On the mathematical representation of phenomena of emergence

This paper is a philosophical enquiry into the role that mathematics play in the articulation of science. It is conducted, in its essentials, in the spirit of Wittgenstein's views on the nature and function of philosophy, which are to lay bare, as it were, the manner in which we do whatever it is that we do, and then to examine the claims that we make for the deed. My conclusions should be easily accessible to those familiar with his thinking on the subject of science.

The case that has inspired the writing of this paper is not that of biology, nor is it the biological theory of evolution; rather, the case I have kept in mind while writing this paper is that of cognitive science, sometimes presented as a “science of mind” by its practitioners. It is primarily a computational theory characterized by two distinct approaches, one internal, the gist of which is that the brain/mind distinction is definitely passé; the other external, based on the view that the mark of human mentation is to be found in the ordinary use of old expressions to convey new meanings, i.e. in the Cartesian test for the existence of other minds, and its simpler computational version, the Turing test. Two intuitions underlie the paper: one, that language is obviously an adaptive characteristic of human organisms: one learns one's own mother's tongue, and feral children cannot conceptualize if first exposed to language after reaching puberty; two, empirical evidence supports the view that the “knowing brain” is different architecturally from the “untutored” one. These intuitions warrant regarding man's cognitive apparatus as an evolutionary system, and the “mind” as an emergent property.     

Representante-representativo,représentant-représentation,ideational representative: Which one is a Freudian concept? On the translation of Vorstellungsrepräsentanz in Spanish,French and English1

The Freudian expression Vorstellungsrepräsentanz ( Freud, 1915b, 1915c ), which is rendered in the Standard Edition as ideational representative, is commonly translated in Spanish as representante-representativo and in French as représentant-représentation, among other renderings. An interdisciplinary conceptual inquiry, which applies linguistic semantics to the evaluation of the available Spanish and French renderings, concludes that this compound expression should be translated in these languages as representante ideativo and représentant idéatif, respectively, renderings which happen to correspond to Strachey’s translation into English in the SE. In contrast to most Spanish and French translations, this proposal conforms to the semantic principle of compositionality. On the one hand, it provides a suitable translation of the two parts of the compound. Thus it renders Vorstellung as idea, with the classical meaning of image or mental representation, which can be traced back to Hume’s empiricist philosophy, and it renders Repräsentanz as representative, with the meaning of delegate. On the other hand, its linguistic form preserves the attributive meaning relationship which exists between both concepts in the original German expression. Against the background of these semantic considerations, a theoretical question concerning Freudian metapsychology is discussed: the drive has a psychic representative, but is there a (mental) representation of the drive?     

Taking a Step Back,Moving Forward: Place and Space without Mental Representations

ABSTRACT

The publication of the revised edition of Place and Experience provides the occasion to discuss Malpas’ original account of place, and its role in a proper account of the central features of human minds. The first edition is a groundbreaking work on the embodiment and embeddedness of human minds, that prefigures more recent developments of a now established field of research on embodied minds: so-called E accounts. In this paper, I address three issues in Malpas’ book that I found problematic at times and unclear at others, and argue that E- accounts, or better, a particular rendering of them, can better dissolve. These interrelated issues are: 1. the use of the idea of mental representations to understand location and orientation; 2. the claim that non-human animals have ‘environments’ but lack ‘worlds’, 3. the use of two exclusive vocabularies, the physical and the mental, for describing cognition. I thus question such ideas, associated with traditional accounts of cognition, which not only are responsible for some of the gravest criticisms such accounts have received, but seem inadequate to Malpas’ characterization of minds as placed. My recommendation is to take a step back from the traditional framework, and allow ourselves to simply move forward.     

Language knowledge and event knowledge in language use

This paper examines how semantic knowledge is used in language comprehension and in making judgments about events in the world. We contrast knowledge gleaned from prior language experience (“language knowledge”) and knowledge coming from prior experience with the world (“world knowledge”). In two corpus analyses, we show that previous research linking verb aspect and event representations have confounded language and world knowledge. Then, using carefully chosen stimuli that remove this confound, we performed four experiments that manipulated the degree to which language knowledge or world knowledge should be salient and relevant to performing a task, finding in each case that participants use the type of knowledge most appropriate to the task. These results provide evidence for a highly context-sensitive and interactionist perspective on how semantic knowledge is represented and used during language processing.     

