We build on Ainslie's discussion of willpower by highlighting another common misconception in the literature: the conflation of self-control and willpower. In our commentary, we identify this issue and discuss the importance of recognizing willpower not as synonymous with self-control, but rather as a subset of self-control. We describe a set of upstream strategies as more effective alternatives to willpower.

In this path breaking volume, leading researchers from psychology, linguistics, philosophy and primatology offer complementary perspectives on the role of intersubjectivity in the context of human development, comparative cognition and...

This book, the first comprehensive study in English of Heidegger's philosophy of art, starts in the mid-1930s with Heidegger's discussion of the Greek temple and his Hegelian declaration that a great artwork gathers together an entire culture in affirmative celebration of its foundational 'truth', and that, by this criterion, art in modernity is 'dead'. His subsequent work on Hölderlin, whom he later identified as the decisive influence on his mature philosophy, led him into a passionate engagement with the art of (...) Rilke, Ce;zanne, Klee and Zen Buddhism, liberating him not only from the overly restrictive conception of art of the mid-1930s but also from the disastrous politics of the period. Drawing on material hitherto unknown in the anglophone world, Young establishes a new account of Heidegger's philosophy of art and shows that his famous essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' is its beginning, not its end. (shrink)

In a revolutionary new book, a theoretical physicist attacks the foundations of modern scientific theory, including the notion of time, as he shares evidence of ...

It is being increasingly recognized that the Saussurean dictum of “the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign” is in conflict with the pervasiveness of the phenomenon commonly known as “sound symbolism”. After first presenting a historical overview of the debate, however, we conclude that both positions have been exaggerated, and that an adequate explanation of sound symbolism is still lacking. How can there, for example, be (perceived) similarity between expressionsand contents across different sensory modalities? We offer an answer, based on the (...) Peircian notion of iconic ground, and G. Sonesson’s distinction betweenprimary and secondary iconicity. Furthermore, we describe an experimental study, in a paradigm first pioneered by W. Kohler, and recently popularized by V.Ramachandran, in which we varied vowels and consonants in fictive word-forms, and conclude that both types of sounds play a role in perceiving an iconic ground between the word-forms and visual figures. The combination of historical conceptual analysis, semiotic explication and psychological experimentationpresented in this article is characteristic of the emerging paradigm of cognitive semiotics. (shrink)

Introduction -- The type/token theory introduced -- Motivating the type/token theory : repeatability -- Nominalist approaches to the ontology of music -- Musical anti-realism -- The type/token theory elaborated -- Types I : abstract, unstructured, unchanging -- Types introduced and nominalism repelled -- Types as abstracta -- Types as unstructured entities -- Types as fixed and unchanging -- Types II : platonism -- Introduction : eternal existence and timelessness -- Types and properties -- The eternal existence of properties reconsidered -- (...) Types and patterns -- Defending the type/token theory I -- Unstructuredness and analogical predication -- Musical works as fixed and unchanging -- Abstractness and audibility (again) -- Works and interpretations -- Conclusion and resumé -- Defending the type/token theory II : musical platonism -- Platonism it is : replies to Anderson and Levinson -- The existence conditions of works of music -- Composition as creative discovery -- The nature of the compositional process : replies to objections -- Composition and aesthetic appraisal : a reply to Levinson -- Composition and aesthetic appraisal : understanding, interpretation, and correctness -- Musical works as continuants : a theory rejected -- A theory introduced -- Explicating and motivating the continuant view -- The continuant view and repeatability -- Further objections to the continuant view -- Musical works as compositional actions : a critique -- Currie's action-type hypothesis -- Davies's performance theory -- Sonicism I : against instrumentalism -- Sonicism introduced -- Sonicism motivated : moderate empiricism -- Instrumentation : timbral sonicism introduced -- Scores -- Instrumentation, artistic properties, and aesthetic content -- Levinson's rejoinder -- Sonicism II : against contextualism -- Introduction : formulating contextualism -- Contextualist ontological proposals -- Levinson's doppelgänger thought-experiments -- Artistic, representational, and object-directed expressive properties -- Aesthetic and non-object-directed expressive properties -- Conclusion : the place of context. (shrink)

