"Où vont les pédagogues?" fait suite à la journée d'étude organisée à l'occasion du départ à la retraite universitaire de Philippe Meirieu et en reprend les lignes de force. Chercheurs de renom, enseignants,... viennent saluer la carrière du pédagogue le plus influent des dernières décennies et questionnent les multiples champs qu'ont embrassés ses recherches. Par sa variété, cet ouvrage se destine à toucher un large public. A côté de contributions des "pères fondateurs" des sciences de l'éducation, interrogeant la (...) figure du pédagogue, ou encore celles de philosophes de l'éducation qui sondent les propriétés du "pédagogique", d'autres témoignages mettent en valeur les spécificités, l'originalité de l'homme derrière le pédagogue. L'ouvrage propose une réflexion sur les modèles et les outils idoines pour affronter le présent et construire l'avenir. C'est véritablement sur la place et l'avenir de la pédagogie dans nos sociétés contemporaines que cet ouvrage invite à réfléchir. (shrink)

Newly edited by Konrad Koerner (University of Ottawa), with an introduction by Clemens Knobloch (Universitat Siegen)The importance of Wegener's Untersuchungen uber die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens can only be compared to that of Karl Buhler's Sprachtheorie. Even now, however, Wegener's work remains virtually unknown to the English speaking world. Wegener's main work was published in 1885. It has its origin in two lectures given in 1883 and 1884 at school teacher meetings held in the Magdeburg area and it still recalls those (...) original occasions and maintains much of the oral style. Part of the volume treats the subject in a systematic and theoretical manner; other sections contain vivid examples and are characterized by a considerable didactic effort. The book is held together by leitmotif-questions, such as 'How do we understand language?' and 'How does language function as a means of everyday communication?'. We witness the experiences of the talented school teacher and the observations of the innovative dialect researcher combined, condensed, and conceptually ordered.In spite of the relatively unsystematic form of presentation, the book remains thoroughly consistent in thought and argument. In the Untersuchungen we have before us the outline of a communicative and functional view of language structure, of the analysis of speech, and of semantics. (shrink)

1. Signification de la métaphysique.--2. Significations de l'être.

Dumézil’s trifunctional theory applied to the only grail plot in Chrétien de Troyes’ Conte du Graal proves to be neither faithful nor worthy of credit. Philological, historical, cultural, cognitive and narratological arguments raise critical objections and question its artificial character. In fact, the incidental episode of the grail functions as a narrative drawer in a plot belonging to the global tale ATU 910B (Good precepts) relating to the part of the work regarding Perceval.

La naissance du CRI à Grenoble doit être replacée dans le contexte intellectuel de la nouvelle critique des années 1960. Les trois courants dominants du matérialisme historique, de la psychanalyse freudienne et du structuralisme ont alors été dépassés par le CRI au profit d’un « nouvel esprit anthropologique » qui privilégiait la réalité sensible des images au détriment des idéologies réductrices. Les intellectuels des villes ont perdu le lien charnel avec une civilisation rurale et un mode de vie ayant façonné (...) notre langue, nos croyances et nos fêtes, ainsi que des artisanats séculaires. Le médiéviste peut encore retrouver le lien avec cette mémoire du temps. Mais s’il n’a pas conservé une âme païenne et un esprit paysan, il est condamné à la posture post-moderne. Penser la culture occidentale en contournant ou ignorant le Moyen Âge n’est qu’une imposture. Un exemple de longue vie des images montre l’importance des relais culturels qui relativise toute théorie préconçue des archétypes. The birth of the CRI in Grenoble is replaced in the intellectual context of new criticism of the 1960s. The three mainstream have been overtaken by the CRI in favour of a “new anthropological spirit” that emphasizes the sensible reality of images at the expense of reducing ideologies. The modern scholars of the cities have lost the carnal connection with a rural civilization and a way of life that have shaped our language, our ancient beliefs and feasts and also centuries-old handicrafts. The medievalist can find the link with this memory of time. But if he has lost a pagan soul and a spirit of peasant, he is sentenced to a post-modern posture. Thinking Western culture in bypassing or ignoring the middle ages appears like a mere sham. An example of long-life images stresses the importance of cultural relays against all preconceived theory of the archetypes. (shrink)

Ariès traces Western man's attitudes toward mortality from the early medieval conception of death as the familiar collective destiny of the human race to the modern tendency, so pronounced in industrial societies, to hide death as if it were an embarrassing family secret.

