This book offers a theory of how human conceptual life begins, and shows how perceptual information becomes transformed into concepts. Drawing on extensive research, Mandler describes the development of preverbal concept formation, inductive inference, and recall, and explains how these processes form the conceptual basis for language and adult thought.

In this paper I answer some concerns of the commentators on my article 'On the birth and growth of concepts'. I explain that my theory of concept formation in infancy emphasizes spatial information over bodily information but still allows the body to influence conceptual thought. I suggest that bodily feelings may be represented differently from spatial information. I do not claim that spatial image-schemas account for all conceptual thought, but I show why they are sufficient for the relatively limited conceptual (...) life of preverbal infants, making an innate propositional language of thought unnecessary. Finally, I discuss why uninterpreted percepts cannot be concepts, and clarify the mechanism of Perceptual Meaning Analysis. (shrink)

A number of criticisms of a recent paper byare made. (1) In attempting to assess the observational adequacy of story grammars, they state that a context‐free grammar cannot handle discontinuous elements; however, they do not show that such elements occur in the domain to which the grammars apply. Further, they do not present adequate evidence for their claim that there are acceptable stories not accounted for by existing grammars and that the grammars will accept nonstories such as procedures. (2) They (...) state that it has been proven that under natural conditions children cannot learn transformational grammars, which is a misrepresentation of the learnability proofs which have been offered. (3) Most important, they take an unduly narrow approach to story understanding by claiming that people only understand story content and do not have knowledge of story structure which is useful in comprehension or memory. Counterevidence from the literature is cited which indicates that such knowledge is both useful and used, and a number of methods for assessing the psychological adequacy of structural models are discussed. (shrink)

A theory of how concept formation begins is presented that accounts for conceptual activity in the first year of life, shows how increasing conceptual complexity comes about, and predicts the order in which new types of information accrue to the conceptual system. In a compromise between nativist and empiricist views, it offers a single domain-general mechanism that redescribes attended spatiotemporal information into an iconic form. The outputs of this mechanism consist of types of spatial information that we know infants attend (...) to in the first months of life. These primitives form the initial basis of concept formation, allow explicit preverbal thought, such as recall, inferences, and simple mental problem solving, and support early language learning. The theory details how spatial concepts become associated with bodily feelings of force and trying. It also explains why concepts of emotions, sensory concepts such as color, and theory of mind concepts are necessarily later acquisitions because they lack contact with spatial descriptions to interpret unstructured internal experiences. Finally, commonalities between the concepts of preverbal infants and nonhuman primates are discussed. (shrink)

This article describes what the earliest concepts are like and presents a theory of the spatial primitives from which they are formed. The earliest concepts tend to be global, like animal and container, and it is hypothesized that they consist of simplified redescriptions of innately salient spatial information. These redescriptions become associated with sensory and other bodily experiences that are not themselves redescribed, but that enrich conceptual thought. The initial conceptual base becomes expanded through subdivision, sometimes aided by language that (...) points up these divisions or suggests new spatial analyses, and by the analogical extension of spatially derived concepts to nonspatial domains. This formulation is contrasted with Fodor's (1998) metaphysical theory of concept formation. (shrink)

There must be innate conceptual machinery, but perhaps not as much as Carey proposes. A single mechanism of Perceptual Meaning Analysis that simplifies spatiotemporal information into a small number of conceptual primitives may suffice. This approach avoids the complexities and ambiguities of interactions between separate dedicated analyzers and central concepts that Carey posits, giving learning a somewhat larger role in early concept formation.

Rogers & McClelland (R&M) present a powerful account of semantic (conceptual) learning. Their model admirably handles many characteristics of early concept formation, but it also needs to address attentional biases, and distinguish direct input from error-driven learning, and fast versus slow learning. Not distinguishing implicit and explicit knowledge means that the authors also cannot explain why some coherently varying information becomes accessible and other information does not.

Even in infancy, concept formation has to do with creating meaning, not with tracking substances. Preverbal infants can identify a substance such as a dog, but their first concept of this substance is not dog but animal. It is difficult to account for such global concepts by the perceptual processes involved in object identification, yet these concepts are the foundation on which later concepts are built.

