A Note on Prototypes,Convexity and Fuzzy Sets

The work on prototypes in ontologies pioneered by Rosch [10] and elaborated by Lakoff [8] and Freund [3] is related to vagueness in the sense that the more remote an instance is from a prototype the fewer people agree that it is an example of that prototype. An intuitive example is the prototypical “mother”, and it is observed that more specific instances like ”single mother”, “adoptive mother”, “surrogate mother”, etc., are less and less likely to be classified as “mothers” by experimental subjects. From a different direction Gärdenfors [4] provided a persuasive account of natural predicates to resolve paradoxes of induction like Goodman’s “Grue” predicate [5]. Gärdenfors proposed that “quality dimensions” arising from human cognition and perception impose topologies on concepts such that the ones that appear “natural” to us are convex in these topologies. We show that these two cognitive principles — prototypes and predicate convexity — are equivalent to unimodal (convex) fuzzy characteristic functions for sets. Then we examine the case when the fuzzy set characteristic function is not convex, in particular when it is multi-modal. We argue that this is an indication that the fuzzy concept should really be regarded as a super concept in which the decomposed components are subconcepts in an ontological taxonomy.     

The Conceptual Fetters of the Mind-Body Problem

The crux of our encounter with the mind-body problem originates from a predicament on the underlying ontological level—from the category of concepts, it seems that the form for grasping the subjective aspects of the mind is incommensurable with the one for understanding the objective level of the brain. This is reflected in the fact that empirical expression is restricted by language, that psychological events cannot be incorporated into strict laws, and that the subject has a path that, with his own mental state, others cannot share. In order to make progress in cracking the mind-body problem, this paper tries to abandon the assumption that “psychology” and “physics” are mutually exclusive and are incompatible ontological categories. The “mind” and “body” are considered as two interchangeable yet non-coexisting perspectives. Therefore, events in the body are represented as conceptions in the mind, and have an expressive correspondence with one another. Meanwhile, the approach for achieving such correspondence involves the entity itself—the ability of the organism to perform purposeful activities constitutes the source of its internal activities. Through the connection of life categories—or rather, the coupling of living beings and their worlds—the mind and body maintain mechanisms which can be jointly realized.     

On the Conditions of Possibility for Comparative and Intercultural Philosophy

In this essay, we present a theory of intercultural philosophical dialogue and comparative philosophy, drawing on both hermeneutics and analytic philosophy. We advocate the approach of “de-essentialization” across the board. It is true that similarities and differences are always to be observed across languages and traditions, but there exist no immutable cores or essences. “De-essentialization” applies to all “levels” of concepts: everyday notions such as green and qing 青, philosophical concepts such as emotion(s) and qing 情, and philosophical categories such as forms of life and dao 道. We argue that interpretation is a holistic multi-directional process constrained by the principle of mutual attunement. It is necessary to assume that “the other” is a human being, who, in most cases, is consistent and stating that which is true or right. This is the condition of possibility for intercultural philosophical dialogue and comparative philosophy. No more necessary conditions are needed. There is no need to presuppose concepts or categories that are universal for all humans and their languages (such as emotion(s) and qing 情).     

The person as an extended field: Querying the ontological binaries and dominant “container” metaphor at the core of psychology

The Western-centricity of psychology means it has inherited some of the key ontological categories and distinctions at the heart of Western cultures. This paper identifies four such distinctions that have been particularly influential in psychology: mind-body; subjective-objective; self-other; and inner-outer. Together, these have created a pervasive view that the mind – and the person more broadly – is metaphorically like a “container.” However, this paper proposes that a better conceptualization, or at least a complementary one, may be a “field,” whereby people's being extends outwards, beyond the apparent boundary of their skin, into the world. Such perspectives have been especially prominent in other cultures and traditions (like Buddhism), but have pedigree in the West too. The paper thus draws on various cultural sources, and numerous disciplines both within psychology and beyond, to make its case. It is hoped the discussion may help psychology reflect on and re-evaluate the ontological assumptions at its core, and to engage with field-based perspectives that may be provide a useful alternative or complement to the standard container metaphor.     

Gender Categories as Dual-Character Concepts?

