This video-ethnographic study explores how professional actors and a director at the end of a theatrical rehearsal process coordinate transitions between rehearsed scenes. This is done through the development and use ofcues, that is, ‘signals for action’. The aim is to understand how cues are developed and how timing in transitions is achieved by using the designed cues. Work on three different scene transitions is analysed using multimodal Conversation Analysis. The results show that cueing is a central tool for developing (...) well-timed transitions, and how cues serve different purposes in the developing performance. There is no prior plan for how to achieve timely transitions. In all the analysed examples, it is an actor who must produce or act on the given cue who insists on its precise definition, followed by a negotiation on candidate cues, confirmation and specifying the cue. It is also actors who are primarily responsible for the timing of transitions, and the timing is solved through an interplay of clear-cut and embodied actions that allow for temporal variance. Cues are reflexively linked to actors’ observation and interpretation of other actors’ actions, which prevents a mechanical determination of timing in scene transition. (shrink)

Space and time, which should properly be taken conjointly, are both communicatively produced and created with certain contextual perspectives—they are not independent physical entities. The standpoint of production makes the relationship between space and time comprehensible. They can either be mental-subjective, physical-objective, or social-intersubjective. Social and intersubjective (or E-series) spacetime might shed new light on biological thinking. For general readers, this paper provides a clue regarding an alternative conceptualization of spacetime based on biology.

Too often C. S. Peirce’s theory of signs is used simply as a classificatory scheme rather than primarily as a heuristic framework (that is, a framework designed and modified primarily for the purpose of goading and guiding inquiry in any field in which signifying processes or practices are present). Such deployment of his semeiotic betrays the letter no less than the spirit of Peirce’s writings on signs. In this essay, the author accordingly presents Peirce’s sign theory as a heuristic framework, (...) attending to some of the most important ways that it might serve to facilitate a semeiotic investigation of our legal practices. He pays close attention to the ways the topics of history, formalism, reductionism, and generality become, from a Peircean perspective, salient features of legal studies. (shrink)

The author presents John Dewey’s mature account of temporal continuity, showing how Dewey’s position can be identified as a form of radical temporalism. Even at the most elemental level (that of subatomic particles), natural existence is for such a temporalist an irreducibly temporal affair. While he focuses primarily on Dewey’s “Time and Individuality” (1940), the author supplements his account by drawing upon Experience and Nature (1925), “Events and the Future” (1926), and to a lesser extent, other texts. In his magnum (...) opus, Dewey draws a crucial distinction between temporal quality and temporal seriality. In an essay published the following year, he insists, contra C. D. Broad, on qualitative heterogeneity being an intrinsic trait of even the thinnest slice of the tem-poral continuum. The most elemental units of the temporal flux are neither “eternal and immu-table”, nor qualitatively homogenous. They also exhibit a from-to-through structure, with the dimensions of time being defined by these terms (pastness as from which, futurity as toward which, and presentness as through which). By relating the distinction between temporal quality and temporal seriality as well as the central claims made in “Events and the Future” to “Time and Individuality”, the author brings into clear focus the contours of Dewey’s radical temporalism. (shrink)

“Thought requires achievement for its own development, and without this development it is nothing. Thought must live and grow in incessant new and higher translations, or it proves itself not to be genuine thought.” – C. S. Peirce (CP 5.595) Introduction: Captivating Pictures and Liberating Gestures At the center of one of the most famous anecdotes involving a famous philosopher, we encounter what is commonly called in English a gesture, in fact, a Neapolitan gesture, though one made by a Tur...

Existing discussions about automated decision-making focus primarily on its inputs and outputs, raising questions about data collection and privacy on one hand and accuracy and fairness on the other. Less attention has been devoted to critically examining the temporality of decision-making processes—the speed at which automated decisions are reached. In this paper, I identify four dimensions of algorithmic speed that merit closer analysis. Duration (how much time it takes to reach a judgment), timing (when automated systems intervene in the activity (...) being evaluated), frequency (how often evaluations are performed), and lived time (the human experience of algorithmic speed) are interrelated, but distinct, features of automated decision-making. Choices about the temporal structure of automated decision-making systems have normative implications, which I describe in terms of "disruption," "displacement," "re-calibration," and "temporal fairness," with values such as accuracy, fairness, accountability, and legitimacy hanging in the balance. As computational tools are increasingly tasked with making judgments about human activities and practices, the designers of decision-making systems will have to reckon, I argue, with when—and how fast—judgments ought to be rendered. Though computers are capable of reaching decisions at incredible speeds, failing to account for the temporality of automated decision-making risks misapprehending the costs and benefits automation promises. (shrink)

Despite the language we saw in the previous chapter, which allowed for time apprehension by perception and marking, in Physics iv 14, Aristotle famously argues that time is dependent on nous.