On what there is: Representation and history

Premise: our representational system has had a relatively invariant core throughout human history (cf. Sellars's manifest image). Major theses: (i) When philosophical argument establishes the existence of an entity, that entity is a representing, not a represented. (ii) Most of the documents in the history of philosophy are on a par (as dialogical resources) with current philosophical literature for establishing or controverting such existence claims. (iii) The use of mathematics (initially the mathematized neo-Platonism of classical mechanics) allowed modern physical science to break with the perennial system of representation; in consequence, a portion of the representings of modern physical scientists do not belong to the historically invariant core. This limits the dialogical resources of physical science and the applicability of arguments from perennial philosophy to science. It also explains the relative irrelevance of pre-17th century science to contemporary physical scientists in contrast to the relevance of pre-17th century philosophy to contemporary philosophers. It also supports thesis (iv), that logic (broadly conceived) in central to all serious philosophical enterprises, since logic is the central tool for exhibiting and criticizing the rationale(s) of our representational system(s). Support for these theses will be found in the paper.     

Why people see things that are not there: a novel Perception and Attention Deficit model for recurrent complex visual hallucinations

As many as two million people in the United Kingdom repeatedly see people, animals, and objects that have no objective reality. Hallucinations on the border of sleep, dementing illnesses, delirium, eye disease, and schizophrenia account for 90% of these. The remainder have rarer disorders. We review existing models of recurrent complex visual hallucinations (RCVH) in the awake person, including cortical irritation, cortical hyperexcitability and cortical release, top-down activation, misperception, dream intrusion, and interactive models. We provide evidence that these can neither fully account for the phenomenology of RCVH, nor for variations in the frequency of RCVH in different disorders. We propose a novel Perception and Attention Deficit (PAD) model for RCVH. A combination of impaired attentional binding and poor sensory activation of a correct proto-object, in conjunction with a relatively intact scene representation, bias perception to allow the intrusion of a hallucinatory proto-object into a scene perception. Incorporation of this image into a context-specific hallucinatory scene representation accounts for repetitive hallucinations. We suggest that these impairments are underpinned by disturbances in a lateral frontal cortex-ventral visual stream system. We show how the frequency of RCVH in different diseases is related to the coexistence of attentional and visual perceptual impairments; how attentional and perceptual processes can account for their phenomenology; and that diseases and other states with high rates of RCVH have cholinergic dysfunction in both frontal cortex and the ventral visual stream. Several tests of the model are indicated, together with a number of treatment options that it generates.     

Communicative action,the lifeworlds of learning and the dialogue that we aren't 1

Abstract

The first section of the paper reviews the kind of action which unfolds in Plato's Republic, and argues that, from Book II onwards, its character shifts from a genuine dialogue (communicative action) to a more manipulative kind of intercourse (strategic action). While the former kind of action was characteristic of the educational activities of the historical Socrates, the case is made that this kind of action became largely eclipsed in Western education and superseded by the strategic concerns to which Platonist conceptions of learning gave prominence. The Platonist legacy, it is pointed out, had a decisive impact on Western conceptions of learning, even beyond the Enlightenment. These conceptions were largely custodial rather than emancipatory in character. An argument is presented in thirteen steps in the second section of the paper, to establish the case that the kind of action which properly describes the experience of teaching and learning is that of a cultural courtship. A distinction is drawn between honourable and dishonourable forms of courtship, the honourable being a candidate for defence in universalist terms. The practical import of the distinction is considered. Under the title ‘The Dialogue that we Aren't’, the third section reviews postmodern objections ‐ particularly those of Lyotard ‐ to the kind of argument made in the thirteen steps, and the concluding section considers Habermas’ later theories in relation to my own ‘universalist’ argument.     

Tabular asterisks, Paul Meehl, and looking at the data

Three of Meehl’s major concerns are examined in this summary. They are the problem of null-hypothesis testing as a strategy, the central significance of heterogeneity in human behavior, and the over-dependence on rating scales with their inherent lack of precision.     

Second-personal reasons: why we need something like them,but why there are actually no such things

Abstract

Stephen Darwall, in his book The Second-Person Standpoint (2006), has argued for an account of morality grounded in what he calls second-personal reasons. My first aim in this paper is to demonstrate the value of an account like Darwall’s; as I read it, it responds to the need for an account of morality as ‘intrinsic’ to the person. However, I go on to argue, as my second aim in this paper, that Darwall’s account is ultimately unsuccessful. I hope to achieve these aims by contrasting Darwall’s second-personal account with two other accounts, Hobbes’ and the neo-Kantians’. In the first case, I aim to show that Darwall’s account meets a need that the other accounts don’t in virtue of its differences from the other accounts; and in the second case, I aim to show that Darwall’s account ultimately fails in virtue of its residual similarities to at least one of them.     

