Juliet Mitchell’s psychoanalytic account of sibling rivalry, fluctuating between narcissistic identification and fear of annihilation, also applies to Walter Benjamin’s model of true love in his reading of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. This model is found in the utopian novella “The Curious Tale of the Childhood Sweethearts,” inserted within Goethe’s novel. By reducing the relationship between the novella and its framing narrative to an opposition between truth and semblance, Benjamin replicates in his reading the specular logic that is love’s (...) obstacle. On the other hand, Freud’s analysis of an episode in Goethe’s autobiography can be said to retroactively operate what Mitchell calls “lateral castration,” for Freud compares the great writer to patients in analysis and thus establishes the necessary seriality that creates “space for one who is the same and different.” Still, and although elements of his own autobiography facilitate the construction of alternative scenarios, Freud exempts Goethe’s sisters from the position of rivals. Recognising “the sister” as earliest playmate, and object of hatred and narcissistic identification, like Mitchell does, might be the first step necessary for drawing a model of love for women as peers this side of utopia. (shrink)

This paper constitutes a critical exploration of the functional features underpinning the unconscious of institutional attachment—namely an attachment which is understood in terms of the subject-infant’s love for his institutional parent-power holder, and the indefinite need for a subject to remain within its infantile condition under the parenthood of the State. We venture beyond the Paternal metaphor and move towards the neglected metaphor of the Mother, so focal in the individual process of identification, assumption of language and the permanent (...) attachment to the space of prohibition and Law. A new position in Language is defined. To understand how the psychic space of the infant is artfully subjugated in the making of the Western culture and domination of the Western system of legal interpretation, an enquiry into the legal emblematic history of representations is necessary to map the process through which the subject learns its legal self and relationship with otherness through what Pierre Legendre coined as the Occidental Mirror and the triangular logic of reflexivity. A final enquiry interrogates the way the legal institution places itself in the position of the specular image that captivates the subject-infant within a procreated legal order, a law-giving and law abiding life starting from the laws of the familial structure reinforced by the role of the parents and by analogy, by the State assuming that role in the institutional life of the ad infinitum infant. (shrink)

I argue that when empty space is seen in mirrors—that is, when perceptual specular experience is veridical—specular empty space is, like pictorial empty space, seen-in. I explain how the phenomenal expansiveness of specular reflections can nonetheless be reconciled with the see-through look of specular space.

This article is a contribution to a recent debate in the philosophy of perception between Alva Noë and Sean Kelly. Noë (2004) has argued that the perspectival part of perception is simultaneously represented along with the non-perspectival part of perception. Kelly (2004) argues that the two parts of perception are not always simultaneously experienced. Here I focus on specular highlights as an example of the perspectival part of perception. First I give a priori motivation to think that specular (...) highlights are experienced at the same time as non-perspectival properties, which challenges Kelly's position. Then I discuss psychophysical work by Andrew Blake and Heinrich B lthoff (1990) which seems to show that specular highlights are not represented in the way that Noë (2004) would suggest. In the third section I suggest a compromise between Noë and Kelly: specular highlights are not represented, but rather play an evidentiary role in the representation of perspective-independent properties, like gloss and shape. I conclude with some thoughts about how this study can generalize to other kinds of experience. (shrink)

While many profound philosophical questions arise about psychopaths, I wish to draw attention to two limitations in current debates. First, philosophers mainly deal with offender and forensic populations neglecting so-called ‘successful’ psychopaths. Second, philosophers mainly focus on the issue of empathy and responsibility, while relatively little attention is paid to volitional aspects. I address these two limitations together and argue that ‘successful’ psychopaths are volitionally constrained. In order to grasp and explore this deficiency, I argue in favour of a more (...) refined and fine-grained understanding of identifications. (shrink)

This paper explores the dialogue between Collingwood and Guido de Ruggiero on art and art criticism. The sense of identity of these two activities, it will be argued, can be understood only if one considers the criticism of living art: The art of one who also creates, who through a critical process transforms an outline into a work of art. Thus understood a work of art belongs to the life of the spirit, if considered from the dimension of becoming. Only (...) by reliving the past can it be transformed, yet this requires an understanding of the map of human experience. This is what constitutes specular phenomenology, a phenomenology reflected in the mirror of art and scientific analysis. (shrink)

