A fundamental aspect of human cognition is the ability to parse our constantly unfolding experience into meaningful representations of dynamic events and to communicate about these events with others. How do we communicate about events we have experienced? Influential theories of language production assume that the formulation and articulation of a linguistic message is preceded by preverbal apprehension that captures core aspects of the event. Yet the nature of these preverbal event representations and the way they are mapped onto language (...) are currently not well understood. Here, we review recent evidence on the link between event conceptualization and language, focusing on two core aspects of event representation: event roles and event boundaries. Empirical evidence in both domains shows that the cognitive representation of events aligns with the way these aspects of events are encoded in language, providing support for the presence of deep homologies between linguistic and cognitive event structure. (shrink)

Compilation of didactic speeches on ethics and conduct of life delivered in Inta nāḷ in̲iya nāḷ, television program.

This essay will try to understand how the problem of the genesis of initiative arises. It will begin by questioning affective perception from the standpoint of the concept of the owned body, to then show how the intentionality that characterizes its relation to objects is also what directs a desire, made explicit by Ricœur through the concept of “thumos.” The ethical intention will proceed from the desire: desire to manifest a freedom, desire that the freedom of others comes about. From (...) these elements of analysis, we shall try to show how initiative articulates the teleological and ethical aspects of ethics, takes part in the advent of an ethical subject while arousing its creativity. (shrink)

This paper argues that if one considers just a single clinical moment there may be no principled way to choose among different approaches to psychoanalytic technique. One must in addition take into account what Aristotle called the final cause of psychoanalysis, which this paper argues is freedom. However, freedom is itself an open-ended concept with many aspects that need to be explored and developed from a psychoanalytic perspective. This paper considers one analytic moment from the perspectives of the techniques of (...) Paul Gray, Hans Loewald, the contemporary Kleinians and Jacques Lacan. It argues that, if we are to evaluate these techniques, we must take into account the different conceptions of freedom they are trying to facilitate. (shrink)

No final do Lísis. Sócrates emprega o termo “demônios” (daímones), no momento em que se constata a aporia a que chega a investigação sobre a amizade. A propósito de uma recente tradução brasileira do diálogo, que, alinhando-se a uma interpretação tradicional, entende o termo no sentido negativo de “divindades maléficas”, este estudo procura defender tese bem diferente: apesar das aparências, lembremo-nos do célebre “demônio socrático” e veremos aqui o anúncio do fim da discussão sem qualquer coação externa à própria investigação, (...) e sim em virtude de necessidades que são internas a esta. Daí se seguirá que, apesar do final aporético, esse diálogo apresenta certo ensinamento positivo que o distingue dos outros diálogos platônicos de juventude. (shrink)

In this paper we identify and characterize an analysis of two problematic aspects affecting the representational level of cognitive architectures (CAs), namely: the limited size and the homogeneous typology of the encoded and processed knowledge. We argue that such aspects may constitute not only a technological problem that, in our opinion, should be addressed in order to build arti cial agents able to exhibit intelligent behaviours in general scenarios, but also an epistemological one, since they limit the plausibility of the (...) comparison of the CAs' knowledge representation and processing mechanisms with those executed by humans in their everyday activities. In the fi nal part of the paper further directions of research will be explored, trying to address current limitations and future challenges. (shrink)

Immoralists hold that in at least some cases, moral fl aws in artworks can increase their aesthetic value. They deny what I call the valence constraint: the view that any effect that an artwork’s moral value has on its aesthetic merit must have the same valence. The immoralist offers three arguments against the valence constraint. In this paper I argue that these arguments fail, and that this failure reveals something deep and interesting about the relationship between cognitive and moral value. (...) In the fi nal section I offer a positive argument for the valence constraint. (shrink)

