Aron Gurwitsch’s theory of the structure and dynamics of consciousness has much to offer contemporary theorizing about consciousness and its basis in the embodied brain. On Gurwitsch’s account, as we develop it, the field of consciousness has a variable sized focus or "theme" of attention surrounded by a structured periphery of inattentional contents. As the field evolves, its contents change their status, sometimes smoothly, sometimes abruptly. Inner thoughts, a sense of one’s body, and the physical environment are dominant field contents. (...) These ideas can be linked with (and help unify) contemporary theories about the neural correlates of consciousness, inattention, the small world structure of the brain, meta-stable dynamics, embodied cognition, and predictive coding in the brain. (shrink)

The ethics of care and Confucian care ethics are both characterised by relations-based moral reasoning and decision-making. Acknowledging this similarity, this article compares and contrasts these two ethics, highlighting Western and Eastern moral concerns. One of the main differences between the two ethical theories is their different focus on vulnerability and inequality as factors in achieving equality in the ethics of care; another is the reciprocity, rather than equality, dimension in Confucian ethics. Both theories enshrine the view that the characteristics (...) of care offer scope for developing the capacity for judgement. However, a fundamental difference is revealed when considering that Confucian ethics emphasises care as a virtue in the cultivation of one's moral agency, whereas the ethics of care sees care as both a disposition and practice, and the caring relationship to be a primary means of moral evaluation. For the care ethicists, the practice of care embraces communicative morality, within fluid, dynamic interpersonal relationships - in sharp contrast to Confucian care practices, which are constructed within formal standards and fixed, role-based relationships. (shrink)

In his book review of Graham Priest's The Fifth Corner of Four, Mark Siderits, while criticising Priest's philology, suggests that Priest's work is 'of considerable interest' for two reasons. First, 'when two independent traditions use similar methods to work on similar issues, it is always possible that one may have hit on approaches that the other missed'. Second, 'the decentering that can be induced by looking at another tradition may trigger fresh insights, even if those insights are not ones that (...) were actually developed by the tradition marked 'other''. The main task of this paper is to unpack Siderits' thought. By analysing some of Priest's work, I will suggest a decentering that must have taken place in China when Buddhism was 'exported to China in Buddhist shipping containers'. For anyone familiar with the forms of Buddhist philosophy developed in India, various forms of Chinese Buddhism can often look strange. Some ideas that were debated and defended by Indian Buddhists do not appear anywhere in Chinese Buddhism and some assumptions have been quietly added to Buddhism by Chinese Buddhists. By showing that Priest's work brings out the 'innovation' that Chinese Buddhists gave to Buddhism, I will suggest that it is this decentering that Siderits suggests Priest makes use of. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an extension of the Minimal Generation Gap (MGG) to reduce the number of fitness evaluation for the real-coded GAs (RCGA). When MGG is applied to actual engineering problems, for example applied to optimization of design parameters, the fitness calculating time is usually huge because MGG generates many children from one pair of parents and the fitness is calculated by repetitive simulation or analysis. The proposed method called Saving MGG reduces the number of fitness evaluation by (...) estimating the promising degrees of children using individual distribution and fitness information of population, and selecting children based on the promising degree before evaluating the fitness. Experimental results show that RCGA with Saving MGG can provide large reducing effects on 20 or 30 dimensional Sphere functions, Rosenbrock functions, ill-scaled Rosenbrock functions, and Rastrigin function. (shrink)

A biosemiotic view of living things is presented that supersedes the mechanistic view of life prevalent in biology today. Living things are active agents with autonomous subjectivity, whose structure is triadic, consisting of the individual organism, its Umwelt and the society. Sociality inheres in every living thing since the very origin of life on the earth. The temporality of living things is guided by the purpose to live, which works as the semantic boundary condition for the processes of embodiment of (...) the subjectivity. Freedom at the molecular and cellular levels allows autonomy and spontaneity to emerge even in single cell organisms, and the presence of the dimension of mind in every living thing is deduced. Living things transcend their individualness, as they live in historically formed higher order structure consisting of the lineage-species and the society. They also transcend materiality, having the dimension of mind. (shrink)

