a single piece. This suggest that superordinate concepts include information about multiple objects and their common relations, particularly the typical scenes in which such objects appear. Four experiments examined this possibility by investigating whether the basic concept advantage will decrease or reverse itself when subjects are asked to categorize an object as part of a scene. The results showed that the basic-superordinate difference did decrease when subjects categorized objects in scenes. Furthermore, when an object was placed in an inappropriate scene, there was more interference for superordinate identifications. The results suggest qualitative differences in the representations of superordinate and basic concepts.     

抽象概念表征的具身认知观

抽象概念是否通过感知经验来表征以及如何被感知经验表征是具身认知面临的一大问题.在抽象概念表征是否具有感知经验基础的问题上,具身认知理论认为抽象概念通过情境模拟或隐喻与感知经验发生联系.在抽象概念如何与感知经验表征发生联系的问题上,概念模拟理论强调情景或运动模拟在抽象概念表征中的直接作用;概念隐喻理论则侧重具体经验或具体经验与抽象概念之间的共同结构关系在抽象概念表征中的间接作用.未来研究应改变概念表征的稳定的心理实体观,从语言和抽象表征的关系、正常儿童和特殊群体的抽象概念表征差异入手,整合不同的具身认知观点.     

Is the debate on ‘global justice’ a global one? Some considerations in view of modern philosophy in Africa

At present, the debate on global justice, a debate which is at the core of global ethics, is largely being conducted by European and American scholars from different disciplines without taking into account views and concepts from other regions of the world, particularly, from the Global South. The lack of a truly intercultural, interreligious, and international exchange of ideas provokes doubts whether the concepts of global justice introduced so far are able to transcend regional and cultural horizons. The article introduces concepts of justice from African scholars, whose voices have remained marginal until now, like the Kenyan philosopher Henry Odera Oruka, the Ethiopian philosopher Teodros Kiros, and the debate on ubuntu, one of the most controversial concepts in southern Africa today. These concepts focus on issues that are seldom considered in the debate on global justice, such as the importance of bodily needs as a prerequisite for human beings to act as moral beings and the importance of human relationships and solidarity. The last part of the article discusses factors which lead to exclusion from the academic discourse and the question how we as scholars can work for more academic justice.     

The curious case of the refrigerator-TV: similarity and hybridization

This article examines the role of similarity in the hybridization of concepts, focusing on hybrid products as an applied test case. Hybrid concepts found in natural language, such as singer songwriter, typically combine similar concepts, whereas dissimilar concepts rarely form hybrids. The hybridization of dissimilar concepts in products such as jogging shoe mp3 player and refrigerator TV thus poses a challenge for understanding the process of conceptual combination. It is proposed that models of conceptual combination can throw light on the judged future success and desirability of hybrid products in general. The composite prototype model proposes two stages of conceptual combination. In the first stage, the concepts are aggregated into an additive hybrid, simply by forming the union of the two sets of attributes. In the second stage, any conflicting attributes are identified and resolved, often with the introduction of emergent attributes, resulting in an integrative hybrid. Across four studies that varied the similarity and type of hybrid products, similar and integrative hybrids were valued more than dissimilar and additive hybrids. Critically, though, dissimilar hybrids were also highly valued if they were integrative. Results supported the two stages proposed by the composite prototype model, and implications for other models of hybrid formation are discussed.     

The bark and bite of the logically negative soul: further reflections on Rilke's dog of ‘divine inseeing’

Following on the approach taken in the previous essay, this article critically reflects Rilke's account of his having imaginatively entered into the interior of a passing dog more deeply into itself. In doing so, it illustrates the concepts of logical negativity and absolute negative interiorization, which are core concepts of the speculative turn within analytical psychology that is known by the name ‘psychology as the discipline of interiority’. Just as analytical psychology often thinks in terms of the alchemical figure of ‘the stone that is not a stone’, so in this article the bark and bite of a logically negative ‘dog that is not a dog’ is grappled with. Further insights into what is meant by the author's phrase, ‘the Archimedean‐less interiority of the soul’, are imparted.     

