Perspectivity,Intersubjectivity, Normativity: On Malpas’s Place and Experience

ABSTRACT

The publication of the revised edition of Jeff Malpas’s Place and Experience in 2018 gives the opportunity to reconsider this book (originally published in 1999) and the debates that it originally sparked. In this article, I focus on Malpas’s characterization of space as subjective, allocentric, and objective and I approach them in conjunction with other notions and considerations that, I suggest, are useful to expand and complement Malpas’s central theses. I approach the concept of subjective space in conjunction with the notion of coenaesthesis and with Heidegger’s notion of mineness (Jemeinigkeit); the concept of allocentric space by addressing Malpas’s critique of Nagel’s notion of detachment; and the concept of objective space through a discussion of the issue of perspective in light of Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Leibniz’s notion of ‘géométral’ (geometrized projection). These analyses pave the way for a discussion of some possible normative implications of the conception of place and subjectivity that emerges from Malpas’s Place and Experience against the background of Heidegger’s thought, and particularly in relation to Heidegger’s notion of dwelling (Wohnen).     

Learning in the visual association of novice and expert designers

Designers are adept at determining similarities between previously seen objects and new creations using visual association. However, extant research on the visual association of designers and the differences between expert and novice designers when they engage in the visual association task are scant. Using electroencephalography (EEG), this study attempted to narrow this research gap. Sixteen healthy designers—eight experts and eight novices—were recruited, and asked to perform visual association while EEG signals were acquired, subsequently analysed using independent component analysis. The results indicated that strong connectivity was observed among the prefrontal, frontal, and cingulate cortices, and the default mode network. The experts used both hemispheres and executive functions to support their association tasks, whereas the novices mainly used their right hemisphere and memory retrieval functions. The visual association of experts appeared to be more goal-directed than that of the novices. Accordingly, designing and implementing authentic and goal-directed activities for improving the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex and default mode network are critical for design educators and creativity researchers.     

Globalization and the Evolution of Democratic Civil Society: Democracy as Spatial Discourse

At its core, the evolution of democratic civil society is a process of transcending existing, historical social space, a process that desires to dissolve “political society” into “civil society” and with it to reformulate space as more democratic, participatory public space, and global spheres of interaction. In this article, the author examines the implications of globalization and the evolution of democratic civil society. Drawing on the work of French theorists de Certeau and Lefebvre, the author examines the nature of space as a social construct and the importance of understanding space as a practiced place in relation to the evolution of democratic civil society that makes transnational space a practiced place for global civil society. The author argues that as globalization spreads across nation-states, spatial forces produced by economic, cultural, and political discourses and practices give way to the potential for the evolution of democratic civil society.     

Testing attitudes,social desirability and behavioral regulations as moderators of implicit-explicit exercise discrepancies: A replication study in Iranian students

IntroductionThere is mixed evidence regarding moderators of the relationship between implicitly and explicitly measured constructs. This study examined this issue with evaluations of exercise relative to health or appearance in a sample of Iranian adolescents. Investigaing automatic associations and reflective constructs might provide important implications for developing interventions targeting exercise behavior in a population with different cultural, social, and economic barriers to exercise than European or North American adolescents.MethodsParticipants were 471 students enrolled in grades 9 to 12, of whom 269 (54.9%) were female. Behavioral regulations, explicit attitudes, and social desirability were investigated as possible moderators. All students completed questionnaire measures of physical activity behavior, attitudes, social desieality and behavioral regulation. They also completed two Go/No Go Association tasks to measure automatic associations of exercise with health and apperarance.ResultsAttitude was a significant moderator of discrepancies between automatic associations of exercise with health and health motives. Interjected regulation moderated implicit-explicit appearance discrepancies. Participants with low social desirability and negative automatic appearance associations had the highest appearance motivation.ConclusionsParticipants focused on the potential of achieving positive health outcomes of exercise rather than physical appearance outcomes, which differs from research from other countries. It is possible that, health was strongly linked with exercise by the pervasive societal pressures in Iran to have a healthy body.     