A major part of philosophical work is engagement with argumentative texts. Engaging with an argumentative text involves correctly identifying the arguments presented in this text. In the context of teaching philosophy in school, the difficulty of correctly identifying arguments in philosophical texts is often underestimated. In this paper, I focus on one specific problem with argument identification that has been neglected in philosophy didactics thus far: the problem that there are many non-argumentative phenomena in an argumentative text that are (...) easily misidentified as expressing (part of) an argument. It is easy to fall for such phenomena if one is not aware of this problem, thereby misinterpreting the author’s intentions. This paper aims to present and discuss such phenomena, as well as to provide guidelines on how to help students recognize them. (shrink)

In recent years, the adverse implications of organizational identification (OID) have received significant attention in the field of organizational behavior research, particularly as it is considered a critical factor in unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). Nevertheless, the findings of previous studies are inconsistent. To explain these discrepancies, we performed a meta-analysis of 54 independent studies from January 2010 to April 2023, comprising a total of 14,836 samples, to investigate the impact of OID on UPB and the moderating effects of cultural (...) context. The results of our study demonstrated that individualism, power distance, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and indulgence play moderating roles in the OID – UPB relationship. This study makes noteworthy theoretical and practical contributions and lays the foundation for future research. (shrink)

This paper articulates and defends a noncognitive, care-based view of identification, of what privileged psychic subset provides the source of self-determination in actions and attitudes. The author provides an extended analysis of "caring," and then applies it to debates between Frankfurtians, on the one hand, and Watsonians, on the other, about the nature of identification, then defends the view against objections.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

On self-mutilation, fetishism and Kristeva.

Specular reflections and refractive distortions are complex image properties of solid transparent objects, but despite this complexity, we readily perceive the 3D shapes of these objects. We have found in past work that relevant sources of scene complexity have differential effects on 3D shape perception, with specular reflections increasing perceived thickness, and refractive distortions decreasing perceived thickness. In an object with both elements, such as glass, the two optical properties may complement each other to support reliable perception of (...) 3D shape. We investigated the relative dominance of specular reflection and refractive distortions in the perception of shape. Surprisingly, the ratio of specular reflection to refractive component was almost equal to that of ordinary glass and ice, which promote correct percepts of 3D shape. The results were also explained by the variance in local RMS contrast in stimulus images but may depend on overall luminance and contrast of the surrounding light field. (shrink)

This article explores a form of ethics and spirituality based on the nearly universal but often undeveloped human capacity for identifying self with others and with non-personal values. It begins with commonplace non-moral identification experiences, then describes identification with others in ethical and spiritual unions. Freud’s psychological emphasis on identification is linked with ethics and spirituality, though Freud would have objected. Robert S. Hartman’s three kinds of goodness—systemic, extrinsic, and intrinsic—are applied to abundant ethical and spiritual living (...) through identification. Intrinsic identification with intrinsic values is the highest moral ideal; intrinsic identification with ultimate reality and with goodness in all its forms is the highest spiritual ideal. (shrink)

In crossmodal identification, a subject token identifies an item perceived in one sensory modality with an item perceived in another sensory modality. Does crossmodal identification always occur in cognition, or does crossmodal identification sometimes take place in perception? This paper argues that crossmodal identification occurs in cognition, and not in perception. Nevertheless, multisensory perception is not unalive to crossmodal identity. Experimental evidence demonstrates that perception is differentially sensitive to the identity of individuals presented to distinct senses. (...) Such sensitivity enhances recognition and improves action. This approach relies on distinguishing crossmodal identification from perceiving crossmodal identity. Perception registers crossmodal identity, but crossmodal identification as such belongs to thought. (shrink)

To contribute to the continuing challenge of explaining how managers identify stakeholders and assess their salience, in this article, we chronicle the history, assess the impact, and evaluate the possibilities opened by Mitchell, Agle, and Wood (MAW-1997). We do so through two types of qualitative analysis, and also through utilizing a quantitative network analysis tool. The first qualitative analysis categorizes the major contributions of the most influential papers succeeding MAW-1997; the second identifies and compares the relevant issues with MAW-1997 at (...) the time of initial publication and today. We apply main path analysis, a quantitative tool, to map how this scholarly domain has evolved. These three analyses robustly depict the impact of MAW-1997 and the ensuing scholarly conversation, and they enable us to illustrate the current state and trajectory of stakeholder identification and salience scholarship. We close by discussing pressing topics related to the broader body of stakeholder theory literature. (shrink)

