In visual science the term filling-inis used in different ways, which often leads to confusion. This target article presents a taxonomy of perceptual completion phenomena to organize and clarify theoretical and empirical discussion. Examples of boundary completion (illusory contours) and featural completion (color, brightness, motion, texture, and depth) are examined, and single-cell studies relevant to filling-in are reviewed and assessed. Filling-in issues must be understood in relation to theoretical issues about neuralignoring an absencejumping to a conclusionanalytic isomorphismCartesian materialism, a particular (...) neural stage that forms the immediate substrate of perceptual experience enactiveanimatesubpersonal” considerations about internal processing, but rather by considerations about the task of vision at the level of the animal or person interacting with the world. (shrink)

Instead of essentializing and defining what CSR “is”, we analyze CSR as a political discourse in which different actors struggle to fill the empty shell of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) with a legitimate interpretation. In this paper we take the current debate on CSR in Austria as an example to demonstrate how this debate is shaped by changes in the greater socio-economic environment. We suggest that this debate might be paradigmatic for the development of CSR in the European/International context. We (...) argue that the debate and the political moves concerning an implicit or an explicit concept of CSR are rooted in a more fundamental question: the societal (re-)embedding or disembedding of companies. (shrink)

This essay begins with a discussion of the phenomenon of filling in. It is argued that filling in is naturally accounted for by taking visual experiences to be importantly like drawn pictures of the world outside. An alternative proposal is then considered, one that models visual experiences on incomplete descriptions. It is shown that introspection does not favor the pictorial view. It is also shown that the phenomenon of blurriness in visual experience does not provide a good reason for favoring (...) the pictorial view either. Why, then, be a pictorialist? It is argued that visual experiences conform to what have been called “the laws of appearance” and that their conformity to these laws gives us an excellent reason for preferring the pictorial account. (shrink)

Perceptual filling-in for vision is the insertion of visual properties (e.g., color, contour, luminance, or motion) into one’s visual field, when those properties have no corresponding retinal input. This paper introduces and provides preliminary empirical support for filled/non-filled pairs, pairs of images that appear identical, yet differ by amount of filling-in. It is argued that such image pairs are important to the experimental testing of theories of consciousness. We review recent experimental research and conclude that filling-in involves brain activity with (...) relatively high integrated information (Phi) compared to veridical visual perceptions. We then present filled/non-filled pairs as an empirical challenge to the integrated information theory of consciousness, which predicts that phenomenologically identical experiences depend on brain processes with identical Phi. (shrink)

Two different kinds of collections have been used to anticipate influenza pandemics: viral strains and bird specimens. These collections have been organized in museums and data banks to fill the gaps when specimens were decaying or when viral strains were missing. This article asks how collecting practices changed when such collections integrated specimens from China, considered a reservoir of influenza viruses and bird species, following a recurrent critical trope that Chinese specimens were missing. The article shows that techniques for hunting (...) viruses and birds were used to accumulate information so as to mitigate the global threat of species extinction. It suggests that in sentinel territories, museums transform samples and specimens into signs and images of future catastrophic events. (shrink)

A collective duty gap arises when a group has caused harm that requires remedying but no member did harm that can justify the imposition of individual remedial duties. Examples range from airplane crashes to climate change. How might collective duty gaps be filled? This paper starts by examining two promising proposals for filling them. Both proposals are found inadequate. Thus, while gap-filling duties can be defended against objections from unfairness and demandingness, we need a substantive justification for their existence. I (...) argue that substantive justification can be found in the normative force of commitments individuals make to others with regard to ends. Along the way, I argue that gap-filling duties must be conceptualized differently in group agents, as compared to non-agent groups: in the former, gap-filling duties can be understood as duties to “take up the slack”; in the latter, this would be a category error. (shrink)

One of the things you learn if you read books and articles in (or about) cognitive science is that the brain does a lot of "filling in"--not filling in, but "filling in"--in scare quotes. My claim today will be that this way of talking is not a safe bit of shorthand, or an innocent bit of temporizing, but a source of deep confusion and error. The phenomena described in terms of "filling in" are real, surprising, and theoretically important, but it (...) is a mistake to conceive of them as instances of something being filled in, for that vivid phrase always suggests too much--sometimes a little too much, but often a lot too much. Here are some examples (my boldface throughout). (shrink)