There are two fundamental models to understanding the phenomenon of natural life. One is thecomputational model, which is based on the symbolic thinking paradigm. The other is the biologicalorganism model. The common difficulty attributed to these paradigms is that their reductive tools allowthe phenomenological aspects of experience to remain hidden behind yes/no responses (behavioraltests), or brain ‘pictures’ (neuroimaging). Hence, one of the problems regards how to overcome meth-odological difficulties towards a non-reductive investigation of conscious experience. It is our aim in (...) thispaper to show how cooperation between Eastern and Western traditions may shed light for a non-reductive study of mind and life. This study focuses on the first-person experience associated withcognitive and mental events. We studied phenomenal data as a crucial fact for the domain of livingbeings, which, we expect, can provide the ground for a subsequent third-person study. The interventionwith Jhana meditation, and its qualitative assessment, provided us with experiential profiles based uponsubjects' evaluations of their own conscious experiences. The overall results should move towards anintegrated or global perspective on mind where neither experience nor external mechanisms have thefinal word. (shrink)

b>—Several paradigms (e.g. change blindness, inattentional blindness, transsaccadic integra- tion) indicate that observers are often very poor at reporting changes to their visual environment. Such evidence has been used to suggest that the spatio-temporal coherence needed to represent change can only occur in the presence of focused attention. However, those studies almost always rely on explicit reports. It remains a possibility that the visual system can implicitly detect change, but that in the absence of focused attention, the change does not (...) reach awareness and consequently is not reported. To test this possibility, we used a simple change detection paradigm coupled with a speeded orien- tation discrimination task. Even when observers reported being unaware of a change in an item’s orientation, its nal orientation effectively biased their response in the orientation discrimination task. Both in aware and unaware trials, errors were most frequent when the changed item and the probe had incongruent orientations. These results demonstrate that the _nature _of the change can be represented in the absence of awareness. (shrink)

on points that remain especially crucial, i.e., the concept of the natural attitude, the ways into the reduction (and their systematics), and finally the question of the “meaning of the reduction.” Indeed, in the reading attempted here, this final question leads to two, not necessarily related, focal points: a Cartesian and a Life-world tendency. It is my claim that in following these two paths, Husserl was consistent in pursuing two evident leads in his philosophical enterprise; however, he was at the (...) same time unable to systematically unify these two strands. Thus, I am offering an interpretation which might be called a modified “departure from Cartesianism” reading that Landgrebe pro-. (shrink)

Van Inwagen proposes that besides simples only living organisms exist as composite objects. This paper suggests expanding van Inwagen’s ontology by also accepting composite objects in the case that physical bonding occurs (plus some extra conditions). Such objects are not living organ-isms but rather physical bodies. They include (approximately) the complete realm of inanimate ordinary objects, like rocks and tables, as well as inanimate scientific objects, like atoms and mol-ecules, the latter filling the ontological gap between simples and organisms in (...) van Inwagen’s origi-nal picture. We thus propose a compositional pluralism claiming that composition arises if and on-ly if bonding or life occurs. (shrink)

A ideia do “fi m da história”, subentendida no capítulo fi nal da Fenomenologia do espírito, serviu de base para o início de uma discussão, feita a partir das posições assumidas por Alexandre Kojève nos seus cursos sobre Hegel em Paris, na década de 1930, e em sua publicação no fi nal dos anos 1940 (com reedição em 1968), voltou à baila com o artigo de Francis Fukuyama, de 1989, sobre o “fim da história”, no qual ele comemorava o fi (...) m do “socialismo real” e a hegemonia mundial completa dos Estados Unidos da América. Passada a euforia sobre a “nova ordem mundial”, inclusive em virtude de sucessivas crises econômicas, é interessante recolocar a questão sobre as condições sob as quais são aceitáveis conceitos associados a esse tema, especialmente o substantivo “pós-história” e o adjetivo “pós-histórico”. A tese a ser defendida nesse artigo é a de que o campo da estética é um âmbito em que esses conceitos são defensáveis. Como exemplos de refl exões estéticas frutíferas que deles se valem, são consideradas a noção de “arte pós-histórica”, de Arthur Danto, e os desdobramentos estéticos do conceito de “pós-história”, tal como sustentado por Vilém Flusser. (shrink)

Pierre Duhem’s (1861-1916) lifelong opposition to 19th century atomic theories of matter traditionally has been attributed to his conventionalist and/or positivist philosophy of science. Relatively recently, the traditional view has been challenged by the new claim that Duhem’s opposition to atomism was due to the precarious state of atomic theories at the beginning of the 20th century. In this paper, I present some of the difficulties with both the traditional and the new interpretation of Duhem’s opposition to atomism, and provide (...) a new framework in which to understand Duhem's rejection of atomic hypotheses. I argue that although not positivist, instrumentalist, or conventionalist, Duhem’s philosophy of physics was not compatible with belief in unobservable atoms and molecules. The key for understanding Duhem’s resistance to atomism during the final phase of his career is the historicist arguments he presented in support of his ideal of physics. (shrink)