The theoretical debate on the nature of narrative has been mainly concerned with literary narratives, whereas forms of non-literary and especially pictorial narrativity have been somewhat neglected. In this paper, however, I shall discuss narrativity specifically with regard to pictorial objects in order to clarify how pictorial storytelling may be based on the activation of mentally stored action and scene schemas. Approaches from cognitive psychology, such as the work of Schank, Roger C. & Robert P. Abelson. 1977. Scripts, plans, goals (...) and understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Mandler, Jean Matter. 1984. Stories, scripts, and scenes: Aspects of schema theory. London/hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Schank, Roger C. 1995. Tell me a story: Narrative and intelligence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, suggest that cognition crucially depends on the storage and retrieval of action scripts or schemata, that is, narrative structures, which may occur at various levels of abstraction. These schemas incorporate generalized knowledge about event sequences, such as the order in which specific events will take place; causal, enabling, or conventionalized relations between these events, and what kind of events occur in certain action sequences. There also are scene schemas that are characterized by spatial rather than temporal relations. Further kinds of schemas seem also to play a decisive role. Drawing upon considerations from schema and script theory, I will focus on some concrete examples of pictorial narration, more specifically depictions of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, where narrative schema structures become involved and, indeed, the comprehensibility of the pictures as such presuppose mental script representations. (shrink)

"This wonderfully eloquent and playful colloquy of two brilliant minds gives new life to the old notion of Dialogue, a sadly forgotten form now.... I "love" this book!

This book explains, in simple terms, with a minimum of mathematics, why things can appear to be in two places at the same time, why correlations between simultaneous events occurring far apart cannot be explained by local mechanisms, and why, nevertheless, the quantum theory can be understood in terms of matter in motion. No need to worry, as some people do, whether a cat can be both dead and alive, whether the moon is there when nobody looks at it, (...) or whether quantum systems need an observer to acquire definite properties. The author's inimitable and even humorous style makes the book a pleasure to read while bringing a new clarity to many of the longstanding puzzles of quantum physics. (shrink)

There were three such assumptions required, one explicitly stated, and two not made explicit until Bayle. The explicit one was a certain commonly accepted double understanding of ‘destruction’: a ‘natural’ version, which made it no more than a change in a particular arrangement or ‘organization’ of particles through which an aggregate was destroyed by losing its identity, and a metaphysical version, which entailed the actual annihilation of a substance. It was assumed that the latter could be accomplished only by miraculous (...) supra-natural means available only to God. Thus, if it could be shown that the soul was ‘without parts,’ it followed that the soul was ‘naturally’ indestructible and thus immortal. Bayle summarized the Cartesian argument to immortality as follows. (shrink)

‘No matter how long I may look at an image, I shall never find anything in it but what I put there. It is in this fact that we find the distinction between an image and a perception.' - Jean-Paul Sartre L’Imagination was published in 1936 when Jean-Paul Sartre was thirty years old. Long out of print, this is the first English translation in many years. The Imagination is Sartre’s first full philosophical work, presenting some of the (...) basic arguments concerning phenomenology, consciousness and intentionality that were to later appear in his master works and be so influential in the course of twentieth-century philosophy. Sartre begins by criticising philosophical theories of the imagination, particularly those of Descartes, Leibniz and Hume, before establishing his central thesis. Imagination does not involve the perception of ‘mental images’ in any literal sense, Sartre argues, yet reveals some of the fundamental capacities of consciousness. He then reviews psychological theories of the imagination, including a fascinating discussion of the work of Henri Bergson. Sartre argues that the ‘classical conception’ is fundamentally flawed because it begins by conceiving of the imagination as being like perception and then seeks, in vain, to re-establish the difference between the two. Sartre concludes with an important chapter on Husserl’s theory of the imagination which, despite sharing the flaws of earlier approaches, signals a new phenomenological way forward in understanding the imagination. The Imagination is essential reading for anyone interested in the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, phenomenology, and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. This new translation includes a helpful historical and philosophical introduction by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. Also included is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s important review of L’Imagination upon its publication in French in 1936. Translated by Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf. (shrink)