The following points are discussed in response to the commentaries: (1) A taxonomy of perceptual completion phenomena should rely on both phenomenological and mechanistic criteria. (2) Certain forms of perceptual completion are caused by topographically organized neural processes the view that there must be a pictorial or spatial neural-perceptual isomorphism at the bridge locus – should be rejected. Although more abstract kinds of isomorphism are central to the neural-perceptual mapping, the perceptual cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of the neural, (...) and therefore the explanation of perception cannot be reduced to uncovering neural-perceptual isomorphisms. (5) The task of vision is to guide action in the world, not to construct a detailed world-model in the head. (6) Neural filling-in facilitates the integration of information and thereby helps the animal find out about its environment. (7) Perceptual content needs to be understood at the level of the person or animal interacting in the world. (shrink)

This essay begins with a discussion of the phenomenon of filling in. It is argued that filling in is naturally accounted for by taking visual experiences to be importantly like drawn pictures of the world outside. An alternative proposal is then considered, one that models visual experiences on incomplete descriptions. It is shown that introspection does not favor the pictorial view. It is also shown that the phenomenon of blurriness in visual experience does not provide a good reason for favoring (...) the pictorial view either. Why, then, be a pictorialist? It is argued that visual experiences conform to what have been called “the laws of appearance” and that their conformity to these laws gives us an excellent reason for preferring the pictorial account. (shrink)

In this paper I fix a typical regress argument, locate a typical gap in the argument, and try to supply a number of gap-filling readings of its first premise.

Boundary completion and surface filling-in are computationally complementary processes whose multiple processing stages form processing streams that realize a hierarchical resolution of uncertainty. Such complementarity and uncertainty principles provide a new foundation for philosophical discussions about visual perception, and lead to neural explanations of difficult perceptual data.

L’article propose de mettre en évidence les déterminants des trajectoires scolaires exceptionnelles de huit filles, d’une même famille protestante de la petite bourgeoisie rurale, nées à l’aube du XXe siècle.

(1) In the everyday situation of seeing a uniform patch on a variegated background, filling-in does seem to require a mechanism. (2) Our attempts to make matches to such a patch make us appreciate anew the elusiveness of the phenomenon.

For Kant, a body fills out space by means of its causal efficacy. The essential properties of matter are hence dependent on underlying forces and it is one task of the Opus postumum (OP) to reconstruct the system of forces. In order to avoid an infinite regress of causal explanations, this system of forces needs to account for a primitive origin of all mechanical moving forces in something that is constitutive of forces, yet radically different - this is the ether (...) that fills all space that constantly moves or vibrates all the parts of the material bodies internally. I argue that we can read Kant’s argument for the existence of the ether through the lens of dispositions: essential properties of matter, such as ponderability, coercibility, cohesibility, and exhaustibility, should be understood as dispositions. These dispositions are ‘physically conditioned,’ as Kant calls it, on the ether. To display their manifest and perceivable properties, the ether acts as the ubiquitous and universal ‘activation stimulus’ of the dispositions that make up material bodies. He causes them to constantly display their manifest properties that make them continuously perceivable and causally efficient. Thereby Kant offers a solution to a problem formulated by Simon Blackburn, namely that purely dispositional matter would lead us into skepticism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT John Dewey argued in his Art as Experience that the significance of art as experience was of incomparable importance for the adventure of philosophical thought. He claimed that while both move in the medium of imaginative mind, art provides a “unique control” for the “imaginative ventures of philosophy.” In this article I examine, relying on a range of sources, some pivotal implications of this claim and especially how various forms of art and aesthetic experience can exemplify and further ways (...) of formulating, presenting, and critically engaging focal issues, both methodological and substantive, of the tasks of philosophy. The originary context of philosophy is agonistic, wresting meaning from the noise of meaninglessness or discerning order in a seeming world of chaos, not merely that of winning an argument. Both philosophy and art have attempted to fill a “hole in sense” by various practices, discursive in the case of philosophy and nondiscursive or “presentational” in the case of art. But art forms offer us models for a plurality of philosophical approaches to the task of enabling us to maintain and restore our existential and experiential balance within what Dewey called the “moving unbalanced balance of things.”. (shrink)

Discriminating behavior depends on neural representations in which the sensory activity patterns guiding different responses are decorrelated from one another. Visual information can often be parsimoniously transformed into these behavioral bridge-locus representations within neuro-computational visuo-spatial maps. Isomorphic inverse-optical world representation is not the goal. Nevertheless, such useful transformations can involve neural filling-in. Such a subpersonal representation of information is consistent with personal-level vision theory.