Following the levels of intentionality and semiosis distinguished by the Semiotic Hierarchy, and the distinction between original agency and enhanced agency, we propose a model of an agency hierarchy, consisting of six layers. Consistent with the phenomenological orientation of cognitive semiotics, a central claim is that agency and subjectivity are complementary aspects of intentionality. Hence, there is no agency without at least the minimal sense/feeling of agency. This perspective rules out all artefacts as genuine agents, as well as simple organisms, (...) since it is highly unlikely that e.g. bacteria have any first-person perspective. Using this model, we review and assess recent proposals on the nature of agency from cognitive science, and neuroscience, and draw conclusions on how to incorporate aspects of them within a synthetic cognitive-semiotic framework. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 559-572.

Great Thinkers A-Z is the ideal book for anyone interested in the history of Western thought and a valuable reference resource for students of philosophy and related disciplines.

Human communication can be either monosemiotic or polysemiotic, depending on whether it combines ensembles of representations from one or more semiotic systems such as language, gesture and depiction. Each semiotic system has its unique storytelling potentials, which makes intersemiotic translation from one system to another challenging. We investigated the influence of the source semiotic system, realised in speech and a sequence of pictures, respectively, on the way the same story was retold using speech and co-speech gestures. The story was the (...) content of the picture book Frog, Where Are You?. A group of Finnish speakers saw the story in pictures, and another group heard it in matched oral narration. Each participant retold the story to an addressee and all narrations were video-recorded and analysed for both speech and gestures. Given the high degree of iconicity in depiction, we expected more iconic gestures (especially enactments) in the narratives translated from pictures than in those translated from speech. Conversely, we expected greater narrative coherence in the narratives translated from speech. The results showed that more iconic gestures were produced in the narratives translated from speech, but these were primarily not from the enactment subtype. As expected, iconic enactments were more frequent in the narratives translated from the story presented in pictures. The narratives produced by participants who had only heard the story did not have a greater variety of connective devices, yet the type of devices differed slightly between the groups. Together with some additional differences between the groups that had not been anticipated, the results indicate that a story presented in different semiotic systems tends to be translated into different polysemiotic narratives. (shrink)

A persistent controversy in language evolution research has been whether language emerged in the gestural-visual or in the vocal-auditory modality. A “dialectic” solution to this age-old debate has now been gaining ground: language was fully multimodal from the start and remains so to this day. In this paper, we show this solution to be too simplistic and outline a more specific theoretical proposal, which we designate as pantomime-first. To decide between the multimodal-first and pantomime-first alternatives, we review several lines of (...) interdisciplinary evidence and complement it with a cognitive-semiotic experiment. In the study, the participants saw – and then matched to hand-drawn images – recordings of short transitive events enacted by 4 actors in two conditions: visual and multimodal. Significantly, the matching accuracy was greater in the visual than the multimodal condition, though a follow-up experiment revealed that the emotional profiles of the events enacted in the multimodal condition could be reliably detected from the sound alone. We see these results as supporting the proposed pantomime-first scenario. (shrink)

This article addresses a classical question: Can a machine use language meaningfully and if so, how can this be achieved? The first part of the paper is mainly philosophical. Since meaning implies intentionality on the part of the language user, artificial systems which obviously lack intentionality will be `meaningless'. There is, however, no good reason to assume that intentionality is an exclusively biological property and thus a robot with bodily structures, interaction patterns and development similar to those of human beings (...) would constitute a system possibly capable of meaning – a conjecture supported through a Wittgenstein-inspired thought experiment. The second part of the paper focuses on the empirical and constructive questions. Departing from the principle of epigenesis stating that during every state of development new structure arises on the basis of existing structure plus various sorts of interaction, a model of human cognitive and linguistic development is proposed according to which physical, social and linguistic interactions between the individual and the environment have their respective peaks in three consecutive stages of development: episodic, mimetic and symbolic. The transitions between these stages are qualitative, and bear a similarity to the stages in phylogenesis proposed by Donald and Deacon. Following the principle of epigenetic development, robotogenesis could possibly recapitulate ontogenesis, leading to the emergence of intentionality, consciousness and meaning. (shrink)