I argue that Husserlian phenomenology is metaphysically neutral, in the sense of being compatible with multiple metaphysical frameworks. For example, though Husserl dismisses the concept of an unknowable thing in itself as “material nonsense”, I argue that the concept is coherent and that the existence of such things is compatible with Husserl’s phenomenology. I defend this metaphysical neutrality approach against a number of objections and consider some of its implications for Husserl interpretation.

This chapter presents the main formalism of the book, which is used in subsequent chapters to describe a variety of concepts in Husserlian phenomenology, and thereby unify them. A dynamical systems approach to Husserl is introduced, and several dynamical laws of Husserlian phenomenology are described. The first is an expectation rule according to which expectations are determined by what a person knows, sees, and does. The second is a learning rule according to which background knowledge is updated in a specific (...) way when experiences fulfill or frustrate prior expectations. In addition to these rules, a “supervenience function” is described, which associates how a thing is seen with a “trail set,” the set ways that thing is expected to look, relative to all possible ways of moving around it. This function further illustrates the explanatory dimension of phenomenology described in Chap. 2, whereby how we immanently experience things is determined by how we expect them to look relative to counterfactual movement patterns. (shrink)

It is known that for any subdirectly irreducible finite Heyting algebra A and any Heyting algebra, B, A is embeddable into a quotient algebra of B, if and only if Jankov's formula ${\rm{\chi A}}$ A for A is refuted in B. In this paper, we present an infinitary extension of the above theorem given by Jankov. More precisely, for any cardinal number ${\rm{\kappa }}$, we present Jankov's theorem for homomorphisms preserving infinite meets and joins, a class of subdirectly irreducible complete (...) ${\rm{\kappa }}$ - Heyting algebras and ${\rm{\kappa }}$ - infinitary logic, where a ${\rm{\kappa }}$ -Heyting algebra is a Heyting algebra A with ${\rm{\# A}} \le {\rm{\kappa }}$ and ${\rm{\kappa }}$ - infinitary logic is the infinitary logic such that for any set ${\rm{\Theta }}$ of formulas with ${\rm{\# \Theta }} \le {\rm{\kappa }}$ ⌈ Θ and ‷ Θ are well defined formulas. (shrink)

Kripke completeness of some infinitary predicate modal logics is presented. More precisely, we prove that if a normal modal logic above is -persistent and universal, the infinitary and predicate extension of with BF and BF is Kripke complete, where BF and BF denote the formulas pi pi and x x, respectively. The results include the completeness of extensions of standard modal logics such as , and its extensions by the schemata T, B, 4, 5, D, and their combinations. The proof (...) is obtained by extending the correspondence between the representation of modal algebras and the completeness of propositional modal logic to infinite. (shrink)

November 4th-5th, 2012 at Kyoto University. Organizers: Hisashi Nakao & Pierre-Alain Braillard.

It is often claimed (1) that levels of nature are related by supervenience, and (2) that processes occurring at particular levels of nature should be studied using dynamical systems theory. However, there has been little consideration of how these claims are related. To address the issue, I show how supervenience relations give rise to ‘supervenience functions’, and use these functions to show how dynamical systems at different levels are related to one another. I then use this analysis to describe a (...) graded approach to non-reductive physicalism, and to critically assess Davidson’s arguments for psychological anomaly. I also show how this approach can inform empirical research in cognitive science. (shrink)