This article presents the Arabic text of al-Q's short geometric treatise, The Book of the centres of the tangent circles on lines, by the method of analysis, with translation and a mathematical commentary. In this treatise al-Q solves by analysis an ordered set of eight problems where the goal is to locate, on a given line, the centre of a circle which is tangent to two given elements, which may be points, straight lines or circles. For example, in the first (...) problem he wanted to find the centre of a circle which contains two given points. In fact, al-Q establishes the locus of the solutions, and this locus can be a straight line or a conic. The treatise is reminiscent of one of the purposes of al-Q's work on the perfect compass, namely to assign to the conics the status of regular lines. (shrink)

The question of how inequality is generated and how it reproduces over time has been a major concern for social scientists for more than a century. Yet the relationship between inequality and the process of economic development is far from being well understood. These Raffaele Mattioli Lectures have brought together two of the world's leading economists, Professors Philippe Aghion and Jeffrey Williamson, to question the conventional wisdom on inequality and growth, and address its inability to explain recent economic experience. (...) Professor Aghion assesses the affects of inequality on growth, and asks whether inequality matters: if so why is excessive inequality bad for growth, and is it possible to reconcile aggregate findings with macroeconomic theories of incentives? In the second part Jeffrey Williamson discusses the Kuznets hypothesis, and focuses on the causes of the rise of wage and income inequality in developed economies. (shrink)

Welche Rolle spielt die Moral für unser wirtschaftliches Handeln und überhaupt in der Wirtschaft? Steht sie uns vielleicht sogar im Weg? Durch Finanz- und Wirtschaftskrisen ist das Misstrauen zwischen Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft weiter gestiegen. In Anbetracht dessen stellen die Herausgeber dieses Bandes die Frage, ob wir eine neue Wirtschaftsethik brauchen: eine Wirtschaftsethik, die den in der Wirtschaft tätigen Menschen eine wirkliche Orientierung gibt, statt sie dem Dilemma von leerem Moralismus und praktischen Zwängen der ökonomischen Welt zu überlassen; eine Wirtschaftsethik, die (...) dem Anspruch, einen realistischen ethischen Rahmen für das wirtschaftliche Handeln zu bieten, tatsächlich gerecht wird. Die Beiträge dieses Buches behandeln interdisziplinär und aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven die Schwierigkeiten mit der Moral und münden in der provokanten These, dass sich Wirtschaftsethik auch ausgezeichnet als Warnung vor der Moral eignet. (shrink)

It has long been recognized that productivity growth and the business cycle are closely interrelated. Yet, until recently, the two phenomena have been investigated separately in the economics literature. This book provides the first consistent attempt to analyze the effects of macroeconomic volatility on productivity growth, and also the reverse causality from growth to business cycles. The authors show that by looking at the economy through the lens of private entrepreneurs, who invest under credit constraints, one can go some way (...) towards explaining persistent macroeconomic volatility and the effects of volatility on growth. Beginning with an analysis of the effects of volatility on growth, the authors argue that the lower the level of financial development in a country the more detrimental the effect of volatility on growth. This prediction is confirmed by cross-country panel regressions. The data also suggests that a fixed exchange rate regime or more countercyclical budgetary policies are growth-enhancing in countries with a lower level of financial development. The former reduce aggregate volatility whereas the latter reduce the negative effects of volatility on long-term productivity-enhancing investment by firms. The book concludes with an investigation into how the interplay between credit constraints and pecuniary externalities is sufficient to generate persistent business cycles and to explain the occurrence of currency crises. (shrink)