Why do we draw the boundaries between “blue” and “green”, where we do? One proposed answer to this question is that we categorize color the way we do because we perceive color categorically. Starting in the 1950’s, the phenomenon of “categorical perception” (CP) encouraged such a response. CP refers to the fact that adjacent color patches are more easily discriminated when they straddle a category boundary than when they belong to the same category. In this paper, I make three related (...) claims. (1) Although what seems to guide discrimination performances seems to indeed be categorical information, the evidence in favor of the fact that categorical perception infl uences the way we perceive color is not convincing. (2) That CP offers a useful account of categorization is not obvious.While aiming at accounting for categorization, CP itself requires an account of categories. This being said, CP remains an interesting phenomenon. Why and how is our discrimination behavior linked to our categories? It is suggested that linguistic labels determine CP through a naming strategy to which participants resort while discriminating colors. This paper’s fi nal point is (3) that the naming strategy account is not enough. Beyond category labels, what seems to guide discrimination performance is category structure. (shrink)

Los criterios de excelencia e innovación a la hora de valorar las tecnologías de la comunicación se ven afectados por un gran número de factores, pero al final hay uno que prima sobre todos los demás: la calidad de la imágenes utilizadas, como sucede con National Geographic y Walt Disney, dos empresas de comunicación que han sido determinantes a la hora de fijar los criterios estándar de excelencia e innovación. En este contexto se reconstruye el debate contemporáneo entre Wiesing, Levinson, (...) Crowther y Seel acerca de los criterios de excelencia e innovación usados a la hora de valorar la calidad de las imágenes virtuales mediáticas por parte de las tecnologías de la comunicación, teniendo en cuenta su cuádruple dimensión genético-retroductiva, simbólica, contextual y estrictamente escénica. (shrink)

The object of this article is to review and evaluate a debate that has been taking place among Muslim and Arab writers for some time now about the concept of ‘dawla madaniyya’ (‘civil state/ government’), and the place of religion in democratic politics. More precisely, it will be suggested that the current popularity of the term ‘dawla madaniyya’ signifies only a partial meeting of minds between Islamists and their liberal and secular opponents. By and large, the concept seems to have (...) an instrumental value as part of an on-going discursive struggle between various political orientations about the place of Islam in the social–political order. On the basis of our discussion of the terms of the debate, a new approach to conceptualizing the disagreement will be suggested. The goal of this is not to resolve the disagreement, but rather to sharpen it in a way that shows what is required to achieve significant progress. The final resolution of the disagreement must await a more radical convergence of ideas than currently exists a convergence that touches not only on standards of reasonableness but also on substantive beliefs and values. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate the relationship between a nonlapsarian, evolutionary account of the origin of sin and the potential ramifications this might have for theodicy. I begin by reviving an early twentieth century evolutionary model of the origin of sin before discussing the most prominent objection which it elicits, namely, that if sin is merely the misuse of natural animal passions and habits, then God is ultimately answerable for the existence of sin in the human sphere. Though I suggest (...) that this argument likely misfires, my main concern lies elsewhere. For the proponent of the Responsibi- lity Argument will customarily reject an evolutionary account of sin’s origin and instead endorse something like the traditional Fall account—the doctrine of Origi- nal Sin. I argue, however, that the Fall theory is also clearly subject to a parallel Responsibility Argument, so long as we take God to possess Molina’s scientia media. While I will not pretend to have solved every issue in my discus- sion of Molinism, still the desired conclusion should emerge unscathed: if the Responsibility Argument is a problem for an evolutionary account of the origin of sin, then it is a problem for the Fall doctrine, too. (shrink)