Personal identity and brain death: a critical response

The authors contend that there are logical inconsistencies in a theory put forth by Michael Green and Daniel Wikler ("Brain death and personal identity," Philosophy and Public Affairs 1980 Winter; 9(2): 105-133) to justify the brain death concept of death. Green and Wikler had asserted that individuals cease to exist and are dead when the criteria for continuity in their personal identity are not met. Having argued that the theory of personal identity is misguided, Agich and Jones suggest that further research into the ontological foundation of brain death concepts should begin, not by rejecting medical or moral considerations, but by carefully defining the main competing concepts of brain death as brain stem death, cerebral death, death of the brain as a whole, and whole brain death, and then by relating these concepts to the ontological conditions for being a live individual or person.     

语义表征具身理论:情绪在概念表征中的作用

概念如何被表征是认知科学的热点问题,其中抽象概念如何表征是当前具身认知最具争议性的话题之一。与前期概念隐喻理论(强调意象图式)和知觉符号理论(强调情境内省信息)的观点不同,语义表征具身理论强调情绪经验信息在抽象概念表征和加工中的作用。具体而言,具体概念的表征主要来自感觉运动信息,而抽象概念的表征主要来自情绪经验信息和语言信息。研究证明,抽象概念的高情绪经验信息能够促进词汇的加工,且这一促进作用受词汇情绪效价的调节。未来研究应进一步考虑影响情绪经验信息发挥作用的因素,比如语言信息的丰富性、情绪唤醒或个体的情绪状态等。     

Repression and substitutive formation: the relationship between Freud's concepts reconsidered

This paper examines Freud's concept of repression and the relationship between repression and substitutive formation as it presents itself in Freud's writings. The author shows that Freud gives at least four different meanings to the term "repression": Freud uses it interchangeably with defense, as a consciously intended forgetting, as a specific unconscious mechanism of defense, and to describe the consequence of defense mechanisms leading to substitutive formations. The inconsistencies in this relationship are discussed and clarified, and Freud's economic and linguistic attempts at founding repression are subjected to critique; the need of a primal repression as a necessary condition for repression proper is pointed out. In developing Freud's linguistic foundation of repression further, the author presents defense as a semantic displacement. Ideas are excluded from the realm of the concepts that belong to them historically. These presentations become unconscious, that is, repressed, in that they can no longer be identified as "cases" of these conceptual internal contents. At the same time they are displaced into the extensions of concepts whose internal contents do not belong to them originally. It is by virtue of the internal contents of these concepts that the displaced elements as substitutive formations once again attain consciousness, albeit a false one. The author suggests dismissing repression as a specific defense mechanism of its own; to reversing Freud's thesis that repression, as a rule, creates a substitutive formation into its opposite; and recognizing that the mechanisms used to build substitutes, as a rule, create repression.     

Translatability of Family Concepts into the Japanese Culture: Using the Family Environment Scale

Family concepts and their measurements interest many family researchers. There is a question about the extent to which family concepts are universal or influenced by the culture in which the instrument originated. Using the Family Environment Scale (FES), the authors examine the translatability of family concepts into the Japanese culture. Forward-and back-translation processes and cross-cultural assessment of reliability and validity are discussed. We suggest that there may be different degrees of translatability for each of the family concepts used in the FES and that evaluation of families in different societies necessitates culturally appropriate constructs and instruments. The discussion is built around Japanese data, which are compared to the American results.     

Processing of fearful and neutral information by obsessive-compulsives

Eighteen obsessive-compulsive and non-obsessive-compulsive outpatients provided data for a study of thinking processes in obsessive-compulsives. First we explored whether the concepts of obsessive-compulsives are excessively complex and over-specific (complex concepts) or, conversely, whether they are excessively ‘simple’, so that items that non-obsessive-compulsives would view as different from one another are classed together by obsessives. Secondly, we examined whether the cognitive mechanisms underlying obsessional fears are specific to the content of the fear, or whether they reflect a general deficit in information processing. To this end, obsessive-compulsive and non-obsessive-compulsive patients sorted four decks of cards into piles; two decks were sorted using ‘neutral’ principles, and two using ‘feared’ principles (contamination and serious mistakes). Results indicated that obsessive thinking is characterized by ‘complex concepts,’ and suggested that this deficit is general, not specific to obsessives' thinking about feared topics. Results also suggested the existence of an additional thinking deficit that is specific to fear-associated topics.     