Les fouilles de Pompéi ont permis la découverte d’un vaste ensemble d’inscriptions électorales, les programmata, peintes sur les murs extérieurs des maisons, et par lesquelles un individu, le rogator (ou plusieurs), appelle à voter pour un ou des candidats aux élections locales. Une soixantaine de ces inscriptions comprend le nom d’une femme comme rogator. Qui furent ces femmes? Leur engagement obéissait-il à des modalités particulières? Peut-on déterminer quelles furent leurs raisons pour soutenir ces candidats? Comment expliquer, alors qu’elles n’avaient officiellement (...) aucun rôle politique, qu’elles prirent la parole publiquement pour s’adresser aux électeurs? Enfin, que nous disent en creux ces inscriptions sur les nécessités morales et narratives auxquelles se pliaient les sources littéraires et normatives du début de l’Empire? (shrink)

This paper concerns Aristotle's kind‐crossing prohibition. My aim is twofold. I argue that the traditional accounts of the prohibition are subject to serious internal difficulties and should be questioned. According to these accounts, Aristotle's prohibition is based on the individuation of scientific disciplines and the general kind that a discipline is about, and it says that scientific demonstrations must not cross from one discipline, and corresponding kind, to another. I propose a very different account of the prohibition. The prohibition is (...) based on Aristotle's scientific and metaphysical essentialism, according to which a scientific demonstration must take as its starting point a set of per se properties of a subject, if these make up a single, unitary definition. The subject of demonstration here is a kind, although not the general kind associated with a discipline, but rather the particular kind that the particular demonstration is about. (shrink)

This article discusses Sven Ove Hansson’s corpus model for the influence of values (in particular, non-epistemic ones) in the hypothesis acceptance/rejection phase of scientific inquiry. This corpus model is based on Hansson’s concepts of scientific corpus and science ‘in the large sense’. I first present Hansson’s corpus model of value influence with some introductory comments about its origins, a detailed presentation of the model with a new terminology, an analysis of its limits, and an appreciation of its handling of controversial (...) non-epistemic values. I conclude that it is a very good candidate for managing value influence, because contrary to other models in the literature it is fairly simple, it provides a universal and systematic procedure for dealing with values, and it syste- matically preserves the epistemic integrity of science. I then study some difficulties associated with the model’s central feature of taking the maximum level of evidence required by the applications of a claim in order for the latter to enter the scientific corpus: the difficulty to identify this maximum requirement; the non-optimality of this requirement with respect to other less demanding requirements; the potentially detrimental consequences of the preference for false negatives over false positives on which it relies; and the issue of whether there can nevertheless be requirements higher than this maximum. I show that these issues may potentially challenge the corpus model. Finally, I call for empirical work (in particular, an investigation of scientists’ and engineers’ own normative views) in order to better assess these issues. (shrink)

William Alston’s argument against the deontological conception of epistemic justification is a classic—and much debated—piece of contemporary epistemology. At the heart of Alston’s argument, however, lies a very simple mistake which, surprisingly, appears to have gone unnoticed in the vast literature now devoted to the argument. After having shown why some of the standard responses to Alston’s argument don’t work, we elucidate the mistake and offer a hypothesis as to why it has escaped attention.

According to one productive and influential approach to cognition, categorization, object recognition, and higher level cognitive processes operate on a set of fixed features, which are the output of lower level perceptual processes. In many situations, however, it is the higher level cognitive process being executed that influences the lower level features that are created. Rather than viewing the repertoire of features as being fixed by low-level processes, we present a theory in which people create features to subserve the representation (...) and categorization of objects. Two types of category learning should be distinguished. Fixed space category learning occurs when new categorizations are representable with the available feature set. Flexible space category learning occurs when new categorizations cannot be represented with the features available. Whether fixed or flexible, learning depends on the featural contrasts and similarities between the new category to be represented and the individual's existing concepts. Fixed feature approaches face one of two problems with tasks that call for new features: If the fixed features are fairly high level and directly useful for categorization, then they will not be flexible enough to represent all objects that might be relevant for a new task. If the fixed features are small, subsymbolic fragments (such as pixels), then regularities at the level of the functional features required to accomplish categorizations will not be captured by these primitives. We present evidence of flexible perceptual changes arising from category learning and theoretical arguments for the importance of this flexibility. We describe conditions that promote feature creation and argue against interpreting them in terms of fixed features. Finally, we discuss the implications of functional features for object categorization, conceptual development, chunking, constructive induction, and formal models of dimensionality reduction. Key Words: concept learning; conceptual development; features; perceptual learning; stimulus encoding. (shrink)