What are the philosophical arguments justifying limited strikes? This essay, as part of the roundtable “The Ethics of Limited Strikes,” adopts a French perspective both because France is, along with the United States and the United Kingdom, one of the states that launched such limited strikes in recent years, and because it developed a limited warfare ethos. There is something specific about such an ethos that makes it particularly receptive to thejus ad vimframework and, therefore, to the issue of limited (...) strikes. This essay also builds on the case of the use (or threat) of limited force in Syria as a response to the country's use of chemical weapons between 2013 and 2018. Presented as a way to “punish” the Syrian regime as much as to “deter” it from using chemical weapons again, these limited strikes are a good illustration of the traditional retributive/preventive dichotomy of penal philosophy. I argue that the moral justification of those strikes should be guided by a consequentialist ethic, preventive rather than retributive. From a consequentialist perspective, limited strikes are justified when they “work”—that is, when they have a deterrent/compellent effect. For that to happen, they need to be credible and imply the potential of an escalation; the challenge being to keep the escalation under control. Carrying the risk of inefficacy at one end of the spectrum and of escalation at the other, limited strikes are indeed a matter of balance. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the examination of the attitudes of the in two regions of the globe, both with respect to basic relations between citizen and state and with respect to the extent to which affects these relations. These questions have too long been discussed primarily at the level of elites or on the basis of assumptions or about what the reactions of the people at large may be. By providing at least some evidence pertaining to both these questions, (...) the study thus aims at beginning to fill a gap which has long needed to be filled and at giving the debate on and on some of the empirical basis which it badly needs. (shrink)

The myth of an economy where nobody could have a predominant position, has lost its credibility. The presentiment of a high risk of social explosion makes companies undertake tentative moral legitimation. Thus, a new paradigm develops according to which the firm has to care for the satisfaction of public interest if it wants to try to win forgiveness for misbehavior towards the decorum rules of the atomicity of competition. Thus, there is a wave of business ethics industry building up. However, (...) the stock exchange performances considered as ethical, are not different from others! The market does not seem to be able to say why it might be interesting to invest in stock considered as ethical. Moreover, opinion polls reveal a very significant discrepancy between the characterization of the responsible company as defined by itself or by notation agencies and, on the other hand, the hierarchy of criteria according to the answers of polled people. When companies and agencies favor sustainable development and good governance, rejecting child labor and so on, polled people consider that the paramount criterion of ethical conduct is personnel management. The problem is right here. Such is the view of a positively critical economist, situated at the point where macroeconomics meets corporate management. (shrink)

A new ethics for the global practice of curating Today, everyone is a curator. What was once considered a hallowed expertise is now a commonplace and global activity. Can this new worldwide activity be ethical and, if yes, how? This book argues that curating can be more than just selecting, organizing, and presenting information in galleries or online. Curating can also constitute an ethics, one of acquiring, arranging, and distributing an always conjectural knowledge about the world. Curating as Ethics is (...) primarily philosophical in scope, evading normative approaches to ethics in favor of an intuitive ethics that operates at the threshold of thought and action. It explores the work of authors as diverse as Heidegger, Spinoza, Meillassoux, Mudimbe, Chalier, and Kofman. Jean-Paul Martinon begins with the fabric of these ethics: how it stems from matter, how it addresses death, how it apprehends interhuman relationships. In the second part he establishes the ground on which the ethics is based, the things that make up the curatorial--for example, the textual and visual evidence or the digital medium. The final part focuses on the activity of curating as such--sharing, caring, preparing, dispensing, and so on. With its invigorating new approach to curatorial studies, Curating as Ethics moves beyond the field of museum and exhibition studies to provide an ethics for anyone engaged in this highly visible activity, including those using social media as a curatorial endeavor, and shows how philosophy and curating can work together to articulate the world today. (shrink)