This paper offers an experimental test of a version of Rubinstein’s bargaining model in which the players’ discount factors are unequal. We find that learning, rationality, and fairness are all significant in determining the outcome. In particular, we find that a model of myopic optimization over time predicts the sign of deviations in the opening proposal from the final undiscounted agreement in the previous period rather well. To explain the amplitude of the deviations, we then successfully fit a perturbed version (...) of the model of myopic adjustment to the data that allows for a bias toward refusing inequitable offers. (shrink)

:La iglesia entiende la vida conyugal como un sacramento, es decir, como un signo y un instrumento de la relación de Dios con la humanidad. La vida esponsal es signo del amor de Dios para con la humanidad y de la alianza de Cristo con la Iglesia, pero también es una forma origi-nal de “hacer teología”, de conocer el amor y la gracia de Dios dando testimonio de ellos. En este sen-tido, constituye un instrumento eficaz para hacer realmente pre-sente y (...) poder experimentar el amor y la gracia de Dios. El Con-cilio Vaticano II subrayó enfáticamente la comprensión bíblica del matrimonio como alianza, superando una visión eminentemente jurídica y destacando la dimensión personal del amor y de la vida conyugal. Se trata de algo muy significativo para el desarrollo de la espiritualidad del matrimonio. (shrink)

The term ‘moral particularism’ has been used to refer to different doctrines. The main body of this paper begins by identifying the most important doctrines associated with the term, at least as the term is used by Jonathan Dancy, on whose work I will focus. I then discuss whether holism in the theory of reasons supports moral particularism, and I call into question the thesis that particular judgements have epistemological priority over general principles. Dancy’s recent book Ethics without Principles (Dancy (...) 2004) makes much of a distinction between reasons, enablers, disablers, intensi- ers, and attenuators. I will suggest that the distinction is unnecessary, and I will argue that, even if there is such a distinction, it does not entail moral particularism. In the nal two sections, I try to give improved versions of arguments against particularism that I put forward in my paper ‘Moral Particularism: Wrong and Bad’ (Hooker 2000b: 1--22, esp. pp. 7--11, 15--22). (shrink)

This paper presents a brief argument from the interaction of weak crossover (WCO), antecedent-contained deletion (ACD), and other facts of VP-ellipsis that subjects are base-generated in a predicateinternal position but move through an intermediate A-position on their way to their final landing site (the specifier of TP) and can take scope in this intermediate position.

There is near universal agreement within the scientific and ethics communities that a necessary condition for the moral permissibility of cross-national, collaborative research is that it be responsive to the health needs of the host community. It has proven difficult, however, to leverage or capitalize on this consensus in order to resolve lingering disputes about the ethics of international medical research. This is largely because different sides in these debates have sometimes provided different interpretations of what this requirement amounts to (...) in actual practice. The goal of the discussion that follows is to clarify the nature of this important moral requirement. The first section explains the requirement for responsiveness to host community health needs in the context of international medical research. The second section examines various formulations of this requirement as they are enunciated in some of the core consensus documents in research ethics. The third section then defends a particular interpretation of this requirement, and the final sections examine more liberal alternatives with the aim of highlighting points of agreement and assessing the significance of areas of disagreement. (shrink)

Three studies investigated implicit brand attitudes and their relation to explicit attitudes, prod- uct usage, and product differentiation. Implicit attitudes were measured using the Implicit As- sociation Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). Study 1 showed expected differ- ences in implicit attitudes between users of two leading yogurt brands, also revealing significant correlations between IAT-measured implicit attitudes and explicit attitudes. In Study 2, users of two fast food restaurants (McDonald’s and Milk Bar) showed implicit attitudi- nal preference for their (...) favorite restaurant. In Study 3, implicit attitudes of users of two soft drinks (Coca-Cola and Pepsi) predicted brand preference, product usage, and brand recognition in a blind taste test. A meta-analytic combination of the three studies showed that the use of IAT measures increased the prediction of behavior relative to explicit attitude measures alone. (shrink)

Converse contended that the ideological disorganization, attitudi?nal inconsistency, and limited information of American voters make them a politically disengaged mass, not a responsible electorate. I illustrate the shortcomings of Converse's line of reasoning by showing that he misread his two most prominent examples of the electoral consequences of his theory: voting on the Vietnam War in the 1968 New Hampshire primary, and public opinion about the 1948 Taft?Hartley Act. In both cases, voters were better able to sort candidates and policies (...) than Converse reported, despite their lack of ideological sophistication or their knowledge of specific legislation. Converse's interpretive errors here stem from mistaken assumptions about information processing and recall, and from questionable normative standards about what constitute meaningful and competent political orientation. His criteria underestimate the public's ability to make responsible choices, and the effect of campaigns on the choosing process. (shrink)