Polysemous concepts with multiple related meanings pervade natural languages, yet some philosophers argue that we should eliminate them to avoid miscommunication and pointless debates in scientific discourse. This paper defends the legitimacy of polysemous concepts in science against this eliminativist challenge. My approach analyses such concepts as patchworks with multiple scale-dependent, technique-involving, domain-specific and property-targeting uses (patches). I demonstrate the generality of my approach by applying it to "hardness" in materials science, "homology" in evolutionary biology, "gold" in chemistry and "cortical (...) column" in neuroscience. Such patchwork concepts are legitimate if the techniques used to apply them produce reliable results, the domains to which they are applied are homogenous, and the properties they refer to are significant to describe, classify or explain the behavior of entities in the extension of the concept. By following these normative constraints, researchers can avoid miscommunication and pointless debates without having to eliminate polysemous patchwork concepts in scientific discourse. (shrink)

: In the 1980s, the analysis of presupposition projection contributed to a ‘dynamic turn’ in semantics: the classical notion of meanings as truth conditions was replaced with a dynamic notion of meanings as Context Change Potentials. We argue that this move was misguided, and we offer an alternative in which presupposition projection follows from the combination of a fully classical semantics and a new pragmatic principle, which we call Be Articulate. This principle requires that a meaning pp’ conceptualized as involving (...) a pre-condition p should be articulated as … … rather than as … pp’ …, unless the full conjunction is ruled out because the first or the second conjunct is semantically idle. In particular, … … is infelicitous - and hence … pp’ … is acceptable - if one can determine as soon as p and is uttered that no matter how the sentence ends these words could be eliminated without affecting its contextual meaning. An equivalence theorem guarantees that this condition suffices to derive Heim’s results in almost all cases. Extensions of the condition lead to several new predictions, in particular concerning some ‘symmetric readings’, as well as presupposition projection in quantified structures, which displays a complex interaction between the nature of the trigger and the monotonicity of the quantifier. (shrink)

Recent semantic research has made increasing use of a principle, Maximize Presupposition, which requires that under certain circumstances the strongest possible presupposition be marked. This principle is generally taken to be irreducible to standard Gricean reasoning because the forms that are in competition have the same assertive content. We suggest, however, that Maximize Presupposition might be reducible to the theory of scalar implicatures. (i)First, we consider a special case: the speaker utters a sentence with a presupposition p which is not (...) initially taken for granted by the addressee, but the latter takes the speaker to be an authority on the matter. Signaling the presupposition provides new information to the addressee; but it also follows from the logic of presupposition qua common belief that the presupposition is thereby satisfied (Stalnaker, Ling Philos 25(5–6):701–721, 2002). (ii) Second, we generalize this solution to other cases. We assume that even when p is common belief, there is a very small chance that the addressee might forget it (‘Fallibility’); in such cases, marking a presupposition will turn out to generate new information by re-establishing part of the original context. We also adopt from Raj Singh (Nat Lang Semantics 19(2):149–168, 2011) the hypothesis that presupposition maximization is computed relative to local contexts—and we assume that these too are subject to Fallibility; this accounts for cases in which the information that justifies the presupposition is linguistically provided. (iii) Finally, we suggest that our assumptions have benefits in the domain of implicatures: they make it possible to reinterpret Magri’s ‘blind’ (i.e. context-insensitive) implicatures as context-sensitive implicatures which just happen to be misleading. (shrink)