This English translation of Gebser’s major work, Ursprung und Gegenwart (Stuttgart, Deutsche Verlag, 1966), offers certain fundamental insights which should be beneficial to any sensitive scientist and makes it available to the English-speaking world for the recognition it deserves. “The path which led Gebser to his new and universal perception of the world is, briefly, as follows. In the wake of materialism and social change, man had been described in the early years of our century as the “dead end” of (...) nature. Freud had redefined culture as illness—a result of drive sublimation; Klages had called the spirit (and he was surely speaking of the hypertrophied intellect) the “adversary of the soul,” propounding a return to a life like that of the Pelasgi, the aboriginal inhabitants of Greece; and Spengler had declared the “Demise of the West” during the years following World War I. The consequences of such pessimism continued to proliferate long after its foundations had been superseded. It was with these foundations—the natural sciences—that Gebser began. As early as Planck it was known that matter was not at all what materialists had believed it to be, and since 1943 Gebser has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called crisis of Western culture was in fact an essential restructuration.… Gebser has noted two results that are of particular significance: first, the abandonment of materialistic determinism, of a one-sided mechanistic-causal mode of thought; and second, a manifest “urgency of attempts to discover a universal way of observing things, and to overcome the inner division of contemporary man who, as a result of his one-sided rational orientation, thinks only in dualisms.” Against this background of recent discoveries and conclusions in the natural sciences Gebser discerned the outlines of a potential human universality. He also sensed the necessity to go beyond the confines of this first treatise so as to include the humanities (such as political economics and sociology) as well as the arts in a discussion along similar lines. This was the point of departure of The Ever-Present Origin. From In memoriam Jean Gebser by Jean Keckeis. (shrink)

This volume examines the evolving reputation of Rousseau as an authority on education in France from the publication of Emile in 1762 to the fall of the Jacobins in 1794. It takes as its focus the centrality of the debate over private and public education. The author argues that what unites Rousseau and the Revolutionaries is their holistic approach, which perceives an organic relationship between the internal constitution of the person as a moral and emotional being and what are normally (...) thought of as external public matters such as politics. Education is, in fact, the key to Rousseau's philosophy and it is also the key to revolutionary change. The Revolutionaries may start by looking at the necessary reform of the monarchy or the taxation system, but as things develop, they realise that if the Revolution is to last, education must be appropriate to it. In this way the Revolutionaries are obliged to consider education as a tool for thinking about the very problem Rousseau had perceived: the connection between the inner self and society and its institutions. The study examines the way in which the early revolutionaries are faced by Rousseau's already established reputation as an authority on private education and how this poses problems for them. Linked too emphatically with individualism and the private sphere, Rousseau represents an ambiguous symbol for those concerned with the reform of public education. Yet, his reputation in the field of child care the developing cult of him as inspiration and symbol of the Revolution make him an almost obligatory reference point for educational reformers. The author's analysis traces the progression of the Revolutionaries' attitudes. The volume demonstrates how the first thirty to thirty-five years of the fortunes of Rousseau's reputation as an educationist have, arguably, more to do with politics than pedagogy. Two major phases of the intermeshing of education and politics around the figure of Rousseau can be seen: the first in the years following the publication of Emile, when the supporters of absolute monarchy show their suspicion of the radical implications of Emile, and the second in mid-Revolution, when the association of Rousseau and his political doctrine spills over into the plans of educational reform. This volume charts the progress of these developments and casts new light on the vexed question of the relationship of Rousseau to the French Revolution. (shrink)

An examination of the fundamental role cybernetics played in the birth of cognitive science and the light this sheds on current controversies. The conceptual history of cognitive science remains for the most part unwritten. In this groundbreaking book, Jean-Pierre Dupuy—one of the principal architects of cognitive science in France—provides an important chapter: the legacy of cybernetics. Contrary to popular belief, Dupuy argues, cybernetics represented not the anthropomorphization of the machine but the mechanization of the human. The founding fathers of (...) cybernetics—some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, including John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts—intended to construct a materialist and mechanistic science of mental behavior that would make it possible at last to resolve the ancient philosophical problem of mind and matter. The importance of cybernetics to cognitive science, Dupuy argues, lies not in its daring conception of the human mind in terms of the functioning of a machine but in the way the strengths and weaknesses of the cybernetics approach can illuminate controversies that rage today—between cognitivists and connectionists, eliminative materialists and Wittgensteinians, functionalists and anti-reductionists. Dupuy brings to life the intellectual excitement that attended the birth of cognitive science sixty years ago. He separates the promise of cybernetic ideas from the disappointment that followed as cybernetics was rejected and consigned to intellectual oblivion. The mechanization of the mind has reemerged today as an all-encompassing paradigm in the convergence of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science. The tensions, contradictions, paradoxes, and confusions Dupuy discerns in cybernetics offer a cautionary tale for future developments in cognitive science. (shrink)

