Husserl’s transcendental philosophy and the critique of naturalism

Throughout his career, Husserl identifies naturalism as the greatest threat to both the sciences and philosophy. In this paper, I explicate Husserl’s overall diagnosis and critique of naturalism and then examine the specific transcendental aspect of his critique. Husserl agreed with the Neo-Kantians in rejecting naturalism. He has three major critiques of naturalism: First, it (like psychologism and for the same reasons) is ‘countersensical’ in that it denies the very ideal laws that it needs for its own justification. Second, naturalism essentially misconstrues consciousness by treating it as a part of the world. Third, naturalism is the inevitable consequence of a certain rigidification of the ‘natural attitude’ into what Husserl calls the ‘naturalistic attitude’. This naturalistic attitude ‘reifies’ and it ‘absolutizes’ the world such that it is treated as taken-for-granted and ‘obvious’. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological analysis, however, discloses that the natural attitude is, despite its omnipresence in everyday life, not primary, but in fact is relative to the ‘absolute’ transcendental attitude. The mature Husserl’s critique of naturalism is therefore based on his acceptance of the absolute priority of the transcendental attitude. The paradox remains that we must start from and, in a sense, return to the natural attitude, while, at the same time, restricting this attitude through the on-going transcendental vigilance of the universal epoché.

Infinity in Ontology and Mind

Two fundamental categories of any ontology are the category of objects and the category of universals. We discuss the question whether either of these categories can be infinite or not. In the category of objects, the subcategory of physical objects is examined within the context of different cosmological theories regarding the different kinds of fundamental objects in the universe. Abstract objects are discussed in terms of sets and the intensional objects of conceptual realism. The category of universals is discussed in terms of the three major theories of universals: nominalism, realism, and conceptualism. The finitude of mind pertains only to conceptualism. We consider the question of whether or not this finitude precludes impredicative concept formation. An explication of potential infinity, especially as applied to concepts and expressions, is given. We also briefly discuss a logic of plural objects, or groups of single objects (individuals), which is based on Bertrand Russell’s (1903, The principles of mathematics, 2nd edn. (1938). Norton & Co, NY) notion of a class as many. The universal class as many does not exist in this logic if there are two or more single objects; but the issue is undecided if there is just one individual. We note that adding plural objects (groups) to an ontology with a countable infinity of individuals (single objects) does not generate an uncountable infinity of classes as many.

靶刺激变换对情景知觉过程中注视控制的影响

研究考察了情景浏览过程中靶刺激变换对注视控制的影响,运用了眼动记录技术。实验采用2(靶刺激位置:左、右)×2(变换方式:增加靶刺激、删除靶刺激)的重复测量设计。结果发现:(1)靶刺激变换方式对靶刺激所属兴趣区首次注视启动时间存在显著性影响,并对靶刺激所属兴趣区的前3次注视持续时间产生影响;(2)靶刺激位置属性对兴趣区首次注视启动时间、前3次注视持续时间均不存在显著影响。结果表明,与靶刺激增加相比,靶刺激的删除更易引起被试的优先注意,而且会抑制首次注视过程中的信息提取。     

Incorporating Demographic Embeddings Into Language Understanding

Meaning depends on context. This applies in obvious cases like deictics or sarcasm as well as more subtle situations like framing or persuasion. One key aspect of this is the identity of the participants in an interaction. Our interpretation of an utterance shifts based on a variety of factors, including personal history, background knowledge, and our relationship to the source. While obviously an incomplete model of individual differences, demographic factors provide a useful starting point and allow us to capture some of this variance. However, the relevance of specific demographic factors varies between situations—where age might be the key factor in one context, ideology might dominate in another. To address this challenge, we introduce a method for combining demographics and context into situated demographic embeddings—mapping representations into a continuous geometric space appropriate for the given domain, showing the resulting representations to be functional and interpretable. We further demonstrate how to make use of related external data so as to apply this approach in low‐resource situations. Finally, we show how these representations can be incorporated into improve modeling of real‐world natural language understanding tasks, improving model performance and helping with issues of data sparsity.     