The Pareto principle states that if the members of society express the same preference judgment between two options, this judgment is compelling for society. A building block of normative economics and social choice theory, and often borrowed by contemporary political philosophy, the principle has rarely been subjected to philosophical criticism. The paper objects to it on the ground that it indifferently applies to those cases in which the individuals agree on both their expressed preferences and their reasons for entertaining them, (...) and those cases in which they agree on their expressed preferences, while differing on their reasons. The latter are cases of "spurious unanimity", and it is normatively inappropriate, or so the paper argues, to defend unanimity preservation at the social level for them, so the Pareto principle is formulated much too broadly. The objection seems especially powerful when the principle is applied in an ex ante context of uncertainty, in which individuals can disagree on both their probabilities and utilities, and nonetheless agree on their preferences over prospects. (shrink)

This article explores the question of how to understand social media following the Habermasian theory of the structural transformation of the public sphere. We argue for a return to political-economic fundamentals as the basis for analysing the public sphere and seek to establish a characteristic connection between digital-behavioural control and singularised audiences in the context of proprietary markets. In the digital constellation, it is less a matter of immobilising the citizen as a consumer but rather of their political activation – (...) albeit in conditions under which commercial interests have primacy: privatisation without privatism. (shrink)

Several disputes about the nature of experience operate under the assumption that experiences have parts, including temporal parts. There's the widely held view, when it comes to temporal experiences, that we should follow James' exhortation that such experiences aren't mere successions of their temporal parts, but something more. And there's the question of whether it is the parts of experiences which determine whole experiences and the properties they have, or whether the determination goes instead from the whole to the parts, (...) as holists have it. But what are parts, or temporal parts, of experiences exactly—what does it mean to say that an experience is “part” of another? Are the participants in those disputes talking about the same thing—is there a univocal notion of “experiential part” available? Are there different kinds of experiential parts? And if there are, is there a systematic way of carving them out? More importantly, how should we conceive of the temporal parts of experiences, and how can we establish that experiences really do have temporal parts, against those who reject the notion? (shrink)

Potts (2005, 2007) has argued that expressives such as honky must be analyzed using an entirely new dimension of meaning. We explore a more conservative theory in which expressives are presuppositional expressions [Macià 2002] that are indexical and attitudinal (and sometimes shiftable): they predicate something of the mental state of the agent of the context (and this need not always be the agent of the actual context). Following Stalnaker’s recent work on informative presuppositions (2002), we argue that the presuppositions triggered (...) by expressives are automatically satisfied (= ’self-fulfilling’), hence the impression that they are not standard presupposition triggers. (shrink)

The paper develops an objection to the extensional model of time consciousness—the view that temporally extended events or processes, and their temporal properties, can be directly perceived as such. Importantly, following James, advocates of the extensional model typically insist that whole experiences of temporal relations between non-simultaneous events are distinct from mere successions of their temporal parts. This means, presumably, that there ought to be some feature(s) differentiating the former from the latter. I try to show why the extensional models (...) offers no credible ground for positing such a difference. (shrink)

Developing tools is a crucial aspect of experimental practice, yet most discussions of scientific change traditionally emphasize theoretical over technological change. To elaborate on the role of tools in scientific change, I offer an account that shows how scientists use tools in exploratory experiments to form novel concepts. I apply this account to two cases in neuroscience and show how tool development and concept formation are often intertwined in episodes of tool-driven change. I support this view by proposing common normative (...) principles that specify when exploratory concept formation and tool development succeed to initiate scientific change. (shrink)

This book aims to make the pragmatist intellectual framework accessible to organization and management scholars. It presents some fundamental concepts of Pragmatism, their potential application to the study of organizations and the resulting theoretical, methodological, and practical issues.