We define a mathematical formalism based on the concept of an ‘‘open dynamical system” and show how it can be used to model embodied cognition. This formalism extends classical dynamical systems theory by distinguishing a ‘‘total system’’ (which models an agent in an environment) and an ‘‘agent system’’ (which models an agent by itself), and it includes tools for analyzing the collections of overlapping paths that occur in an embedded agent's state space. To illustrate the way this formalism can be (...) applied, several neural network models are embedded in a simple model environment. Such phenomena as masking, perceptual ambiguity, and priming are then observed. We also use this formalism to reinterpret examples from the embodiment literature, arguing that it provides for a more thorough analysis of the relevant phenomena. (shrink)

We survey the development of “California Phenomenology”, both as a philosophical movement originating with Dagfinn Føllesdal’s formulation of a Fregean, analytic reading of Husserl in the late 1950s and 1960s, and as an evolving network of philosophers working throughout California, who have met under the auspices of several groups in a more or less continuous way since that time. We trace the history of these groups in detail, provide an overview of debates that occurred between “West Coast” approaches to Husserlian (...) phenomenology and other approaches, and survey the broad panorama of more recent work. (shrink)

Although debate is a richly structured and prevalent form of discourse, it has received little scholarly attention. Logicians have focused on the structure of individual arguments-how they divide into premises and conclusions, which in turn divide into various constituents. In contrast, I focus on the structure of sets of arguments, showing how arguments are themselves constituents in high-level dialectical structures. I represent debates and positions by graphs whose vertices correspond to arguments and whose edges correspond to two inter-argument relations: "dispute" (...) and "support," respectively. On this basis I develop a theory of the structure of debate. (shrink)

Husserl is well known for his critique of the “mathematizing tendencies” of modern science, and is particularly emphatic that mathematics and phenomenology are distinct and in some sense incompatible. But Husserl himself uses mathematical methods in phenomenology. In the first half of the paper I give a detailed analysis of this tension, showing how those Husserlian doctrines which seem to speak against application of mathematics to phenomenology do not in fact do so. In the second half of the paper I (...) focus on a particular example of Husserl’s “mathematized phenomenology”: his use of concepts from what is today called dynamical systems theory. (shrink)

The question whether cognition is subserved by internal processes in the brain (internalism) or extends in to the world (active externalism) has been vigorously debated in recent years. I show how internalist and externalist ideas can be pursued in a common framework, using (1) open dynamical systems, which allow for separate analysis of an agent's intrinsic and embodied dynamics, and (2) supervenience functions, which can be used to study how low-level dynamical systems give rise to higher-level dynamical structures.

Progress in psychology and the cognitive sciences is often taken to vindicate physicalism and cast doubt on such extravagant metaphysical theses as dualism and idealism. The goal of this paper is to argue that cognitive science has no such implications—rather, evidence from cognitive science is largely (but not wholly) irrelevant to the mind-body problem. Our argument begins with the observation that data from cognitive science can be modeled by supervenience relations. We then show that supervenience relations are neutral, by showing (...) how they can be coherently interpreted in physicalist, idealist, and dualist terms. We distinguish several types of supervenience relation, and show that each coheres better with some positions on the mind-body problem than the other. Since these variants of supervenience are not empirically equivalent, there is a possibility that data from cognitive science will end up supporting some positions on the mind-body problem more than others. It is in this sense that cognitive science is mostly, but not wholly, neutral. (shrink)

I show how existing concepts of supervenience relate to two more fundamental ontological relations: determination and dependence. Determination says that the supervenient properties of a thing are a function of its base properties, while dependence says that having a supervenient property implies having a base property. I show that most varieties of supervenience are either determination relations or determination relations conjoined with dependence relations. In the process of unpacking these connections I identify limitations of existing concepts of supervenience and provide (...) ways of overcoming them. What results is a more precise, flexible, and powerful set of tools for relating sets of properties than current concepts of supervenience provide. I apply these tools to a recalcitrant problem in the physicalism literature – the problem of extras. (shrink)