One broadly recognised characteristic feature of (a core subset of) the self-attributions constitutive of self-knowledge is that they are ‘immune to error through misidentification’ (hereafter IEM). In the last thirty years, Evans’s notion of “identification-freedom” (Evans 1982) has been central to most classical approaches to IEM. In the Evansian picture, it is not clear, however, whether there is room for a description of what may be the strongest and most interesting variant of IEM; namely what Pryor (1999) has first (...) brought to the fore under the name “Which-object IEM”, and which I’ll prefer calling existential IEM. I argue that recent development of relativist frameworks in semantics and pragmatics, particularly in Recanati (2007a-b), (2009), (2010), (2012a), may be precisely of a nature to address this limitation. The relativist theory of IEM, and in particular its suitability to cover existential IEM, may superficially seem to stem from a rejection of the core elements of the classical identification-freedom approach. However, I hope to show that, modulo a clarification and richer un-derstanding of the relevant notions of identification and identification-freedom, the relativist theory of IEM can be seen as both pushing further and complementing Evans’s intuitions, rather than conflicting with them. (shrink)

The paper constitutes an exploration of the construction of academic identities through a retrospective autoethnographic narrative analysis. In what is an essentially experimental mode I set out to examine processes of identification, and in particular, the understanding of desire that lies at the heart of them, for, it can be argued without desire there is no identity. Therefore, I begin my analysis by following two lines of thought concerning desire. The first, drawing on the work of Lacan, conceives of (...) desire negatively as lack (Fink 1995; Lacan 2001). The second deriving from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1987, 2004/1972) constructs desire as abundance, a positive force. These two conceptualisations may, at first sight, appear to be opposed but is this necessarily the case? The question to be examined then is, to what extent can these two conceptualisations of desire – as lack and as abundance - be held to be incommensurable? And following this, can an unstable accommodation between desire as lack and desire as abundance be drawn on in theorising processes of identification and the subjectivities that these processes give rise to? If identification is always (already?) an inherently unstable process, located within a space, which I shall designate a narrative space, how does a mobilisation of desire which moves between lack and abundance enable a creative and experimental conceptualisation of processes of identification to emerge? (shrink)

An important thesis discussed in the literature on shared agency is that group identification motivates pre-school children to act together. This paper aims at further illuminating this thesis by clarifying what triggers the process of group identification in young children. It is argued that joint attention, among other functions in supporting joint actions, can reveal to the co-attenders that they share some preferences. Since sharing preferences has been established by the literature to be a reliable motivation of group (...) identification and since joint attention has an early emergence in development, one can consider joint attention to be a putative trigger of group identification in pre-school children. If this is on the right track, group identification, joint attention, and preferences identify a cluster of minimal pre-conditions for joint actions. (shrink)

1. Historically, our sense of smell has been deemed informationally impoverished, not very discerning, subjective, ineffable, and generally of little value (for an overview, see e.g., Barwich, 2020...

I [try] to understand identification by appeal to phenomena of deciding to treat, and of treating, a desire of one's as reason-giving in one's practical reasoning, planning, and action. Is identification, so understood, "fundamental," as Frankfurt says, "to any philosophy of mind and of action"? Well, we have seen reason to include in our model of intentional agency such phenomena of deciding to treat, and of treating, certain of one's desires as reason-giving. Identification, at bottom, consists in (...) such phenomena — or so I have proposed. Given that such phenomena are important in our practical lives, we may agree with Frankfurt that identification is, in this sense, "fundamental.". (shrink)