This chapter questions the causal-constitution fallacy raised against the extended mind. It does so by presenting our signature temporal thesis about how to understand constitutive relations in the context of the extended mind, and with respect to dynamical systems, more broadly. We call this thesis diachronic constitution. We will argue that temporalising the constitution relation is not as remarkable (nor problematic) as it might initially seem. It is (arguably) inevitable, given local interactions between microscale and macroscale states of (coupled) dynamical (...) systems. We focus primarily on the metaphysics of the extended mind in this paper. However, we also show how our account of diachronic constitution has important implications for the metaphysics of dependence relations more generally as well as an emerging literature on inter-level explanations in the mechanistic framework applied to the discussion over extended, enactive and embodied cognition. (shrink)

I argue that an evolutionary adaptation for bodily mimesis, the volitional use of the body as a representational devise, is the “small difference” that gave rise to unique and yet pre-linguistic features of humanity such as imitation, pedagogy, intentional communication and the possibility of a cumulative, representational culture. Furthermore, it is this that made the evolution of language possible. In support for the thesis that speech evolved atop bodily mimesis and a transitional multimodal protolanguage, I review evidence for the extensive (...) presence of sound-symbolism in modern languages, for its psychological reality in adults, and for its contribution to language acquisition in children. On a meta-level, the argument is that dividing human cognitive-semiotic evolution into a sequence of stages is crucial for resolving classical dichotomies concerning human nature and language, which are both natural and cultural, both continuous with and discontinuous from those of animals. (shrink)

Theoretical ethics includes both metaethics (the meaning of moral terms) and normative ethics (ethical theories and principles). Practical ethics involves making decisions about every day real ethical problems, like decisions about euthanasia, what we should eat, climate change, treatment of animals, and how we should live. It utilizes ethical theories, like utilitarianism and Kantianism, and principles, but more broadly a process of reflective equilibrium and consistency to decide how to act and be.

Experientialist semantics has contributed to a broader notion of linguistic meaning by emphasizing notions such as construal, perspective, metaphor, and embodiment, but has suffered from an individualist concept of meaning and has conflated experiential motivations with conventional semantics. We argue that these problems can be redressed by methods and concepts from phenomenology, on the basis of a case study of sentences of non-actual motion such as “The mountain range goes all the way from Mexico to Canada.” Through a phenomenological reanalysis (...) of proposals of Talmy, Langacker, and Matlock, we show that non-actual motion is both experientially and linguistically non-unitary. At least three different features of human consciousness—enactive perception, visual scanning, and imagination—constitute experiential motivations for non-actual motion sentences, and each of these could be related to phenomenological analyses of human intentionality. The second problem is addressed by proposing that the experiential motivations of non-actual motion sentences can be viewed as sedimented through “passive” processes of acquisition and social transmission and that this implies an interactive loop between experience and language, yielding losses in terms of original experience, but gains in terms of communal signification. Something that is underestimated by phenomenology is that what is sedimented are not only intentional objects such as states of affairs, but aspects of how they are given, i.e., the original, temporal, bodily experiences themselves. Since cognitive semantics has emphasized such aspects of meaning, we suggest that phenomenology can itself benefit from experientialist semantics, especially when it turns its focus from prepredicative to predicative, linguistic intentionality. (shrink)

Few other social technologies and institutions are more consequential to human societies than money. Yet money remains a deeply perplexing phenomenon. On the one hand, it is a pan-human system of valuation, but on the other, it is conventional and variable in its uses. While it is controversial if money instantiates a fully-fledged sign system, it is rife with semiotic capacities. To present an illuminating analysis of money is thus a test case for the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM) of (...) meaning making, with roots in the phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Using MSM, we analyze two origin accounts of money: the commodity money account evidenced in archaic and classical Greek coinage, and the credit money account exemplified by early findings in Mesopotamia. Both accounts focus on the interactions between the three levels of MSM: the pre-signitive Embodied, the cultural Sedimented, and the interactional Situated levels of meaning and propose different series of “loops” to account for the genesis of money. Despite key differences in the two origins, both imply semiotic processes operating according to motivated, and hence non-arbitrary, conventions developing within institutional formations that ultimately influenc present-day concepts of money. (shrink)