Learning what children know about space from looking at their hands: the added value of gesture in spatial communication

This article examines two issues: the role of gesture in the communication of spatial information and the relation between communication and mental representation. Children (8-10 years) and adults walked through a space to learn the locations of six hidden toy animals and then explained the space to another person. In Study 1, older children and adults typically gestured when describing the space and rarely provided spatial information in speech without also providing the information in gesture. However, few 8-year-olds communicated spatial information in speech or gesture. Studies 2 and 3 showed that 8-year-olds did understand the spatial arrangement of the animals and could communicate spatial information if prompted to use their hands. Taken together, these results indicate that gesture is important for conveying spatial relations at all ages and, as such, provides us with a more complete picture of what children do and do not know about communicating spatial relations.     

Being there,experiencing and creating space for dialogue: about working with children in family therapy

While most authors agree that it is important to mobilize the active participation of children in the family therapy session, a lot of family therapists exclude children from participating because they do not feel comfortable with children. Teaching family therapists to feel more comfortable around children is a good idea, but perhaps it is not enough. In this article, the author reflects on the complexity of the issue of the comfort of the therapist in a session with children and families. In the discussion of the case story of Elly and her mother, practitioners are reminded that the therapist's experiencing in the session can help her to understand something of what goes on in the families she is working with.     

Form and content: looking at visual features of television.

Television viewing at home by 50 individuals in 5 age groups (2-, 5-, 8-, 12-year-olds, and adults) was recorded on 1-s time-lapse videotapes over 10-day periods. Coding was based on 5-min point samples. Analysis examined looking at the TV screen in relation to the visual presence of the features cuts, movement, animation, man, woman, child, and nonhuman; content features were child vs. adult programming and overt purposeful character behavior. Cuts, movement, and overt purposeful character behavior were positively related to looking independent of child vs. adult programming. Associations with looking for the remaining features depended on the viewer's age or sex or type of content within which they occurred.     

Representation and constraints: the inverse problem and the structure of visual space

Visual space can be distinguished from physical space. The first is found in visual experience, while the second is defined independently of perception. Theorists have wondered about the relation between the two. Some investigators have concluded that visual space is non-Euclidean, and that it does not have a single metric structure. Here it is argued (1) that visual space exhibits contraction in all three dimensions with increasing distance from the observer, (2) that experienced features of this contraction (including the apparent convergence of lines in visual experience that are produced from physically parallel stimuli in ordinary viewing conditions) are not the same as would be the experience of a perspective projection onto a frontoparallel plane, and (3) that such contraction is consistent with size constancy. These properties of visual space are different from those that would be predicted if spatial perception resulted from the successful solution of the inverse problem. They are consistent with the notion that optical constraints have been internalized. More generally, they are also consistent with the notion that visual spatial structures bear a resemblance relation to physical spatial structures. This notion supports a type of representational relation that is distinct from mere causal correspondence. The reticence of some philosophers and psychologists to discuss the structure of phenomenal space is diagnosed in terms of the simple materialism and the functionalism of the 1970s and 1980s.     

From gaze cueing to perspective taking: Revisiting the claim that we automatically compute where or what other people are looking at

ABSTRACT

Two paradigms have shown that people automatically compute what or where another person is looking at. In the visual perspective-taking paradigm, participants judge how many objects they see; whereas, in the gaze cueing paradigm, participants identify a target. Unlike in the former task, in the latter task, the influence of what or where the other person is looking at is only observed when the other person is presented alone before the task-relevant objects. We show that this discrepancy across the two paradigms is not due to differences in visual settings (Experiment 1) or available time to extract the directional information (Experiment 2), but that it is caused by how attention is deployed in response to task instructions (Experiment 3). Thus, the mere presence of another person in the field of view is not sufficient to compute where/what that person is looking at, which qualifies the claimed automaticity of such computations.     

Tyranny and freedom: looking at ideas in the practice of family therapy

This article comments upon recent "second-order" family therapy concerns about the nature of the therapeutic relationship, and explores how ideas held by therapists may rule and restrict therapeutic conversations. Ideas are examined in the light of how adherence to them might open space (free) or close space (tyrannize) with respect to the therapeutic relationship. The authors propose a philosophical viewpoint, a methodology, and practical suggestions for therapists wishing to maintain a stance of relative freedom with respect to ideas in their work with clients.     

Induction: Representation,strategy and argument

In order to be a general theory of human cognition, the theory of mental models needs to accommodate a variety of forms of reasoning in addition to deduction. The mental model theory of induction is a crucial step in establishing generality. After suggesting that the theory of mental models can also account for abduction and analogy, the paper points out that inductive performance is likely to be constrained both by the nature of the representation used and by strategic factors. Since human cognition involves the communication of arguments, a final section explores the relationship between the theory of mental models and the notion of an argument. It proposes that models can contain tokens of inductive arguments which can be referred to in the course of other arguments.     