Beginning with Freud’s treatment of identification as an ambivalent process, we explore identification’s polarization between narcissistic idealization and melancholic division. While narcissistic identification can be seen as a strategy adopted by the ego to avoid the educational development of its drives and to maintain itself either in whole or in part in an infantile state, melancholic identification activates a tension between the ego-ideal and the real ego at the expense of the latter. After discussing the ambivalence (...) of identification, we review Freud’s discussion of mass formations as group identifications, arguing that the work of facilitating a productive sublimation of the drives cannot be reduced to a strengthening of the artificial masses represented by social institutions such as the church and the educational system. Instead, the difference between mass formations allowing for collective sublimation and those suffering from narcissistic or melancholic blockages must be found in the productive qualities of the mass itself. In closing, we outline a few ways in which we might begin to understand the political contribution of masses to the maturation of human drives. (shrink)

When the stored representation of the meaning of a stimulus is accessed through the processing of a sensory input it is maintained in an activated state for a certain amount of time that allows for further processing. This semantic activation is generally accompanied by conscious identification, which can be demonstrated by the ability of a person to perform discriminations on the basis of the meaning of the stimulus. The idea that a sensory input can give rise to semantic activation (...) without concomitant conscious identification was the central thesis of the controversial research in subliminal perception. Recently, new claims for the existence of such phenomena have arisen from studies in dichotic listening, parafoveal vision, and visual pattern masking. Because of the fundamental role played by these types of experiments in cognitive psychology, the new assertions have raised widespread interest. (shrink)

Real-self accounts of moral responsibility distinguish between various types of motivational elements. They claim that an agent is responsible for acts suitably related to elements that constitute the agent's real self. While such accounts have certain advantages from a compatibilist perspective, they are problematic in various ways. First, in it, authority and authenticity conceptions of the real self are often inadequately distinguished. Both of these conceptions inform discourse on identification, but only the former is relevant to moral responsibility. Second, (...) authority and authenticity real-self theories are unable to accommodate cases in which the agent neither identifies nor disidentifies with his action and yet seems morally responsible for what he does. Third, authority and authenticity real-self theories are vulnerable to counterexamples in which the provenance of the agent's real self undermines responsibility. (shrink)

The fast development of synthetic media, commonly known as deepfakes, has cast new light on an old problem, namely—to what extent do people have a moral claim to their likeness, including personally distinguishing features such as their voice or face? That people have at least some such claim seems uncontroversial. In fact, several jurisdictions already combat deepfakes by appealing to a “right to identity.” Yet, an individual’s disapproval of appearing in a piece of synthetic media is sensible only insofar as (...) the replication is successful. There has to be some form of identity between the content and the natural person. The question, therefore, is how this identity can be established. How can we know whether the face or voice featured in a piece of synthetic content belongs to a person who makes claim to it? On a trivial level, this may seem an easy task—the person in the video is A insofar as he or she is recognised as being A. Providing more rigorous criteria, however, poses a serious challenge. In this paper, I draw on Turing’s imitation game, and Floridi’s method of levels of abstraction, to propose a heuristic to this end. I call it the identification game. Using this heuristic, I show that identity cannot be established independently of the purpose of the inquiry. More specifically, I argue that whether a person has a moral claim to content that allegedly uses their identity depends on the type of harm under consideration. (shrink)

This paper provides a detailed study of fraud in practice through an empirical investigation of B.P.Sayers, a family-owned stockbroking firm that had been in existence for over 100 years and that collapsed due to the fraudulent activities of the firm's junior partner. An interpretive narrative methodology has been employed which has resulted in the development of a detailed understanding of fraud and moral breakdown in organizations, resulting from a failure of responsibility that arises from a dysfunctional work identification and (...) its moral implications. In developing this account of fraud, the conceptual framework utilized is drawn from the moral philosophical work of Emmanuel Levinas who explicated how the breakdown of social relations of responsibility results, in turn, in moral breakdown. (shrink)

The paper is focused on the problem of identification in perception. I attempt to inquire on what ground the cognitive system is able to identify an object of perception (I restrict my analysis to visual perception). Although this is an empirical question for cognitive science, I consider it using a philosophical method of analysis. But my considerations in great part are heuristic, I ask questions and rather search for the answers than give a ready solution. The questions I ask (...) arise from a theoretical philosophical inquiry made in the context of cognitive science. The key question of my paper is whether perceptual identification has any cognitive basis, i.e. does it require any concepts or any prior knowledge. I especially pay attention to the problem of representation, asking if perceptual identification is representational or not. These questions are topical today and show that the traditional philosophical approaches to perception require revision and a new critical look at old problems and controversies. (shrink)