Seminal work by Knobe, Prasada, and Newman (2013) distinguished a set of concepts, which they named “dual-character concepts.” Unlike traditional concepts, they require two distinct criteria for determining category membership. For example, the prototypical dual-character concept “artist” has both a concrete dimension of artistic skills, and an abstract dimension of aesthetic sensibility and values. Therefore, someone can be a good artist on the concrete dimension but not truly an artist on the abstract dimension. Does this analysis capture people's understanding of cornerstone social categories, such as gender, around which society and everyday life have traditionally been organized? Gender, too, may be conceived as having not only a concrete dimension but also a distinct dimension of abstract norms and values. As with dual-character concepts, violations of abstract norms and values may result in someone being judged as not truly a man/woman. Here, we provide the first empirical assessment of applying the dual-character framework to people's conception of gender. We found that, on some measures that primarily relied on metalinguistic cues, gender concepts did indeed resemble dual-character concepts. However, on other measures that depicted transgressions of traditional gender norms, neither “man” nor “woman” appeared dual-character-like, in that participants did not disqualify people from being truly a man or truly a woman. In a series of follow-up studies, we examined whether moral norms have come to replace gender role norms for the abstract dimension. Implications for the evolution of concepts and categories are explored.     

“God is the creator of all life and the energy of this world”: German intersex Christians’ reflection on the image of God and being created in God’s image

ABSTRACT

Intersex individuals are often told they are not human beings because they do not neatly fit into the categories of “female” and “male.” Many are made to feel like monsters. Christianity enforces this model of sexual dimorphism with the notion that to be a human being means to be created clearly “female” or clearly “male” in the image of God. This paper draws on interviews with German intersex Christians to explore their diverse images of God and what it means to be created in God’s image with the goal of creating new “conditions of possibility” that represent the full range of human sex/gender.     

Concepts as Semantic Pointers: A Framework and Computational Model

The reconciliation of theories of concepts based on prototypes, exemplars, and theory‐like structures is a longstanding problem in cognitive science. In response to this problem, researchers have recently tended to adopt either hybrid theories that combine various kinds of representational structure, or eliminative theories that replace concepts with a more finely grained taxonomy of mental representations. In this paper, we describe an alternative approach involving a single class of mental representations called “semantic pointers.” Semantic pointers are symbol‐like representations that result from the compression and recursive binding of perceptual, lexical, and motor representations, effectively integrating traditional connectionist and symbolic approaches. We present a computational model using semantic pointers that replicates experimental data from categorization studies involving each prior paradigm. We argue that a framework involving semantic pointers can provide a unified account of conceptual phenomena, and we compare our framework to existing alternatives in accounting for the scope, content, recursive combination, and neural implementation of concepts.     

Cognition in moral space: A minimal model

We describe moral cognition as a process occurring in a distinctive cognitive space, wherein moral relationships are defined along several morally relevant dimensions. After identifying candidate dimensions, we show how moral judgments can emerge in this space directly from object perception, without any appeal to moral rules or abstract values. Our reductive “minimal model” (Batterman & Rice, 2014) elaborates Beal’s (2020) claim that moral cognition is determined, at the most basic level, by “ontological frames” defining subjects, objects, and the proper relation between them. We expand this claim into a set of formal hypotheses that predict moral judgments based on how objects are “framed” in the relevant dimensions of “moral space.”     

Concepts as Tools Not Rules: a Commentary on (Re-) Defining Racism

In (Re-) Defining Racism, Alberto Urquidez argues that conflicting philosophical accounts over the definition of racism are at bottom linguistic confusions that would benefit from a Wittgensteinian-inspired approach. In this essay, I argue that such an approach would be helpful in disputes over the definition of metaphysically contested concepts, such as “race,” or semantically contested concepts, such as “racialization.” I disagree, however, that such insights would prove helpful or do very little for disputes concerning normatively contested concepts, such as “racism.”