An examination of concept lattices,types, and functions inRoget’s International Thesaurus

The notions of objects and attributes are essential to knowledge representation. Rudolf Wille’s concept lattices group objects and attributes into concepts, with concepts organized in a lattice, so that some concepts are subconcepts of others. This paper applies certain aspects of type theory to concept lattices in order better to facilitate the representation of knowledge inRoget’s International Thesaurus. Of particular interest is a formal analysis of functions providing concept lattices with a way of representing procedures and actions that currently are not present in the thesaurus.     

Mentalism, behavior-behavior relations, and a behavior-analytic view of the purposes of science

In a behavioral view, the purposes of science are primarily prediction and control. To the extent that a scientist embraces both of these as a unified and generally applicable criterion for science, certain philosophical and theoretical practices are counterproductive, including mentalism in both its metaphysical and metatheoretical forms. It is possible and often worthwhile to recast some mentalistic talk into an issue of behavior-behavior relations. When behavior-behavior relations are approached non-mechanistically, however, analysis cannot stop at the level of the relations themselves. Several analytic concepts common in the behavioral community share some of the dangers of mentalism if not employed properly, including such concepts as self-reinforcement, response-produced stimulation, and self-rules.     

Philosophical assumptions in Freud, Jung and Bion: questions of causality

The historical development of concepts of causality in philosophy is described. Since the Enlightenment and the growth of science, exponents of the two most important concepts, determinism and teleology, have been in conflict. At the inception of psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century this conflict was particularly intense. It was the cause of the first major schism in psychoanalysis between Jung and Freud. Psychoanalytic theorists have continued to disagree over this issue. Post-modernist philosophy has abolished all metaphysics and therefore called into question concepts of psychic causality. Parallel to, but uninfluenced by this development, Bion has developed a psychoanalytic conceptualization which may be seen as transcending causality. The clinical and theoretical implications of these developments are described.     

Abwehr, Verdrängung und Ersatzbildung

The author investigates the relationship of defence, repression and substitutive formation as it presents itself in Freud’s writings. He shows that Freud gives at least four different meanings to the term “repression”: Freud uses it interchangeably with defence, as a consciously intended forgetting, as a specific unconscious mechanism of defence and to describe the consequence of defence mechanisms leading to substitutive formations. The inconsistencies in this relationship are discussed and clarified and Freud’s economic and linguistic attempts to justify repression are subjected to critique as well as the need of a primal repression as a necessary condition for repression proper. In developing Freud’s linguistic justification of repression further, the author presents defence as a semantic displacement. Ideas are excluded from the realm of the concepts which belong to them historically. These presentations become unconscious, i.e. repressed, in that they can no longer be identified as “cases” of these conceptual internal contents. At the same time they are displaced into the extensions of concepts whose internal contents do not belong to them originally. It is by virtue of the internal contents of these concepts that the displaced elements as substitutive formations once again attain consciousness, albeit a false one. It is suggested that repression as a specific defence mechanism of its own should be dismissed, to reverse Freud’s thesis that repression as a rule creates a substitutive formation into its opposite and to understand that the mechanisms used to build substitutes as a rule create repression.     

A model to coordinate understanding of active autonomous learning

Family therapy has enthusiastically taken up certain concepts for adult education but has not benefited from the full range of ideas that are now both available and compatible with current epistemologies. Good practice in formulating learning objectives is discussed and the objectives of this article are specified. Areas of psychology that are relevant to adult learning are reviewed, and concepts of adult education that are important in the training of family therapists are considered. A model of a spiral process of learning that has been developed within the Leeds Family Therapy and Research Centre is proposed. The model coordinates the principles of adult learning described in the article and may be used as a framework for considering whether training will achieve its learning objectives as well as allowing people engaged in learning to gain further insight into how they learn. Readers are encouraged to use the principles of active reflective learning during their processing of the article.