Predictions about autonomous weapon systems are typically thought to channel fears that drove all the myths about intelligence embodied in matter. One of these is the idea that the technology can get out of control and ultimately lead to horrifi c consequences, as is the case in Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein. Given this, predictions about AWS are sometimes dismissed as science-fiction fear-mongering. This paper considers several analogies between AWS and other weapon systems and ultimately offers an argument that nuclear weapons (...) and their effect on the development of modern asymmetrical warfare are the best analogy to the introduction of AWS. The fi nal section focuses on this analogy and offers speculations about the likely consequences of AWS being hacked. These speculations tacitly draw on myths and tropes about technology and AI from popular fi ction, such as Frankenstein, to project a convincing model of the risks and benefi ts of AWS deployment. (shrink)

The present essay explores plausible affinities between the Orphic theogony embedded in the Derveni papyrus and its interpretation in the mode of physikē philosophia by the Derveni author. It focuses specifically on the relationship between latent meaning and manifest content in the text as a whole. The Derveni author’s complex techniques of allegorical exegesis and his mental makeup are the subject-matter of the firstpart. The ways in which he is influenced by, and diverges from, Heraclitus in a crucial column of (...) the papyrus are taken as indicative of his specifically Orphic concerns. The sequence of the mythical events narrated in the poem is established in the following part, and those which seem to be original with the poet are distinguished from the traditional material of Hesiod’s Theogony. Special emphasis is put on the psychological significance that a narrative stressing a double or two-phased generation of the world-order, may have had for initiates of the so-called Orphic type. In the third part of the essay, a similar two-phased creation of the world-order is discerned in the Derveni author’s ‘scientific’or‘rational’cosmogony. A table of tentative correspondences between the Derveni author’s cosmogony and the Orphic poet’s theogony is also included. The final remarks explore the place of the Derveni author in ‘the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’, and highlight what seems to have been his most perplexing concern: the simultaneous immanence and transcendence of divinity with respect to the world. (shrink)

Occasionally you will hear it said that the violence perpetrated by organizations such as Al Qaeda is “nihilistic.” The senses of the term as thus employed seem to be largely intuitive, and involve a cluster of notions. The journalist and pundit Christopher Hitchens, for example, offers up such descriptions as “sinister grandiosity,” “pointless nastiness,” and “the tactic of demanding the impossible and demanding it at gun- point.”1 The idea is that contrary to the revolutionary, idealist rhetoric of those enacting the (...) violence, there is something hollow, cruel, and irratio- nal at the center of such actions. This intuitive application of the term “nihilistic” to organizations such as Al Qaeda has substantial merit, and it is in fact possible to specify a more detailed philosophical and psycholog- ical basis to the concept.2 A properly elaborated concept of nihilism is of considerable interpretive utility where some of the familiar socio-political concepts like “colonialism,” “globalization,” and the like have demon- strable shortcomings. Hegel and Nietzsche have, in separate ways, devel- oped the sort of philosophical and psychological basis to the notion of nihilism as discussed here. (shrink)

The most time consuming effort has been toward building a precision, servo-controlled rotary drive to turn the attractor. After discovering our Nanomotion HR1 Ultra-High-Vacuum motor was incapable of continuous operation in a vacuum environment (due to heat management issues), we were forced to redesign the system such that the motor remained in atmosphere. We are pleased with the final performance. Fig. 2.1-1A..