Would metaphors used in the context of psychotherapy by people who experience various forms of anxiety disorders differ from those used by people who experience stress? We investigated this question with the help of the Motivation & Sedimentation Model (MSM), a theory of meaning-making developed within the synthetic new discipline of cognitive semiotics. The analysis of a sample of ten transcripts of psychotherapy sessions concerning the topic of anxiety, and a comparable sample concerning stress, showed a significantly stronger proportion of (...) conventionalized metaphors in the stress sample, and a marginally significant difference in the number of innovative metaphors in the anxiety sample. These results suggest that lived experience of an anxiety disorder or another form of maladaptive anxiety affects metaphorical meaning-making, and manifests itself in spontaneous metaphor use. Furthermore, as a result of the conceptual and the empirical investigations of the topic, we propose novel theoretical and operational definitions of the notion of metaphoricity. (shrink)

The publication of the first study to use gene editing techniques in human embryos (Liang et al., 2015) has drawn outrage from many in the scientific community. The prestigious scientific journals Nature and Science have published commentaries which call for this research to be strongly discouraged or halted all together (Lanphier et al., 2015; Baltimore et al., 2015). We believe this should be questioned. There is a moral imperative to continue this research.

The goal of the present deliverable is to provide a developmental analysis of attentional intersubjectivity, which, as we show below, is a more inclusive notion than the more commonly used term ‘joint attention’. The use of the term ‘joint attention’ is not consistent in the literature, sometimes referring to the general phenomenon when two or more subjects attend to the same target, sometimes to more reciprocal situations in which the subjects also are aware of attending to the same target. Most (...) often solely visual attention has been described, but implicitly the descriptions have been thought to generalize to other modalities. The concepts introduced in this deliverable constitute an attempt to construct a coherent framework that will allow for distinguishing and comparing the range of behaviours that in the literature have been addressed as ‘joint attention’ behaviours. By attentional intersubjectivity we refer to the general case when two or more subjects simultaneously focus their attention on the same target. Attentional intersubjectivity will be further divided into types, according to which behaviours that are typically associated with attentional intersubjectivity occur during the interaction, and in which combinations. The result is that the over-all behaviour of the subjects during different types of attentional intersubjectivity differs. Our contentions are that: a) the types of attentional intersubjectivity identified in this report build on each other cumulatively and constitute different levels, and b) these levels correspond to evolutionary and developmental stages. In saying that the types are cumulative we mean that there is a progress by successive stages where each type is causally dependent on the type preceding it, and, furthermore, has increased in complexity as compared to previous types. While attentional intersubjectivity involves several perceptual modalities, for practical reasons, this study primarily concerns the visual modality. Our analysis is, however, intended also to be applicable to these other modalities. (shrink)

There are 4 main arguments for euthanasia: (1) arguments appealing to consistency (e.g., from passive to active euthanasia); (2) the argument from respect for autonomy; (3) appeals to justice; and (4) the argument from interests (mercy or relief of suffering). I will argue that only the last is directly relevant to active euthanasia as a medical intervention, though arguments together from autonomy and justice can in practice (through the backdoor) provide a ground for voluntary active medical euthanasia (AME).

The first hurdle to overcome in approaching the complex topic of the relation between language and consciousness is terminology. So let me begin, in good philosophical style, by explaining the senses in which I use the three lexical terms in the title. Luckily I need not explain those of the three grammatical words the, of, and on: there is probably a minor library of semantic literature devoted to that. I need not, since I both know their meanings pre-theoretically, and know (...) that my readers, as users of English, know them. The significance of this simple fact concerning the meaning of all everyday words, in everyday constructs, is something that I will return to, since it plays a central role in the argument in Section 2. However, with abstract, theoretically loaded nominalizations such as dependence, language, and most of all consciousness, we need to beware since we cannot assume common knowledge -- myriads of misunderstandings arise since we mean somewhat different 'things' by them. I start with the easiest, by which I mean specifically ' dependence of language on consciousness', explaining only afterward what I mean by the latter terms. I ask the reader to bear this circularity with me. (shrink)

Principles of distributive justice are normative principles designed to guide the allocation of the benefits and burdens of economic activity.