An important step in In Pierre Bayle’s defense of religious tolerance is to refute St Augustine’s claim that heretics who refuse to convert to the true faith do so out of ill will. This claim legitimizes, for Augustine and his followers, the application of temporal sanctions to those heretics, in order to offset their wicked inclination and restore their free will. To counter this view, Bayle uses the theological notions of invincible ignorance and dutiful erroneous conscience, elaborated during the Middle (...) Ages. However, these notions had a very restricted scope, which needed to be extended to so-called heretical beliefs. I show how two early modern scholastics, the Jesuits Gabriel Vázquez and Rodrigo Arriaga, have prepared this evolution and have paved the way for Bayle's denunciation any form of coercion in religious matters. (shrink)

The problem of the intensification and remission of qualities was a crux for philosophical, theological, and scientific thought in the Middle Ages. It was raised in Antiquity with this remark of Aristotle: some qualities, as accidental beings, admit the more and the less. Admitting more and less is not a trivial property, since it belongs neither to every category of being, nor to every quality. Rather it applies only to states and dispositions such as virtue, to affections of bodies such (...) as heat and sweetness, and to affections of soul such as anger. However, the property of admitting more and less was a matter of importance for the qualitative physics that had reigned up to about the time of Descartes, a physics which was concerned with concepts such as heat, coldness, lightness, heaviness, and so on. (shrink)

Authors from a variety of fields including law, political science, international relations and economics discuss matters of justice at the national, international and global levels.

We argue, in the spirit of some of Jean-Yves Jaffray's work, that explicitly incorporating the information, however imprecise, available to the decision maker is relevant, feasible, and fruitful. In particular, we show that it can lead us to know whether the decision maker has wrong beliefs and whether it matters or not, that it makes it possible to better model and analyze how the decision maker takes into account new information, even when this information is not an event and (...) finally that it is crucial when attempting to identify and measure the decision maker's attitude toward imprecise information. (shrink)

The implementation of a diplomacy that could put more emphasis on democracy and human rights was not an easy process in Belgium. Treatment of these matters have taken a different perspective in Zaïre, Rwanda and Burundi, Belgium 's three most important African partners. Reasons for that are twofold. Fore one thing, the Belgian foreign affairs service has always been overloaded by mercantile preoccupations. Secondly, knowledge on Africa has been limited to short circle diplomatic contacts while no instruments were ever implemented (...) that could have ensured some following up of the African civil society at large.In the future, the continuation for a slow process of disengagement might be foreseable. New "partners" might come to the forefront such as South Africa while the U.S. and international financial organisations will definitely try to impose "good governance" together with a reasonable dose of human rights. (shrink)

Eos or the Wider Aspects of Cosmogony J H Jeans Originally published in 1928 "A fascinating summary of his tremendous conclusions…" Times Literary Supplement "No book in the series surpasses Eos in brilliance and profundity…" Is this universe permanent or transitory? If transitory, is it near its end or just beginning? Is life common or rare? Where does life stand in relation t the stupendous mass of inert matter? These and other issues are lucidly dealt with in this book. (...) 80pp, 6 b&w plates Hermes, or the Future of Chemistry T W Jones Originally published in 1928. "A complete and readable survey of chemical developments, making special reference to bio-chemistry, synthetic fuels, and catalysis." Manchester Guardian "Tells us…with brilliant clarity, what chemistry and its achievements are likely to be in the future." Morning Post Chemistry as the means of human emancipation is the subject of this book. Today chemistry is one off the master factors of our existence; tomorrow, the author argues, it will dominate every phase of life, winning for man the goal of all endeavour: economic freedom, and may also effect a startling change in man himself. 82pp. Sybilla or the Future of Prophecy C A Mace Originally published in 1927 "An entertaining and instructive pamphlet." Morning Post An examination of the possibilities of scientific forecasting. 90pp Archimedes or the Future of Physics L L Whyte Originally published in 1928. "This book will be an inspiration. The writer is a clear and fearless thinker." Discovery When this volume was written, physics, biology and psychology were, in the author’s view, converging towards a scientific synthesis of unprecedented importance whose influence on thought and social custom would be profound. This book interprets those events. 88pp. (shrink)