Corpus-based estimates of word association predict biases in judgment of word co-occurrence likelihood

This paper draws a connection between statistical word association measures used in linguistics and confirmation measures from epistemology. Having theoretically established the connection, we replicate, in the new context of the judgments of word co-occurrence, an intriguing finding from the psychology of reasoning, namely that confirmation values affect intuitions about likelihood. We show that the effect, despite being based in this case on very subtle statistical insights about thousands of words, is stable across three different experimental settings. Our theoretical and empirical results suggest that factors affecting traditional reasoning tasks are also at play when linguistic knowledge is probed, and they provide further evidence for the importance of confirmation in a new domain.     

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.     

Place and Philosophical Topography: Responding to Bubbio,Farin and Satne

ABSTRACT

Diego Bubbio, Ingo Farin and Glenda Satne have advanced a range of comments, questions and challenges relating to the ideas and arguments set out in the new edition of my Place and Experience (2018). Rather than address each of my interlocutors separately, my responses here are organized around four main topics: the relation between space and place, including the nature of space; the relation between place and subjectivity, and the foundational role of place; the relation between place and conceptuality; and the relation between place and normativity.     

Missing

Wartime experience in Britain during World War Two left thousands of empty spaces where once buildings and streets had been. It simultaneously left gaps in families, often with far-reaching consequences. In this paper, I reflect on one such case in my own family. I examine how the devastating loss of a particular family member as a consequence of an unlucky combination of time and place played into a silent history of earlier losses connected to physical migration, experiences which had traumatic impact decades later. The interweaving of physical place, space, and gaps, with their emotional and unconscious counterparts is explored in a narrative which also traces their ripple effect through time. As part of this meditation on my family's history, I draw on research on the impact later in life of early childhood experience of maternal depression, and on studies concerning the emotional impact of migration.     

Association between the arginine vasopressin receptor 1A (AVPR1A) gene and preschoolers’ executive functioning

Recent evidence implicates the arginine vasopressin (AVP) system in complex neuropsychological disorders which are characterized by deficits in executive functioning (EF). Despite the genetic contribution to EF, little is currently known about its molecular genetic basis. Drawing on research from social neuroscience and the role of related physiological systems in psychopathology, the current study hypothesized that variability in the AVP receptor 1a gene (AVPR1A) would be associated with EF in an epidemiological sample of 323 normally developing preschool-aged children. Using a family-based association design, the current study found that variability in the rs7298346 marker, located in the 5′-flanking region, was significantly related to a composite measure of EF in 4-year-old children after controlling for a variety of covariates and children’s theory of mind. The converse association between AVPR1A and theory of mind (after controlling for EF) was not significant, suggesting a level of specificity in this relationship. The results are discussed in terms of the difficulties faced by genetic association studies in teasing apart the behavioral phenotypes that characterize complex psychological diseases and the involvement of multiple physiological systems in human behavior.     

Exploring subject positions in Greek migrants' discourse on mobility decisions

The current study explores the ways in which Greek migrants in their early adulthood position themselves in discourse on mobility decisions. For the purposes of the study, 17 virtual interviews with Greek migrants (aged between 25–40 years old) in European cities were conducted. Analysis, based on the principles of critical discursive social psychology, indicated that, in their accounts of migration decision-making, participants positioned themselves in various ways: as career/job seekers, as adventurers, as well as (personal or institutional/economic) crisis-ridden individuals. Multiple subject positions were constituted by an amalgam of rational/practical and affective repertoires which depicted migration as a multifaceted, dynamic and non-linear project. Analysis also highlighted the multiple spatial (transnational, national and local) and dynamic temporal constructions mobilized by participants, in order to construct their motivations for migrating. Discussion of findings suggests that social psychology (a) can vitally contribute to migration literature, by considering ways in which social actors position themselves by the use of historically and culturally specific resources and by their orientation to local interactional concerns in the context of accounting for their mobility and (b) can be benefited by considering spatial and temporal aspects in the analysis of migration.