The role of edge-based and surface-based information in natural scene categorization: Evidence from behavior and event-related potentials

A fundamental question in vision research is whether visual recognition is determined by edge-based information (e.g., edge, line, and conjunction) or surface-based information (e.g., color, brightness, and texture). To investigate this question, we manipulated the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the scene and the mask in a backward masking task of natural scene categorization. The behavioral results showed that correct classification was higher for line-drawings than for color photographs when the SOA was 13 ms, but lower when the SOA was longer. The ERP results revealed that most latencies of early components were shorter for the line-drawings than for the color photographs, and the latencies gradually increased with the SOA for the color photographs but not for the line-drawings. The results provide new evidence that edge-based information is the primary determinant of natural scene categorization, receiving priority processing; by contrast, surface information takes longer to facilitate natural scene categorization.     

INTRODUCTION to Special Edition of JAP on the ‘Who is My Jung?’ conference held at the British Library in October 2017 to mark the 40th Anniversary of the foundation of the Association of Jungian Analysts (AJA)

The paper reviews the processes which went into the creation of an exceptionally comprehensive conference on Jungian analysis and psychology. The conference brought together all five of the constituent societies based in London of the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP). The personal nature of the conference contributions is highlighted together with observations about the passage from spoken to written modes. The idea of ‘conference space’ is reviewed and this leads to a discussion of the often overlooked benign role of conferences in professional life.     

The schema provokes a disparity of false recollection between actions and objects in an everyday scene

We explored the effect of the schema on recognition memories and subjective experiences for actions and objects in an everyday scene. At first, participants watched slides of a man cooking in a kitchen. The man performed schema‐consistent actions, and schema‐consistent objects were left. After watching the slides, participants completed a recognition test, a remember/know test, and a Perception/Thought/Emotion/Context questionnaire. We confirmed three main results. First, participants made more false recognitions for schema‐consistent distracters than for schema‐inconsistent distracters with more “remember” judgments accompanied by perceptual, thought, and contextual details, and with more “know” judgments. Second, participants made more false recognitions for schema‐consistent object distracters than for schema‐consistent action distracters. Third, participants more frequently recognized schema‐consistent action targets than schema‐consistent object targets with more “remember” judgments. Both action memory and object memory were reconstructed under the schema, provoking false recognitions for schema‐consistent distracters. However, the memories of schema‐consistent action targets were so recollective that they could prevent false recognitions for schema‐consistent action distracters.     

Response to commentaries on discussion paper Gene–environment interdependence

There is a high measure of agreement on the key issues concerning gene–environment interdependence. Contrary to arguments on the need for direct exact replication of findings, it is suggested that “robust” replication using the same constructs is needed. RCTs have an important role for testing for environmental mediation but cannot be used for environmental risks in childhood that show G×E in relation to adult outcomes. Instead, greater use needs to be made of natural experiments. Experimental methods are needed to study biological mediating mechanisms and these should include both animal models and human brain imaging studies. In addition to further research on G×E, further studies of gene–environment correlations are required. Many challenges remain but the future for gene–environment interdependence is bright.     

To what extent do we process the nondominant object in a morphed figure? Evidence from a picture–word interference task

Since the 1970s, the Heuristics and Biases Program in Cognitive Psychology has shown that people do not reason correctly about conditional probability problems. In the 1990s, however, evolutionary psychologists discovered that if the same problems are presented in a different way, people's performance greatly improves. Two explanations have been offered to account for this facilitation effect: the natural frequency hypothesis and the nested-set hypothesis. The empirical evidence on this debate is mixed. We review the literature pointing out some methodological issues that we take into account in our own present experiments. We interpret our results as suggesting that when the mentioned methodological problems are tackled, the evidence seems to favour the natural frequency hypothesis and to go against the nested-set hypothesis.