It is proved that for any k, the class of classical categorial grammars that assign at most k types to each symbol in the alphabet is learnable, in the Gold (1967) sense of identification in the limit from positive data. The proof crucially relies on the fact that the concept known as finite elasticity in the inductive inference literature is preserved under the inverse image of a finite-valued relation. The learning algorithm presented here incorporates Buszkowski and Penn's (1990) algorithm (...) for determining categorial grammars from input consisting of functor-argument structures. (shrink)

The notion of moral expertise poses a variety of challenges concerning both the question of existence of such experts and their identification by laypeople. I argue for a view of ethics expertise, based on moral understanding instead of on moral knowledge, that is less robust than genuine moral expertise and that does not rely on deference to testimony. I propose identification criteria that focus mainly on the awareness and communication of implicit biases and situated ignorance. According to the (...) account of ethics expertise presented in this paper, the expert's testimony is not an epistemic reason for the layperson's belief, but merely an epistemic influence. The epistemic reasons for the layperson's belief are largely independent from the expert. But there is still some epistemic risk involved in the proposed method of knowledge transfer, and therefore criteria for the identification of a trustworthy expert are necessary. The risk involved in knowledge transfer can be both due to willful manipulation and due to the expert's implicit biases and situated ignorance. While willful manipulation cannot really be avoided, the influence from biases and ignorance can be minimized. I argue that the best way to do this is if the expert is aware of their own biases and ignorance and communicates them. Combined with evidence of the expert's education in moral philosophy and experience with the topic in question, this gives the layperson the best chance to identify someone who can really help them consider all relevant aspects of a situation and come to a better justified decision. (shrink)

Governing by identity describes the emerging regime of a globalizing, mobile world. Governance depends on identification but identification increasingly depends on biometrics. This 'solution' to difficulties of verification is described and some technical weaknesses are discussed. The role of biometrics in classification systems is also considered and is shown to contain possible prejudice in relation to racialized criteria of identity. Lastly, the culture of biometric identification is shown to be limited to abstract data, artificially separated from the (...) lived experience of the body including the orientation to others. It is proposed that creators of national ID systems in particular address these crucial deficiencies in their attempt to provide new modes of verification. (shrink)

ABSTRACTFacial stimuli are widely used in behavioural and brain science research to investigate emotional facial processing. However, some studies have demonstrated that dynamic expressions elicit stronger emotional responses compared to static images. To address the need for more ecologically valid and powerful facial emotional stimuli, we created Dynamic FACES, a database of morphed videos from younger, middle-aged, and older adults displaying naturalistic emotional facial expressions. To assess adult age differences in emotion identification of dynamic stimuli and to provide normative (...) ratings for this modified set of stimuli, healthy adults categorised for each video the emotional expression displayed, rated the expression distinctiveness, estimated the age of the face model, and rated the naturalness of the expression. We found few age differences in emotion identification when using dynamic stimuli. On... (shrink)

Recently, Matt King and Peter Carruthers have argued that the Real Self accounts of moral responsibility or autonomy are under pressure because they rely on a questionable conception of self-knowledge of propositional attitudes, such as beliefs and desires. In fact, they defend, as a plausible assumption, the claim that transparent self-knowledge of propositional attitudes is incompatible with mounting evidence in the cognitive sciences. In this chapter, we respond to this line of argument. We describe the types of self-knowledge that might (...) plausibly be involved, as psychological prerequisites, in the processes of identification and integration that lead to the constitution of the real self of an agent. We argue that these forms of self- knowledge do not require the type of transparent knowledge of propositional attitudes that, according to King and Carruthers, is incompatible with the results of contemporary cognitive science. (shrink)