Filled-in sensations exhibit a distinctive mélange of causal features, resembling perceptual sensations in some respects and imagery in others. This commentary identifies several of these shared causal features and advances the hypothesis that filled-in sensations may constitute the primordial species of imagery, the evolutionary neurofunctional precursor of paradigmatic forms of imagery.

En parcourant ses travaux des années 1975 à 2010, Jean-François Laé découvre la très forte présence d’une figure, « les filles mères » capturées dans les filets des tribunaux, du travail social, des veilles institutionnelles. Il retrace le chemin sinueux de ses recherches et de sa propre biographie, pour réinterroger une correspondance des années 1950, des analyses de jurisprudence civile de la fin du XIXe au début du XXe siècle, des « mains courantes » de police des années 1960, des (...) archives d’institutions sociales. (shrink)

À partir des principaux résultats d'une recherche sociologique réalisée en 1992, l'auteur montre dans ce texte quelles furent les pratiques et les théories du mouvement féministe français contemporain à l'égard des thèmes de la maternité et de l'éducation. En utilisant deux catégories de sources ­la presse de ce mouvement social et les témoignages actuels des militantes-, l'auteur conclut à la faible prise en compte de ces deux thèmes par les féministes, un silence qu'elle explique par des raisons tout à la (...) fois sociologiques (le statut social dominant des militantes), historiques (l'absence de transmission d'une génération de féministes à une autre) et idéologiques (la croyance en une libération immédiate des femmes). Puis elle révèle quelques-unes des pratiques pédagogiques que, en dépit d'un tel contexte, des militantes mères de petites filles et de petits garçons ont tenté d'élaborer et de mettre en pratique durant la même période (1970-1980). (shrink)

The findings of the Archbishop's Council in their 2004 report, to the effect that traditional forms of church in Britain are under threat because of changing cultural patterns, emphasise the need to re-think church for our contemporary contexts. The 'Fresh Expressions of church' movement is one such initiative identified and approved of by the Archbishop's Council. This article reports on research undertaken in a practical theological interpretation of The Filling Station, a Christian ministry that has grown significantly in its 10-year (...) history and was formed as a missional endeavour in recognition of declining church attendance in traditional churches in Britain. This work explores whether The Filling Station is a Fresh Expression of church and whether it meets the values of authentic missional churches. In examining whether The Filling Station ought to be considered for import into appropriate local congregational contexts, it enquires whether it satisfactorily addresses prevailing social trends affecting churches, including consumerism and the need for identity. (shrink)

Pessoa et al. (1998a) summarize a wide body of data suggesting that perceptual filling-in phenomena can be attributed to neural filling-in processes. However, they reject, on philosophical grounds, the hypothesis that filled-in representations in the brain are the immediate substrate of visual percepts. It is proposed in this commentary that resonant binding between distributed cortical areas may instead be the crucial ingredient for conscious visual percepts, and that filling-in processes may facilitate the interactions between behaving organisms and object surfaces. These (...) suggestions circumvent some of the philosophical problems associated with the idea of localized visual representations. (shrink)

À partir des principaux résultats d'une recherche sociologique réalisée en 1992, l'auteur montre dans ce texte quelles furent les pratiques et les théories du mouvement féministe français contemporain à l'égard des thèmes de la maternité et de l'éducation. En utilisant deux catégories de sources ­la presse de ce mouvement social et les témoignages actuels des militantes-, l'auteur conclut à la faible prise en compte de ces deux thèmes par les féministes, un silence qu'elle explique par des raisons tout à la (...) fois sociologiques (le statut social dominant des militantes), historiques (l'absence de transmission d'une génération de féministes à une autre) et idéologiques (la croyance en une libération immédiate des femmes). Puis elle révèle quelques-unes des pratiques pédagogiques que, en dépit d'un tel contexte, des militantes mères de petites filles et de petits garçons ont tenté d'élaborer et de mettre en pratique durant la même période (1970-1980). (shrink)