     

孟荀的“性—情”结构论及艺术本体性

本文从孟子和荀子思想中的“性”与“情”两大范畴入手 ,构建了一个作为生命本体存在形式的“性—情”结构论样式。通过对统领“性—情”结构论的“心”本体的聚合和分解作用 ,梳理了一个心—性—情的逻辑脉络。将“乐”作为形式本体与审美快感体验的主要体现方式进行解剖 ,而使之成为艺术本体存在和审美愉悦的现实参照。本文认为 ,由“心”本体而建构的“性—情”结构论 ,是后世的艺术创造活动中人们提出的所谓“吟咏情性”和“心统性情”等命题的始基 ,它既有张扬艺术情感而创构艺术魅力的作用 ,也有以伦理文化制约艺术一审美体验的局限性。     

The formation of novel social category conjunctions in working memory: A possible role for the episodic buffer?

Recent research (e.g., Hutter, Crisp, Humphreys, Waters, &; Moffit; Siebler) has confirmed that combining novel social categories involves two stages (e.g., Hampton; Hastie, Schroeder, &; Weber). Furthermore, it is also evident that following stage 1 (constituent additivity), the second stage in these models involves cognitively effortful complex reasoning. However, while current theory and research has addressed how category conjunctions are initially represented to some degree, it is not clear precisely where we first combine or bind existing social constituent categories. For example, how and where do we compose and temporarily store a coherent representation of an individual who shares membership of “female” and “blacksmith” categories? In this article, we consider how the revised multi-component model of working memory (Baddeley) can assist in resolving the representational limitations in the extant two-stage theoretical models. This is a new approach to understanding how novel conjunctions form new bound “composite” representations.     

Ad hoc categories

People construct ad hoc categories to achieve goals. For example, constructing the category of “things to sell at a garage sale” can be instrumental to achieving the goal of selling unwanted possessions. These categories differ from common categories (e.g., “fruit,” “furniture”) in that ad hoc categories violate the correlational structure of the environment and are not well established in memory. Regarding the latter property, the category concepts, concept-to-instance associations, and instance-to-concept associations structuring ad hoc categories are shown to be much less established in memory than those of common categories. Regardless of these differences, however, ad hoc categories possess graded structures (i.e., typicality gradients) as salient as those structuring common categories. This appears to be the result of a similarity comparison process that imposes graded structure on any category regardless of type.     

Reality and Philosophy: Reflections on Cora Diamond's Work

The publication of Cora Diamond's important 2002 “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy” (in Philosophy and Animal Life) stimulated the writing of this essay. “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy” attempted to show that there are experiences of reality (recounted especially in literature like John Coetzee's novels and Ted Hughes' poetry) in relation to which philosophical concepts and words encounter difficulty. The experiences resist conceptualization. By examining several of Diamond's earlier writings, I try to show that the difficulty of philosophical conceptualization of reality is due to the fact that reality does not exist external to experience. Reality being internal to experience means that reality contains an unfixed set of possibilities. Being experiential, reality is historical. The historical dimension of reality – such as the reality of animal life suffering – makes the words through we describe this reality too weak, i.e. they are not powerful enough to capture reality, hence the difficulty. Consequently, as I argue, for Diamond, the weakness of words means that words are never complete concepts. The meaning of them seems always still to come since reality seems always to have a surplus of possibilities. I suggest that because of this always still “to come” aspect of the meaning of words, we might characterise Diamond's thought as a messianism.     

Persons and organisms

The philosophical quest for unity leads to the desire for a clear and adequate conception of human reality as a “mind-body unity.” This quest for unity has led both to conceptions of considerable heuristic value and to overly reductionistic approaches that impoverish our full relation to reality. Three basic themes are developed in this essay:

1. That on an ontological level dualistic and monistic approaches to mind-body remain equally plausible.
2. That on a practical level, epistemological considerations require us to retain a dualistic approach suggested by the terms “person” and “organism.”
3. That psychotherapy (whether religious or secular) must ground itself in the notion of “person.”

Differences between the concepts of “person” and “organism” are delineated on six specific points. Finally, it is suggested that a holistic approach to health requires both constructs.     