Ethical Advocacy Across the Autism Spectrum: Beyond Partial Representation

Abstract

Recent debates within the autism advocacy community have raised difficult questions about who can credibly act as a representative of a particular population and what responsibilities that role entails. We attempt to answer these questions by defending a set of evaluative criteria that can be used to assess the legitimacy of advocacy organizations and other nonelectoral representatives. With these criteria in hand, we identify a form of misrepresentation common but not unique to autism advocacy, which we refer to as partial representation. Partial representation occurs when an actor claims to represent a particular group of people but appropriately engages with only a subset of that group. After highlighting symbolic and substantive harms associated with partial representation, we propose several strategies for overcoming it.     

The psychological reality of practical representation

ABSTRACT

We represent the world in a variety of ways: through percepts, concepts, propositional attitudes, words, numerals, recordings, musical scores, photographs, diagrams, mimetic paintings, etc. Some of these representations are mental. It is customary for philosophers to distinguish two main kinds of mental representations: perceptual representation (e.g., vision, auditory, tactile) and conceptual representation. This essay presupposes a version of this dichotomy and explores the way in which a further kind of representation – procedural representation – represents. It is argued that, in some important respects, procedural representations represent differently from both purely conceptual representations and purely perceptual representations. Although procedural representations, just like conceptual and perceptual representations, involve modes of presentation, their modes of presentation are distinctively practical, in a sense which I will clarify. It is argued that an understanding of this sort of practical representation has important consequences for the debate on the nature of know-how.     

推理表征影响整体推理的实验研究

本研究采用５个实验探讨了推理表征对整体推理的影响。研究结果表明，读者在演绎推理和类比推理的条件下可以保持课文的整体连贯即整体推理，只是由于工作记忆容量有限，推理表征对于保持整体推理具有弱化作用。     

Using neural response properties to draw the distinction between modal and amodal representations

ABSTRACT

Barsalou has recently argued against the strategy of identifying amodal neural representations by using their cross-modal responses (i.e., their responses to stimuli from different modalities). I agree that there are indeed modal structures that satisfy this “cross-modal response” criterion (CM), such as distributed and conjunctive modal representations. However, I argue that we can distinguish between modal and amodal structures by looking into differences in their cross-modal responses. A component of a distributed cell assembly can be considered unimodal because its responses to stimuli from a given modality are stable, whereas its responses to stimuli from any other modality are not (i.e., these are lost within a short time, plausibly as a result of cell assembly dynamics). In turn, conjunctive modal representations, such as superior colliculus cells in charge of sensory integration, are multimodal because they have a stable response to stimuli from different modalities. Finally, some prefrontal cells constitute amodal representations because they exhibit what has been called ‘adaptive coding’. This implies that their responses to stimuli from any given modality can be lost when the context and task conditions are modified. We cannot assign them a modality because they have no stable relation with any input type.

Abbreviatons: CM: cross-modal response criterion; CCR: conjuntive cross-modal representations; fMRI: functional magnetic resonance imaging; MVPA: multivariate pattern analysis; pre-SMA: pre-supplementary motor area; PFC: prefrontal cortex; SC: superior colliculus; GWS: global workspace     

Show me the meaning! The contextual relevance of images influences the recall and understanding of multimedia RSVP paragraphs

ABSTRACT

This study examined whether images facilitate contextual grouping as effectively as words. College students (N?=?102) read RSVP paragraphs with topics located at the beginning, middle, or end of the paragraph. Paragraph topic was presented as a topic-related image, topic-unrelated image, or written explicitly in text. Topic identification was equally accurate for topic-related images and topic sentences, and less accurate for unrelated images. Paragraphs from the text condition were recalled more accurately than the related and unrelated image conditions. Further, recognition of unrelated images was a positive predictor of the number of logical errors committed during recall. Therefore, related images did not improve memory and comprehension as much as text, and paragraphs with unrelated images negatively affected understanding of the meaning of the paragraph, but not recall. These findings have implications for multimedia information sources such as textbooks or articles that use images to clarify the meaning of the material.