_The Sub ject of Con scious ness_ is a rich, strik ingly orig i nal and ambi tious work. It makes an impor tant and timely con tri bu tion to cur rent debates on a num ber of issues which over the last few years have been tak ing cen tre stage in the phi los o phy of mind: for exam ple, self-consciousness, selec tive atten tion and the nature of bodily aware ness. What makes this achieve ment (...) some what unusual, and all the more remark able, is that _The Sub ject of Con scious ness_ was pub lished thirty years ago (Evans, 1970). The reviews it received at the time ranged from the hos tile to the deri sory. (shrink)

In October 2009 I decided to stop doing philosophy. This meant, in particular, stopping work on the book that I was writing on the nature of probability. At that time, I had no intention of making my unfinished draft available to others. However, I recently noticed how many people are reading the lecture notes and articles on my web site. Since this draft book contains some important improvements on those materials, I decided to make it available to anyone who wants (...) to read it. That is what you have in front of you. The account of Laplace’s theory of probability in Chapter 4 is very different to what I said in my seminar lectures, and also very different to any other account I have seen; it is based on a reading of important texts by Laplace that appear not to have been read by other commentators. The discussion of von Mises’ theory in Chapter 7 is also new, though perhaps less revolutionary. And the final chapter is a new attempt to come to grips with the popular, but amorphous, subjective theory of probability. The material in the other chapters has mostly appeared in previous articles of mine but things are sometimes expressed differently here. I would like to say again that this is an incomplete draft of a book, not the book I would have written if I had decided to finish it. It no doubt contains poor expressions, it may contain some errors or inconsistencies, and it doesn’t cover all the theories that I originally intended to discuss. Apart from this preface, I have done no work on the book since October 2009. (shrink)

There is much in The Sensory Order that recommends the oft-made claim that Hayek anticipated connectionist theories of mind. To the extent that this is so, contemporary arguments against and for connectionism, as advanced by Jerry Fodor, Zenon Pylyshyn, and John Searle, are shown as applicable to theoretical psychology. However, the final section of this chapter highlights an important disanalogy between theoretical psychology and connectionist theories of mind.

Toute la philosophie de Leibniz tend essentiellement à réconcilier la raison avec la foi. Ces deux aspects de l'intelligibilité ne doivent point être dissociés sous prétexte d'objectivité ou de révélation. Ni la nature n'est dépourvue de la grâce, ni celle-ci n'est étrangère à la phénoménalité. L'univers présente deux plans distincts mais complémentaires, inexplicables l'un sans l'autre : celui des causes finales et celui des causes efficientes ; vouloir négliger les unes au profit des autres, c'est ne pas accepter les conséquences (...) logiques de la définition de Dieu. La philosophie de Leibniz, c'est surtout la doctrine de la substance et de l'harmonie préétablie, car cet univers qui fait l'objet d'une investigation scientifique, représente une hiérarchie de substances plus ou moins complexes qui justifient, à la fois, le purement phénoménal, ou saisi comme tel, et l'exclusivement ontologique et moral."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