Kant’s analysis of the concept of natural purpose in the Critique of judgment captured several features of organisms that he argued warranted making them the objects of a special field of study, in need of a special regulative teleological principle. By showing that organisms have to be conceived as self-organizing wholes, epigenetically built according to the idea of a whole that we must presuppose, Kant accounted for three features of organisms conflated in the biological sciences of the period: adaptation, functionality (...) and conservation of forms..Kant’s unitary concept of natural purpose was subsequently split in two directions: first by Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, that would draw on the idea of adaptative functions as a regulative principle for understanding in reconstituting and classifying organisms; and then by Goethe’s and Geoffroy’s morphology, a science of the general transformations of living forms. However, such general transformations in nature, objects of an alleged ‘archaeology of nature’, were thought impossible by Kant in the §80 of the Critique of judgment. Goethe made this ‘adventure of reason’ possible by changing the sense of ‘explanation’: scientific explanation was shifted from the investigation of the mechanical processes of generation of individual organisms to the unveiling of some ideal transformations of types instantiated by those organisms. (shrink)

We argue that a formal semantics for music can be developed, although it will be based on very different principles from linguistic semantics and will yield less precise inferences. Our framework has the following tenets: Music cognition is continuous with normal auditory cognition. In both cases, the semantic content derived from an auditory percept can be identified with the set of inferences it licenses on its causal sources, analyzed in appropriately abstract ways. What is special about music semantics is that (...) it aggregates inferences based on normal auditory cognition with further inferences drawn on the basis of the behavior of voices in tonal pitch space. This makes it possible to define an inferential semantics but also a truth-conditional semantics for music. In particular, a voice undergoing a musical movement m is true of an object undergoing a series of events e just in case there is a certain structure-preserving map between m and e. Aspects of musical syntax might be derivable on semantic grounds from an event mereology, which also explains some cases in which tree structures are inadequate for music. Intentions and emotions may be attributed at several levels, and we speculate on possible explanations of the special relation between music and emotions. (shrink)

A great mathematician and teacher, and a physicist and philosopher in his own right, bridges the gap between science and the humanities in this exposition of the philosophy of science. He traces the history of science from Aristotle to Einstein to illustrate philosophy's ongoing role in the scientific process. In this volume he explains modern technology's gradual erosion of the rapport between physical theories and philosophical systems, and offers suggestions for restoring the link between these related areas. This book is (...) suitable for undergraduate students and other readers. 1962 ed. Index. 36 figures. (shrink)

Straightening the current ‘value-laden turn’ (VLT) in the philosophical literature on values in science, and reviving the legacy of the value-free ideal of science (VFI), this paper argues that the influence of extra-scientific values should be minimised—not excluded—in the core phase of scientific inquiry where claims are accepted or rejected. Noting that the original arguments for the VFI (ensuring the truth of scientific knowledge, respecting the autonomy of science results users, preserving public trust in science) have not been satisfactorily addressed (...) by proponents of the VLT, it proposes four prerequisites which any model for values in the acceptance/rejection phase of scientific inquiry should respect, coming from the fundamental requirement to distinguish between facts and values: (1) the truth of scientific knowledge must be ensured; (2) the uncertainties associated with scientific claims must be stated clearly; (3) claims accepted into the scientific corpus must be distinguished from claims taken as a basis for action. An additional prerequisite of (4) simplicity and systematicity is desirable, if the model is to be applicable. Methodological documents from international institutions and regulation agencies are used to illustrate the prerequisites. A model combining Betz’s conception (stating uncertainties associated with scientific claims) and Hansson’s corpus model (ensuring the truth of the scientific corpus and distinguishing it from other claims taken as a basis for action) is proposed. Additional prerequisites are finally suggested for future research, stemming from the requirement for philosophy of science to self-reflect on its own values: (5) any model for values in science must be descriptively and normatively relevant; and (6) its consequences must be thoroughly assessed. (shrink)

Based on the analysis of narrations in Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present, we argue that the grammatical notion of context of speech should be ramified into a Context of Thought and a Context of Utterance. Tense and person depend on the Context of Utterance, while all other indexicals are evaluated with respect to the Context of Thought. Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present are analyzed as special combinatorial possibilities that arise when the two contexts are distinct, and (...) exactly one of them is presented as identical to the physical point at which the sentence is articulated. (shrink)