As today's LDS women navigate a turbulent world, they must boldly face a constant barrage of messages challenging their individual worth. So when the barbs of the adversary become too much, where can these women turn for peace? In this beautiful collection of inspirational thoughts and words of reassurance, Fill Your Day with Hope reminds daughters of God of their personal worth with tender optimism. Designed to help sisters reach their full potential, these inspiring messages represent the wisdom of generations (...) of faithful women whose words will encourage young and older sisters alike to spread their wings and fly"-- Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Federal law often avoids setting minimum standards for women’s health and reproductive rights issues, leaving legislative and regulatory gaps for the states to fill as they see fit. This has mixed results. It can lead to state innovation that improves state-level health outcomes, informs federal health reform, and provides data on best practices for other states. On the other hand, some states may use the absence of a federal floor to impose draconian policies that pose risks to women’s and maternal (...) health. Health reforms at the federal level must trod carefully to enable state innovation, while imposing foundational safeguards for promoting women’s health nationwide. (shrink)

Recently Timothy Williamson (2007) has argued that characterizations of the standard (i.e. intuition-based) philosophical practice of philosophical analysis are misguided because of the erroneous manner in which this practice has been understood. In doing so he implies that experimental critiques of the reliability of intuition are based on this misunderstanding of philosophical methodology and so have little or no bearing on actual philosophical practice or results. His main point is that the orthodox understanding of philosophical methodology is incorrect in that (...) it treats philosophical thought experiments in such a way that they can be “filled in” in various ways that undermines their use as counter-examples and that intuition plays no substantial role in philosophical practice when we properly understand that methodology as a result of the possibility of such filling in. In this paper Williamson’s claim that philosophical thought experiments cases can be legitimately filled in this way will be challenged and it will be shown that the experimental critique of the intuition-based methods involved a serious issue. (shrink)

If states are permitted to create and maintain a military force, by what means are they permitted to do so? This paper argues that a theory of just recruitment should incorporate a concern for moral risk. Since the military is a morally risky profession for its members, recruitment policies should be evaluated in terms of how they distribute moral risk within a community. We show how common military recruitment practices exacerbate and concentrate moral risk exposure, using the UK as a (...) case study. We argue that the British state wrongs its citizens by subjecting them to excessively morally risky recruitment practices. Since, we argue, this risk exposure cannot be justified by appealing to the benefits of a military career for recruits, our argument calls for reform of existing practices. Our method of evaluation is generalizable and thus can be used to assess other states’ practices. (shrink)

When surveying the spectrum from pop psych to neurology in works addressed to general readers, one is struck by how few major figures there have been - certainly when cognitive neuro is compared to a far smaller field (1), evolutionary biology, where real literary talents like Loren Eiseley once flourished, where "media dons" like Richard Dawkins regularly clarify our thinking, where there are magnificent series like those of Stephen Jay Gould (fifteen major essays a year, plus scholarly books and research (...) papers, spanning three decades) which have influenced millions to read more. Many writers in the cognitive spectrum have occasionally written an influential book or two, but few could fill the largest available campus auditorium on name recognition alone, even without announcing a topic for the lecture. (shrink)

« Le temps des jeunes filles » grecques est d'abord défini par son terme : le mariage auquel elles sont destinées et dans le cadre duquel, devenues épouses, elles rempliront, pour leur famille et pour la cité, leur fonction de mères. Du temps du jeu à celui du mariage il n'y a qu'un pas ; sitôt pubère, la fillette, désormais parthenos, c'est-à-dire « jeune fille », ou « vierge en attente du mariage » est offerte aux regards, dans le (...) cadre des fêtes religieuses publiques, surtout si elle est de famille « bien née ». Les jeunes filles, en tant que groupe d'âge, sont en effet partie intégrante de la communauté civique, à l'égal des garçons, avec qui elles participent aux choeurs et aux processions. A la fois précieuses, pour l'avenir qu'elles ont pour fonction d'assurer, et vulnérables, elles sont à ces deux titres investies par l'imaginaire de la cité qui construit autour d'elles des histoires qui en font des victimes souvent glorieuses, en fort contraste avec le destin d'épouses et de mères « au foyer » qui les attend dans la cité réelle. (shrink)