In this essay we collect and put together a number of ideas relevant to the under- standing of the phenomenon of creativity, confining our considerations mostly to the domain of cognitive psychology while we will, on a few occasions, hint at neuropsy- chological underpinnings as well. In this, we will mostly focus on creativity in science, since creativity in other domains of human endeavor have common links with scientific creativity while differing in numerous other specific respects. We begin by briefly (...) introducing a few basic notions relating to cognition, among which the notion of ‘concepts’ is of basic relevance. The myriads of concepts lodged in our mind constitute a ‘conceptual space’ of an enormously complex structure, where con- cepts are correlated by beliefs that are themselves made up of concepts and are as- sociated with emotions. The conceptual space, moreover, is perpetually in a state of dynamic evolution that is once again of a complex nature. A major component of the dynamic evolution is made up of incessant acts of inference, where an inference occurs essentially by means of a succession of correlations among concepts set up with beliefs and heuristics, the latter being beliefs of a special kind, namely, ones relatively free of emotional associations and possessed of a relatively greater degree of justification. Beliefs, along with heuristics, have been described as the ‘mind’s software’, and con- stitute important cognitive components of the self-linked psychological resources of an individual. The self is the psychological engine driving all our mental and physical activity, and is in a state of ceaseless dynamics resulting from one’s most intimate ex- periences of the world accumulating in the course of one’s journey through life. Many of our psychological resources are of a dual character, having both a self-linked and a shared character, the latter being held in common with larger groups of people and imbibed from cultural inputs. We focus on the privately held self-linked beliefs of an individual, since these are presumably of central relevance in making possible inductive inferences – ones in which there arises a fundamental need of adopting a choice or making a decision. Beliefs, decisions, and inferences, all have the common link to the self of an individual and, in this, are fundamentally analogous to free will, where all of these have an aspect of non-determinism inherent in them. Creativity involves a major restructuring of the conceptual space where a sustained inferential process eventually links remote conceptual domains, thereby opening up the possibility of a large number of new correlations between remote concepts by a cascading process. Since the process of inductive inference depends crucially on de- cisions at critical junctures of the inferential chain, it becomes necessary to examine the basic mechanism underlying the making of decisions. In the framework that we attempt to build up for the understanding of scientific creativity, this role of decision making in the inferential process assumes central relevance. With this background in place, we briefly sketch the affect theory of decisions. Affect is an innate system of response to perceptual inputs received either from the exter- nal world or from the internal physiological and psychological environment whereby a positive or negative valence gets associated with a perceptual input. Almost every sit- uation faced by an individual, even one experienced tacitly, i.e., without overt aware-ness, elicits an affective response from him, carrying a positive or negative valence that underlies all sorts of decision making, including ones carried out unconsciously in inferential processes. Referring to the process of inferential exploration of the conceptual space that gener- ates the possibility of correlations being established between remote conceptual do- mains, such exploration is guided and steered at every stage by the affect system, analogous to the way a complex computer program proceeds through junctures where the program ascertains whether specified conditions are met with by way of generating appropriate numerical values – for instance, the program takes different routes, depending on whether some particular numerical value turns out to be positive or negative. The valence generated by the affect system in the process of adoption of a choice plays a similar role which therefore is of crucial relevance in inferential processes, especially in the exploration of the conceptual space where remote domains need to be linked up – the affect system produces a response along a single value dimension, resembling a number with a sign and a magnitude. While the affect system plays a guiding role in the exploration of the conceptual space, the process of exploration itself consists of the establishment of correlations between concepts by means of beliefs and heuristics, the self-linked ones among the latter having a special role in making possible the inferential journey along alternative routes whenever the shared rules of inference become inadequate. A successful access to a remote conceptual domain, necessary for the creative solution of a standing problem or anomaly – one that could not be solved within the limited domain hitherto accessed – requires a phase of relatively slow cumulative search and then, at some stage, a rapid cascading process when a solution is in sight. Representing the conceptual space in the form of a complex network, the overall process can be likened to one of self-organized criticality commonly observed in the dynamical evolution of complex systems. In order that inferential access to remote domains may actually be possible, it is necessary that restrictions on the exploration process – necessary for setting the context in ordinary instances of inductive inference – be relaxed and a relatively free exploration in a larger conceptual terrain be made possible. This is achieved by the mind going into the default mode, where external constraints – ones imposed by shared beliefs and modes of exploration – are made inoperative. While explaining all these various aspects of the creative process, we underline the supremely important role that analogy plays in it. Broadly speaking, analogy is in the nature of a heuristic, establishing correlations between concepts. However, analo- gies are very special in that these are particularly effective in establishing correlations among remote concepts, since analogy works without regard to the contiguity of the concepts in the conceptual space. In establishing links between concepts, analogies have the power to light up entire terrains in the conceptual space when a rapid cas- cading of fresh correlations becomes possible. The creative process occurs within the mind of a single individual or of a few closely collaborating individuals, but is then continued by an entire epistemic community, eventually resulting in a conceptual revolution. Such conceptual revolutions make pos- sible the radical revision of scientific theories whereby the scope of an extant theory is broadened and a new theoretical framework makes its appearance. The emerging theory is characterized by a certain degree of incommensurability when compared with the earlier one – a feature that may appear strange at first sight. But incommen- surability does not mean incompatibility and the apparently contrary features of the relation between the successive theories may be traced to the multi-layered structureof the conceptual space where concepts are correlated not by means of single links but by multiple ones, thereby generating multiple layers of correlation, among which some are retained and some created afresh in a conceptual restructuring. We conclude with the observation that creativity occurs on all scales. Analogous to correlations being set up across domains in the conceptual space and new domains being generated, processes with similar features can occur within the confines of a domain where a new layer of inferential links may be generated, connecting up sub- domains. In this context, insight can be looked upon as an instance of creativity within the confines of a domain of a relatively limited extent. (shrink)