Two Cultures Revisited: New Widening Gaps

Aristotle continues to be a highly cited author in cultural sciences (human and social sciences) and humanities. In the last two decades, his work attracted up to a hundred times more attention than the work of Konrad Lorenz or Edward O. Wilson, who have attempted to synthesize new knowledge on behavior and society and proposed alternatives to traditional, intuitively appealing, explanations. Aristotle's interpretations of the world, which appear to be intuitive to the human mind, were abandoned in natural sciences upon introduction of the experimental method. Human intuition may have been appropriate in conditions under which it was originally selected: for life of small non-anonymous groups of hunters and gatherers in the savannah. Intuition confines human understanding to a simple reality circumscribed by a boundary that can be called Aristotle's barrier. The barrier may only be crossed by experimentation, which is largely missing in cultural sciences. Snow's concept of two cultures may be revisited to characterize a splitting of natural sciences versus cultural sciences. It may also be applied to a widening gulf between science and technoscience. Diverging of the two cultures may have far-reaching consequences for prospects of humankind's survival.     

Directed forgetting for categorised pictures: recognition memory for perceptual details versus gist

ABSTRACT

Item-based directed forgetting (DF) was tested using 2-alternative forced-choice recognition to examine the effects of forgetting instructions on memory for perceptual detail and gist of categorised pictures of scenes and objects in three experiments. When the distractor is from the same category as the target (exemplar test condition), discrimination must be based on memory for perceptual details, whereas recognition can be based on gist or general category information when the distractor is from a novel category (novel test condition). Recognition accuracy was greater for Remember-cued than Forget-cued pictures when discrimination must be based on perceptual details in the exemplar test condition but not when discrimination could be based on gist in the novel test condition. Accuracy in scene and object recognition is greater for gist than for perceptual details, and DF instructions serve to reduce recognition memory based on perceptual details.     

Revelation between Cognitive Science of Religion and Dialectical Theology

Abstract

The article critically discusses the contemporary relevance and challenges of Rudolf Bultmann's theology of revelation in relation to the basic claims of cognitive science of religion. Underlying the analysis is the assumption that his theology still has some relevance when confronted with the claims from this scientific approach to religion. There are nevertheless also good reasons for arguing that his notion of revelation needs a wider and more experiential focus. The argument for such an experiential-based notion of revelation is provided by an analysis of what features qualified revelatory experience may consist in.     

Fine-Tuning,Atheist Criticism,and the Fifth Way

Abstract

Like the “modern watchmaker” argument formulated by William Paley, the argument from fine-tuning should not be confused with Thomas Aquinas' fifth proof for the existence of God as expressed in the Summa Theologiae. While the former is based on efficient causality, the latter is based upon final causality. Though some atheist criticisms are relevant to the fine-tuning argument, they do not affect the Fifth Way. After briefly expositing the fine-tuning argument, I will argue that Aquinas' argument from the “governance of the world” offers a more convincing proof for God—one that evades atheistic criticisms leveled against design arguments.     

Evolution by Natural Selection: Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion

The argument-from-design, based on biological evidence, was elaborated by William Paley in his Natural Theology (1802). It was revived in the 1990s by several authors, with a new moniker, the theory of intelligent design. In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin advanced a scientific explanation of the design of organisms: evolution by natural selection. Organisms are pervaded by imperfections, dysfunctions, cruelties, and even sadism. The theory of evolution accounts for these mishaps, by natural selection, so that they need not be attributed to God's explicit design. The theory of evolution by natural selection is Darwin's gift to religion, in addition to its centrality in biology.     

The role of motion and speech in face recognition at birth

Newborns, a few hours after birth, already encounter many different faces, talking or silently moving. How do they process these faces and which cues are important in early face recognition? In a series of six experiments, newborns were familiarized with an unfamiliar face in different contexts (photographs, talking, silently moving, and with only external movements of the head with speech sound). At test, they saw the familiar and a new faces either in photographs, silently moving, or talking. A novelty preference was evidenced at test when photographs were presented in the two phases. This result supports those already evidenced in several studies. A familiarity preference appeared only when the face was seen talking in the familiarization phase and in a photograph or talking again at test. This suggests that the simultaneous presence of speech sound, and rigid and nonrigid movements present in a talking face enhances recognition of interactive faces at birth.     

The probabilistic analysis of language acquisition: theoretical, computational, and experimental analysis

There is much debate over the degree to which language learning is governed by innate language-specific biases, or acquired through cognition-general principles. Here we examine the probabilistic language acquisition hypothesis on three levels: We outline a novel theoretical result showing that it is possible to learn the exact generative model underlying a wide class of languages, purely from observing samples of the language. We then describe a recently proposed practical framework, which quantifies natural language learnability, allowing specific learnability predictions to be made for the first time. In previous work, this framework was used to make learnability predictions for a wide variety of linguistic constructions, for which learnability has been much debated. Here, we present a new experiment which tests these learnability predictions. We find that our experimental results support the possibility that these linguistic constructions are acquired probabilistically from cognition-general principles.     

Retroactive adjustment of perceived time

Accurately timing acoustic events in dynamic scenes is fundamental to scene analysis. To detect events in busy scenes, listeners must often identify a change in the pattern of ongoing fluctuation, resulting in many ubiquitous events being detected later than when they occurred. This raises the question of how delayed detection time affects the manner in which such events are perceived relative to other events in the environment.To model these situations, we use sequences of tone-pips with a time–frequency pattern that changes from regular to random (‘REG–RAND’) or vice versa (‘RAND–REG’). REG–RAND transitions are detected rapidly, but the emergence of regularity cannot be established immediately, and thus RAND–REG transitions take significantly longer to detect. Using a temporal order judgment task, and a light-flash as a temporal marker, we demonstrate that listeners do not perceive the onset of RAND–REG transitions at the point of detection (∼530 ms post transition), but automatically re-adjust their estimate ∼300 ms closer to the nominal transition.These results demonstrate that the auditory system possesses mechanisms that survey the proximal history of an ongoing stimulus and automatically adjust perception to compensate for prolonged detection time, allowing listeners to build meaningful representations of the environment.     

Assessing the Incremental Algorithm: A Response to Krahmer et al.

This response discusses the experiment reported in Krahmer et al.’s Letter to the Editor of Cognitive Science. We observe that their results do not tell us whether the Incremental Algorithm is better or worse than its competitors, and we speculate about implications for reference in complex domains, and for learning from ‘‘normal” (i.e., non‐semantically‐balanced) corpora.     

多视点学习条件下空间表征的朝向特异性

让被试在没有外界参照线索的条件下,从三个观察视点学习物体场景,首次以局部场景再认范式探讨了空间记忆中场景表征的朝向特异性。结果表明：（1）多视点学习条件下,场景空间表征依然是依赖于特定朝向的,不支持空间表征独立于朝向和空间表征依赖于多个观察朝向的观点。（2）场景空间表征的朝向依赖性不仅表现于方位判断任务,也同样表现于场景再认任务。（3）场景本身的内在结构对空间表征中参照系的选取有重要影响。