Revisiting the looking at nothing phenomenon: Visual and semantic biases in memory search

When visual stimuli remain present during search, people spend more time fixating objects that are semantically or visually related to the target instruction than looking at unrelated objects. Are these semantic and visual biases also observable when participants search within memory? We removed the visual display prior to search while continuously measuring eye movements towards locations previously occupied by objects. The target absent trials contained objects that were either visually or semantically related to the target instruction. When the overall mean proportion of fixation time was considered, we found biases towards the location previously occupied by the target, but failed to find biases towards visually or semantically related objects. However, in two experiments the pattern of biases towards the target over time provided a reliable predictor for biases towards the visually and semantically related objects. We therefore conclude that visual and semantic representations alone can guide eye movements in memory search, but that orienting biases are weak when the stimuli are no longer present.     

Technique and final cause in psychoanalysis: Four ways of looking at one moment

This paper argues that if one considers just a single clinical moment there may be no principled way to choose among different approaches to psychoanalytic technique. One must in addition take into account what Aristotle called the final cause of psychoanalysis, which this paper argues is freedom. However, freedom is itself an open‐ended concept with many aspects that need to be explored and developed from a psychoanalytic perspective. This paper considers one analytic moment from the perspectives of the techniques of Paul Gray, Hans Loewald, the contemporary Kleinians and Jacques Lacan. It argues that, if we are to evaluate these techniques, we must take into account the different conceptions of freedom they are trying to facilitate.     

Here's looking at you,kid: attention to infant emotional faces in mothers and non‐mothers

Infant facial cues play a critical role in eliciting care and nurturance from an adult caregiver. Using an attentional capture paradigm we investigated attentional processing of adult and infant emotional facial expressions in a sample of mothers (n = 29) and non‐mothers (n = 37) to determine whether infant faces were associated with greater task interference. Responses to infant target stimuli were slower than adult target stimuli in both groups. This effect was modulated by parental status, such that mothers compared to non‐mothers showed longer response times to infant compared to adult faces. Both groups also responded more slowly to emotional faces, an effect that was more marked for infant emotional faces. Finally, it was found that greater levels of mothers' self‐reported parental distress was associated with less task interference when processing infant faces. These findings indicate that for adult women, infant faces in general and emotional infant faces in particular, preferentially engage attention compared to adult faces. However, for mothers, infant faces appear to be more salient in general. Therefore, infant faces may constitute a special class of social stimuli. We suggest that alterations in attentional processing in motherhood may constitute an adaptive behavioural change associated with becoming a parent.     

Seeing her looking at you: acquaintance and variation in the judgment of gaze depth

The acquaintance of subject and looker as well as the depth of gaze affected male subjects' judgments of a female assistant's looking behavior. In a situation ruling out visual interaction, eye-contact gazes were located no more accurately than other gazes. Nevertheless, although gaze depths were not accurately discriminated, gazes deviating vertically and horizontally, to the edge of the head and just beyond the head, were located with some accuracy. The pattern of errors was toward the head and away from the body. Acquaintance produces a stronger bias away from the body, and may produce other interaction-facilitating biases.     

THE ETHICS OF ECSTASY: Georges Bataille and Amy Hollywood on Mysticism,Morality, and Violence

Georges Bataille agrees with numerous Christian mystics that there is ethical and religious value in meditating upon, and having ecstatic episodes in response to, imagery of violent death. For Christians, the crucified Christ is the focus of contemplative efforts. Bataille employs photographic imagery of a more‐recent victim of torture and execution. In this essay, while engaging with Amy Hollywood's interpretation of Bataille in Sensible Ecstasy, I show that, unlike the Christian mystics who influence him, Bataille strives to divorce himself from any moral authority external to the ecstatic episode itself. I argue that in his attempt to remove external authority he abandons the only resources that could possibly protect his mystical contemplation from engendering sadistic attitudes.     

On doing two things at once: IV. Necessary and sufficient conditions: Rejoinder to Lien, Proctor, and Ruthruff (2003)

Four publications have demonstrated perfect timesharing of 1 simultaneous decisions. In all of these, (a). subjects were motivated to respond as quickly as possible, and with 1 exception that involved unusually extensive practice (E. Hazeltine, D. Teague, & R. B. Ivry, 2002, Experiment 4), (b). at least 1 of the 2 tasks was characterized by ideomotor (IM) compatibility, meaning that each task stimulus incorporated a component of the sensory feedback from its required response. Conclusions justified by these reports are that (a). the use of speed-stress instructions is necessary for perfect timesharing of 2 simultaneous decision tasks: (b). when both tasks are IM compatible, perfect timesharing requires little or no practice: (c). extensive practice is needed to achieve perfect timesharing when only 1 of the 2 tasks is IM compatible: and (d). very large amounts of practice can yield perfect timesharing of 2 decision tasks when neither is IM compatible.