Abstract: We are all familiar with the way in which social roles, such as mother, father, professor, club football coach, citizen, and so on, confront us with clusters of duties that purport to bind us. Though we generally experience these role-duties as normatively binding, we might question this. What reason do role-occupants have for conforming to the duties that define their roles? I argue that the agent who identifies with her role thereby has a weighty and important justificatory reason for (...) conforming to the role's defining duties: namely, the identifying agent realizes the fundamental goods of meaning and self-determination by doing so. This is an important normative ground of role-duties because it, unlike the grounds of natural duty or voluntary assumption, ensures that the duties it grounds are not alien impositions but rather are elements of the identifying agent's wellbeing. I also argue that role-identification provides a reason that shares many of the characteristics of a moral reason, and I argue that role-identification in tandem with the principle of fair play grounds a moral duty to conform to one's role-duties. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an account of metaphor identification on the basis of contextual coherence. In doing so, we build on previous work by Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides that appeals to rhetorical relations in order to explain discourse structure and the constraints on the interpretation of metaphor that follow from it. Applying this general idea to our problem, we will show that rhetorical relations are sometimes insufficient and sometimes inadequate for deciding whether a given utterance is a (...) case of metaphor. They are insufficient, since rhetorical relations fall short at times of providing a basis for disambiguating between literal and metaphorical interpretations. In such cases, contextual information other than previous discourse needs to enter the picture. To this effect, we bring the idea of external consistency into play. Beyond that, though, we will argue that rhetorical relations are sometimes inadequate to account for coherence, if conceived as relations among sentences only. The reason is that extra-linguistic elements of the situation in which the sentence is uttered may be crucial for getting at the preferred interpretation. To account for these cases, we allow rhetorical relations to connect both with previous discourse and with extra-linguistic situations. In our final refinement of the notion of contextual coherence, we forfeit any appeal to rhetorical relations in favour of Questions Under Discussion (QUD). We defend the view that this account does not only explain the same sort of cases. What is more, it solves the issue of metaphor identification in impoverished contexts. (shrink)

The idea that appearances provide justifications for beliefs—the principle of phenomenal conservatism—is self-evidently true. In the case of cognitive penetration, however, it seems that certain irrational etiologies of a belief may influence the epistemic quality of that belief. Susanna Siegel argues that these etiologies lead to ‘epistemic downgrade.’ Instead of providing us with a decisive objection, cognitive penetration calls for us to clarify our epistemic framework by understanding the formative parts of appearances. In doing so, the two different but inseparable (...) ideas of sensation and intellection provide us with a basis of our appearances. These appearances, in turn, provide us with the objective evidence needed to test our judgements. Thus, the extra-sensory concepts of intellectual identification and the appearances they help form become an epistemic groundwork. (shrink)

New medical technologies promise to allow us to transform our core characteristics. Some see these technologies as filled with promise. Others see them as filled with existential risk. David DeGrazia argues that personal identity concerns raised by opponents to enhancement technology fail to impugn attempts by autonomous agents to bring about enhancements with which they autonomously identify. In advancing this argument DeGrazia evaluates five supposedly inviolable core narrative characteristics, concluding that none of these characteristics are in fact inviolable so long (...) as the individual contemplating transformation autonomously identifies with the change they decide to make. Employing insights gleaned from LA Paul’s recent work on the subject of transformative experiences I will argue that at least for some transformations, the prospects for autonomous identification are slim at best. The upshot will be that many of the core narrative traits discussed by DeGrazia will be inviolable in practice, if not in principle. (shrink)

Novelty, the creation of new information, has been the hallmark of Juri M. Lotman’s thought. This issue resurfaces in the discussion of his now famous article “On the semiosphere,” in which Lotman, drawing on Vernadsky, identifies the principles of symmetry, asymmetry, and enantiomorphism as pivotal aspects of the semiotic mechanism of the semiosphere. Specular phenomena and mirror reflections have not only found a prominent place in contemporary semiotic theories of different scholarly traditions – from general semiotics (Eco, Volli) to (...) cognitive semiotics (Sonesson) and to the semiotics of culture (Lotman, Levin) – but they also nail down a key element of the inner mechanism of Lotman’s concept of the semiosphere. By using the analogy of thefacereflecting in amirror, Lotman remarks: “It is also like a face, which, wholly reflected in a mirror, is also reflected in any of its fragments, which, in this form, represents the part and yet remains similar to the whole mirror.” By capitalizing on this excerpt, this study unpacks the significance of Lotman’s idea of specular mechanisms as generators of meaning within the semiosphere. (shrink)