Aron Gurwitsch’s Gestalt-inspired “field theory of consciousness” was introduced in the same period as Wolfgang Köhler’s theory of “electrical brain fields.” I consider parallels between these theories, drawing on results that have emerged in the last five years. First, I consider the claim that fields of consciousness supervene on electromagnetic fields in the brain, then I outline Gurwitsch’s field theory of consciousness, and finally I consider how the structures described by Gurwitsch might relate to structures in the brain’s electro-magnetic field. (...) Along the way, I expose a dogma (that qualia are paradigmatic conscious states) and develop an interpretation of Gurwitsch’s field theory. (shrink)

We prove that every countable non-standard model of WKL0 has a proper initial part isomorphic to itself. This theorem enables us to carry out non-standard arguments over WKL0.

I develop a “two-systems” interpretation of Husserl’s theory of belief. On this interpretation, Husserl accounts for our sense of the world in terms of (1) a system of embodied horizon meanings and passive synthesis, which is involved in any experience of an object, and (2) a system of active synthesis and sedimentation, which comes on line when we attend to an object’s properties. I use this account to defend Husserl against several forms of Heideggerean critique. One line of critique, recently (...) elaborated by Taylor Carman, says that Husserl wrongly loads everyday perception with explicit beliefs about things. A second, earlier line of critique, due to Hubert Dreyfus, charges Husserl with thinking of belief on a problematic Artificial Intelligence (AI) model which involves explicit rules applied to discrete symbol structures. I argue that these criticisms are based on a conflation of Husserl’s two systems of belief. The conception of Husserlian phenomenology which emerges is compatible with Heideggerean phenomenology and associated approaches to cognitive science (in particular, dynamical systems theory). (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that a distinction ought to be drawn between two ways in which a given world might be logically impossible. First, a world w might be impossible because the laws that hold at w are different from those that hold at some other world (say the actual world). Second, a world w might be impossible because the laws of logic that hold in some world (say the actual world) are violated at w. We develop a novel (...) way of modelling logical possibility that makes room for both kinds of logical impossibility. Doing so has interesting implications for the relationship between logical possibility and other kinds of possibility (for example, metaphysical possibility) and implications for the necessity or contingency of the laws of logic. (shrink)

Embodied approaches to cognition see abstract thought and language as grounded in interactions between mind, body, and world. A particularly important challenge for embodied approaches to cognition is mathematics, perhaps the most abstract domain of human knowledge. Conceptual metaphor theory, a branch of cognitive linguistics, describes how abstract mathematical concepts are grounded in concrete physical representations. In this paper, we consider the implications of this research for the metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics. In the case of metaphysics, we argue that (...) embodied mathematics is neutral in the sense of being compatible with all existing accounts of what mathematical entities really are. However, embodied mathematics may be able to revive an older position known as psychologism and overcome the difficulties it faces. In the case of epistemology, we argue that the evidence collected in the embodied mathematics literature is inconclusive: It does not show that abstract mathematical thinking is constituted by metaphor; it may simply show that abstract thinking is facilitated by metaphor. Our arguments suggest that closer interaction between the philosophy and cognitive science of mathematics could yield a more precise, empirically informed account of what mathematics is and how we come to have knowledge of it. (shrink)

A logic is called 'paraconsistent' if it rejects the rule called 'ex contradictione quodlibet', according to which any conclusion follows from inconsistent premises. While logicians have proposed many technically developed paraconsistent logical systems and contemporary philosophers like Graham Priest have advanced the view that some contradictions can be true, and advocated a paraconsistent logic to deal with them, until recent times these systems have been little understood by philosophers. This book presents a comprehensive overview on paraconsistent logical systems to change (...) this situation. The book includes almost every major author currently working in the field. The papers are on the cutting edge of the literature some of which discuss current debates and others present important new ideas. The editors have avoided papers about technical details of paraconsistent logic, but instead concentrated upon works that discuss more 'big picture' ideas. Different treatments of paradoxes takes centre stage in many of the papers, but also there are several papers on how to interpret paraconistent logic and some on how it can be applied to philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of language, and metaphysics. (shrink)