Whereas many others have scrutinized the Allais paradox from a theoretical angle, we study the paradox from an historical perspective and link our findings to a suggestion as to how decision theory could make use of it today. We emphasize that Allais proposed the paradox as a normative argument, concerned with ‘the rational man’ and not the ‘real man’, to use his words. Moreover, and more subtly, we argue that Allais had an unusual sense of the normative, being concerned not (...) so much with the rationality of choices as with the rationality of the agent as a person. These two claims are buttressed by a detailed investigation – the first of its kind – of the 1952 Paris conference on risk, which set the context for the invention of the paradox, and a detailed reconstruction – also the first of its kind – of Allais’s specific normative argument from his numerous but allusive writings. The paper contrasts these interpretations of what the paradox historically represented, with how it generally came to function within decision theory from the late 1970s onwards: that is, as an empirical refutation of the expected utility hypothesis, and more specifically of the condition of von Neumann–Morgenstern independence that underlies that hypothesis. While not denying that this use of the paradox was fruitful in many ways, we propose another use that turns out also to be compatible with an experimental perspective. Following Allais’s hints on ‘the experimental definition of rationality’, this new use consists in letting the experiment itself speak of the rationality or otherwise of the subjects. In the 1970s, a short sequence of papers inspired by Allais implemented original ways of eliciting the reasons guiding the subjects’ choices, and claimed to be able to draw relevant normative consequences from this information. We end by reviewing this forgotten experimental avenue not simply historically, but with a view to recommending it for possible use by decision theorists today. (shrink)

The notion of “hierarchy” is one of the most commonly posited organizational principles in systems neuroscience. To this date, however, it has received little philosophical analysis. This is unfortunate, because the general concept of hierarchy ranges over two approaches with distinct empirical commitments, and whose conceptual relations remain unclear. We call the first approach the “representational hierarchy” view, which posits that an anatomical hierarchy of feed-forward, feed-back, and lateral connections underlies a signal processing hierarchy of input-output relations. Because the representational (...) hierarchy view holds that unimodal sensory representations are subsequently elaborated into more categorical and rule-based ones, it is committed to an increasing degree of abstraction along the hierarchy. The second view, which we call “topological hierarchy", is not committed to different representational functions or degrees of abstraction at different levels. Topological approaches instead posit that the hierarchical level of a part of the brain depends on how central it is to the pattern of connections in the system. Based on the current evidence, we argue that three conceptual relations between the two approaches are possible: topological hierarchies could substantiate the traditional representational hierarchy, conflict with it, or contribute to a plurality of approaches needed to understand the organization of the brain. By articulating each of these possibilities, our analysis attempts to open a conceptual space in which further neuroscientific and philosophical reasoning about neural hierarchy can proceed. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that looking at the concept of neural function through the lens of cognition alone risks cognitive myopia: it leads neuroscientists to focus only on mechanisms with cognitive functions that process behaviorally relevant information when conceptualizing “neural function”. Cognitive myopia tempts researchers to neglect neural mechanisms with noncognitive functions which do not process behaviorally relevant information but maintain and repair neural and other systems of the body. Cognitive myopia similarly affects philosophy of neuroscience because scholars overlook (...) noncognitive functions when analyzing issues surrounding e.g., functional decomposition or the multifunctionality of neural structures. I argue that we can overcome cognitive myopia by adopting a patchwork approach that articulates cognitive and noncognitive “patches” of the concept of neural function. Cognitive patches describe mechanisms with causally specific effects on cognition and behavior which are likely operative in transforming sensory or other inputs into motor outputs. Noncognitive patches describe mechanisms that lack such specific effects; these mechanisms are enabling conditions for cognitive functions to occur. I use these distinctions to characterize two noncognitive functions at the mesoscale of neural circuits: subsistence functions like breathing are implemented by central pattern generators and are necessary to maintain the life of the organism. Infrastructural functions like gain control are implemented by canonical microcircuits and prevent neural system damage while cognitive processing occurs. By adding conceptual patches that describe these functions, a patchwork approach can overcome cognitive myopia and help us explain how the brain’s capacities as an information processing device are constrained by its ability to maintain and repair itself as a physiological apparatus. (shrink)