We are grateful to Facchin and Negro (henceforth F&N) for their rich and generous engagement with our arguments for the hypothesis of the extended conscious mind (ECM). They offer a careful and insightful reconstruction of the key arguments from our 2019 monograph (Kirchhoff & Kiverstein, 2019a). In the end however they are not persuaded by the arguments of our book and raise a number of intriguing and puzzling challenges. We deal with each of their challenges and conclude that these challenges (...) pose no problems for our arguments for the ECM in Kirchhoff & Kiverstein (2019a). (shrink)

The discussion of extended cognition is premised on a metaphysical distinction between causation and constitution. For example, Rowlands (2009) notes that “EM [extended mind] is a claim about the composition or constitution of (some) mental processes” (2009, p. 54). Or, as Wheeler puts it: “Bare causal dependency of mentality on external factors […] is simply not enough for genuine cognitive extension. What is needed is constitutive dependence” (2010, p. 246). In this sense, Krickel (this volume) rightly notes that the current (...) disagreement between friends and foes of extended cognition turns on a metaphysical dispute about what is constitutive of mentality and how to locate those constituents. Krickel (this volume) argues that our account of diachronic constitution fails to provide a convincing answer to the metaphysical dispute about ‘what is constitutive’ of mentality and ‘how to locate’ the relevant constituents. The central reason is that diachronic constitution fails the so-called ‘co-location condition,’ which Krickel argues is a necessary condition that an account of constitution must meet in the discussion over the extended mind. The co-location condition asserts that ‘cognition is located where and only where its constituents are located.’ We expose an ambiguity in the co-location condition, and show why this condition is no threat to our account of diachronic constitution. We conclude that the co-location condition is not a necessary condition that an account of constitution in the discussion over the extended mind must adhere to. (shrink)

This paper presents a novel account of focal stress and pitch contour in English dialogue. We argue that one should analyse and treat focus and pitch contour jointly, since (i) some pragmatic interpretations vary with contour (e.g., whether an utterance accepts or rejects; or whether it implicates a positive or negative answer); and (ii) there are utterances with identical prosodic focus that in the same context are infelicitous with one contour, but felicitous with another. We offer an account of two (...) distinct pitch contours that predicts the correct felicity judgements and implicatures, outclassing other models in empirical coverage or formality. Prosodic focus triggers a presupposition, where what is presupposed and how the presupposition is resolved depends on prosodic contour. If resolving the presupposition entails the proffered content, then the proffered content is uninteresting and hence the utterance is in-felicitous. Otherwise, resolving the presupposition may lead to an implicature. We regiment this account in SDRT. (shrink)

Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the greatest writers and German philosophers of the nineteenth century. His work influenced figures as diverse as Wagner, Freud and Nietzsche. Best known as a pessimist, he was one of the few philosophers read and admired by Wittgenstein. In this comprehensive introduction, Julian Young covers all the main aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy. Beginning with an overview of Schopenhauer's life and work, he introduces the central aspects of his metaphysics fundamental to understanding his work as (...) a whole: his philosophical idealism and debt to the philosophy of Kant; his attempt to answer the question of what the world is; his account of science; and in particular his idea that 'will' is the essence of all things. Julian Young then introduces and assesses Schopenhauer's aesthetics, which occupy a central place in his philosophy. He carefully examines Schopenhauer's theories of the sublime, artistic genius and music, before assessing his ethics of compassion, his arguments for pessimism and his account of 'salvation'. In the final chapter, he considers Schopenhauer's legacy and his influence on the thought of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, making this an ideal starting point for those coming to Schopenhauer for the first time. (shrink)

I discuss social constructivism in the philosophy of mathematics and argue for a novel variety of social constructivism that I call Practice-Dependent Realism.

We find that the nature and origin of the proposed “dialogical cognitive representations” in the target article is not sufficiently clear. Our proposal is that (triadic) bodily mimesis and in particular mimetic schemas – prelinguistic representational, intersubjective structures, emerging through imitation but subsequently interiorized – can provide the necessary link between private sensory-motor experience and public language. In particular, we argue that shared intentionality requires triadic mimesis.

We focus on two problems with the evolutionary scenario proposed: (1) It bypasses the question of the origins of the communicative and semiotic features that make language distinct from, say, pleasant but meaningless sounds. (2) It does little to explain the absence of language in, for example, chimpanzees: Most of the selection pressures invoked apply just as strongly to chimps. We suggest how these problems could possibly be amended.