An assessment of mood or emotion is important in developing mental health measures, and facial expressions are strongly related to mood or emotion. This study thus aimed to examine the relationship between levels of negative mood and characteristics of mouth parts when moods are drawn as facial expressions on a common platform. A cross-sectional study of Japanese college freshmen was conducted, and 1,068 valid responses were analyzed. The questionnaire survey consisted of participants’ characteristics, the Profile of Mood States, and a (...) sheet of facial expression drawing, and the sheet was digitized and analyzed using an image-analysis software. Based on the total POMS score as an index of negative mood, the participants were divided into four groups: low, normal, high, and very high. Lengths of drawn lines and between both mouth corners were significantly longer, and circularity and roundness were significantly higher in the L group. With increasing levels of negative mood, significant decreasing trends were observed in these lengths. Convex downward and enclosed figures were significantly predominant in the L group, while convex upward figures were significantly predominant and a tendency toward predominance of no drawn mouths or line figures was found in the H and VH groups. Our results suggest that mood states can be significantly related to the size and figure characteristics of drawn mouths of FACED on a non-verbal common platform. That is, these findings mean that subjects with low negative mood may draw a greater and rounder mouth and figures that may be enclosed and downward convex, while subjects with a high negative mood may not draw the line, or if any, may draw the line shorter and upward convex. (shrink)

I describe and partially formalize two aspects of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy, in a way that highlights their relevance to cognitive science. First, I describe “constitutive phenomenology”, the study of structures (what I call phenomenological “models”) that constitute a person’s sense of reality. These structures develop incrementally over the course of a person’s life, and serve a variety of functions, e.g. generating expectations relative to actions, and determining the contents of context awareness. Second, I describe “transcendental-eidetic phenomenology”, which posits a (...) hierarchy of laws, each governing the way consciousness must be organized in order for a particular type of thing (a physical thing, a person, a social institution, etc.) to appear. (shrink)

Dharmakīrti argues that there is no pramāṇa (valid means of cognition or source of knowledge) for a thesis that is a self-contradiction (svavacanavirodha). That is, self-contradictions such as ‘everything said is false’ and ‘my mother is barren’ cannot be known to be true or false. The contemporary scholar Tillemans challenges Dharmakīrti by arguing that we can know that self-contradictions are false by means of a formal logical inference. The aims of the paper are to answer Tillemans’ challenge from what we (...) take to be Dharmakīrti’s or Dharmakīrtian (someone who is like Dharmakīrti) perspective and to demonstrate the unique features of Dharmakīrti’s view of inference. By so doing, we show that the epistemology in relation to the formal conception of logic that underlies Tillemans’ challenge is problematic from Dharmakīrti’s or Dharmakīrtian perspective. The paper, thus, presents Dharmakīrti’s view of inference and logical reasoning as well as a Dharmakīrtian challenge to the formal conception of logic that is the dominant contemporary conception. (shrink)

Narrative views of the self argue that we constitute our self in self-narratives. Embodied views hold that our self is shaped through embodied experiences. In that case, what is the relation between embodiment and narrativity in the process of self-constitution? The question demands a clear definition of embodiment, but existing studies remains unclear on this point (section 2). We offer a correction to this situation by drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the body that highlights its habituality. On this account, the (...) body has an inherent tendency to cultivate an organization of habits through its history of engagement with the world (section 3). Next, we explore its role in narrative self-constitution by distinguishing between two aspects of the narrative self, the narrated I and the narrating I (section 4). We argue on phenomenological grounds that self-narratives are informed by bodily perspectives in both respects. Furthermore, a focus on the habituality of the body allows for a better explanation of self-constitution than those based on implicit self-narratives (section 5). For these phenomenological and theoretical reasons, we conclude that narrative self-constitution is an embodied and embedded practice (section 6). (shrink)