In the thesis some combinatorial statements are analysed from the reverse mathematics point of view. Reverse mathematics is a research program, which dates back to the Seventies, interested in finding the exact strength, measured in terms of set-existence axioms, of theorems from ordinary non set-theoretic mathematics. After a brief introduction to the subject, an on-line (incremental) algorithm to transitively reorient infinite pseudo-transitive oriented graphs is defined. This implies that a theorem of Ghouila-Houri is provable in RCA_0 and hence is computably (...) true. Interval graphs and interval orders are the common theme of the second part of the thesis. A chapter is devoted to analyse the relative strength of different characterisations of countable interval graphs and to study the interplay between countable interval graphs and countable interval orders. In this context the theme of unique orderability of interval graphs arises, which is studied in the following chapter. The last chapter about interval orders inspects the strength of some statements involving the dimension of countable interval orders. The third part is devoted to the analysis of two theorems proved by Rival and Sands in 1980. The first principle states that each infinite graph contains an infinite subgraph such that each vertex of the graph is adjacent either to none, or to one or to infinitely many vertices of the subgraph. This statement, restricted to countable graphs, is proved to be equivalent to ACA_0 and hence to be stronger than Ramsey's theorem for pairs, despite the similarity of partial order with finite width contains an infinite chain such that each point of the poset is comparable either to none or to infinitely many points of the chain. For each k less than or equal to 3, the latter principle restricted to countable poset of width k is proved to be equivalent to ADS. Some complementary results are presented in the thesis. (shrink)

The ArgumentThis paper charts eighteenth-century chemistry's transition from its definition as an art to its proclaimed status as a science. Both the general concept of art and specific practices of eighteenth-century chemists are explored to account for this transition. As a disciplined activity, art orients practitioners' attention toward particular directions and away from others, providing a structured space of possibilities within which their discipline develops. Consequently, while chemists throughout the eighteenth century aspired to reveal nature's “true voice,” the path of (...) their investigations was directed by and toward their laboratory manipulations. So long as the chemical community maintained an ethos of polite cooperation and eschewed theoretical wrangling, this point was hidden by a rhetoric of “matter of fact” reporting. But as “facts” mounted in the 1770s and 1780s, especially in pneumatic chemistry, cooperation gave way to contention as chemists sought to name and organize their findings without the guidance of a communally accepted “natural” system. Lavoisier and his fellow “new” chemists offered a forceful solution to this dilemma by introducing a revolutionary network of theories, nomenclature, and instruments that unabashedly fused the productive manipulation of their laboratory work with what they claimed as the structure and activity of nature. (shrink)

“Finding out” about the visual world as approached from the organismic level may well include the “filling-in” type of perceptual completion if considered in terms of underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. But “filling in” can be interpreted not only as a result of within-level propagating of neural activity, but as a byproduct of the process that is necessary for modulating preconscious information about physically present objects or events so as to generate conscious quality in attending to them.

While the social and ecological landscape of the twenty-first century is worlds away from the historical-cultural context in which the biblical myth-symbols of the image of God and the knowledge of good and evil first emerged, Philip Hefner's understanding that Homo sapiens image God as created co-creators presents a plausible starting point for constructing a second naïveté interpretation of biblical anthropology and a fruitful concept for envisioning and enacting our human future.

Les observations des activités de jeux et de construction de jouets se concentrent sur l’âge préscolaire et primaire. Le début des activités ludiques des filles et garçons à l’extérieur de la maison, dans le domaine public, se situe vers l’âge de trois ans dans l’Anti-Atlas et en général au Maroc. Toutefois, l’on trouve des enfants plus petits dehors, lorsqu’ils sont pris en charge par des filles à l’âge de l’école primaire ou par des adolescentes, moins souvent par des garçons ou (...) adolescents : les observations concernent donc des filles de l’Anti-Atlas âgées de 2 à 8 ans, à quelques exceptions près, les jeux de faire semblant, les poupées et autres objets bricolés, et examinent l’impact des jouets industriels sur la fabrication de jouets par les enfants. (shrink)

The question is broadened from isomorphism to invertible transformation and optimal representation. Motivations are drawn from image compression but with an emphasis on object segmentation. Filling-in is considered as the phenomenal side of the binding process with back-surface filling-in being important. Finally, re-normalization of local filtering by globally integrated context is emphasized.