"EVERYMAN'S ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT": A DISSIDENT VERSION

We must agree, I think, with Frank Ebersole that there is something preposterous in supposing that the God of religious belief, the God who handed down tablets to Moses on Mt. Sinai, etc., should be proven to exist by the ontological argument. Indeed, when we place the one, the ontological argument, by the side of the other, the God of religious belief, there seems hardly to be any connection between them. But if we agree to this perception of things, what sense can we make of the ontological argument, for example, the “pull” that it sometimes exerts on us?     

Educating pain

Abstract

In times in which we ask ourselves how political cruelty and torments can be forgotten, Nietzsche’s pleadoyer for pain to serve the purpose of education, surprises. What might sound like a mere provocation, rather lies at the heart of the Nietzschean philosophy. As is pointed out, Nietzsche’s contention that pain is the most powerful aid to mnemonics, originates from his philosophy of pain as the main condition of all forms of creation. The title “educating (bilden) pain” expresses Nietzsche’s advocacy of an education towards pain as the dynamo of creation. In this paper I explore how Nietzsche’s notion of pain is linked to two concepts of Bildung. In the first part I investigate the relation between pain and “Bildung” in the sense of “creation”, and in the second part I link this to the relation between pain and “Bildung” in the sense of “education”. By these means, I try to answer the question: how far can pain, which is seen as the condition of creation, be linked to conditions of education.     

Settling on what we are: The central place of the sense‐of‐self in education,and the implication of the concepts of the teleon and telentropy for the development of the sense‐of‐self

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the centrality of the development of a person's sense‐of‐self in his or her personal growth, and so to justify why educators should deliberately focus the attention of learners on the development of their own senses‐of‐self.

We describe the sense‐of‐self as a person's working hypothesis of what he or she is, as a functioning being. (This is in contrast to the notion of self‐concept, which is composed of the beliefs and evaluations that one has about oneself as a person in a social context.)

To illustrate the centrality of the sense‐of‐self we introduce two associated concepts—the teleon and telentropy. Teleons are “purposeful action patterns,” which may be regarded as the defining characteristic of any living system, including human beings.

Telentropy is similar to entropy (encountered in physics and chemistry), but instead of dealing with the level of disorder in externally described systems, it represents the level of informational confusion existing within an organism regarding its own true nature.

We discuss the implications of the concepts “teleon” and “telentropy” for a person's educability, using examples from daily life and educational institutions.

We provide a number of suggestions for the revising of educational practice to foster the development of the sense‐of‐self in learners. This we demonstrate to have potentially beneficial effects of the general stress levels of society.     

On the relation between conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics

In recent years, there has been growing discussion amongst philosophers about “conceptual engineering”. Put roughly, conceptual engineering concerns the assessment and improvement of concepts, or of other devices we use in thought and talk (e.g., words). This often involves attempts to modify our existing concepts (or other representational devices), and/or our practices of using them. This paper explores the relation between conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics, where conceptual ethics is taken to encompass normative and evaluative questions about concepts, words, and other broadly “representational” and/or “inferential” devices we use in thought and talk. We take some of the central questions in conceptual ethics to concern which concepts we should use and what words should mean, and why. We put forward a view of conceptual engineering in terms of the following three activities: conceptual ethics, conceptual innovation, and conceptual implementation. On our view, conceptual engineering can be defined in terms of these three activities, but not in a straightforward, Boolean way. Conceptual engineering, we argue, is made up of mereologically complex activities whose parts fall into the categories associated with each of these three different activities.     

The Message of a Bottle: A Discussion of “Trump Cards and Klein Bottles: On the Collective of the Individual”

Relational psychoanalysis’ promise is to connect the personal and the collective/political. Through a phenomenological approach, this comment attempts to describe the subjective effects of the “Great History” in the analytic couple dynamics. Starting from the concepts of intersubject, vinculo and the one-to-many forms of relations –proposed by Francisco González– it expatiates on “resonance” as a way to recover fragments of experience shattered by trauma and “consonance” as a means to visualize this phenomena in other collectives, as a trans-collective experience. The piece invites the possibility of creating new analytic experiential object: the Klein Bottle. By entangling the individual with the multiple and history with the present, it opens new dimensions of meaning. It can be used both to deconstruct a fixated pleat of subjectivity and to open new forms of polyphonic relationality. This approach is offered as a path through which we analysts can rejoin to the march of history.