34 found
Order:
  1.  95
    Predicting the Past from Minimal Traces: Episodic Memory and its Distinction from Imagination and Preservation.Markus Werning - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (2):301-333.
    The paper develops an account of minimal traces devoid of representational content and exploits an analogy to a predictive processing framework of perception. As perception can be regarded as a prediction of the present on the basis of sparse sensory inputs without any representational content, episodic memory can be conceived of as a “prediction of the past” on the basis of a minimal trace, i.e., an informationally sparse, merely causal link to a previous experience. The resulting notion of episodic memory (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   39 citations  
  2. What is episodic memory if it is a natural kind?Sen Cheng & Markus Werning - 2016 - Synthese 193 (5):1345-1385.
    Colloquially, episodic memory is described as “the memory of personally experienced events”. Even though episodic memory has been studied in psychology and neuroscience for about six decades, there is still great uncertainty as to what episodic memory is. Here we ask how episodic memory should be characterized in order to be validated as a natural kind. We propose to conceive of episodic memory as a knowledge-like state that is identified with an experientially based mnemonic representation of an episode that allows (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   49 citations  
  3. The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality.Markus Werning, Wolfram Hinzen & Edouard Machery (eds.) - 2012 - Oxford University Press.
    Leading linguists and philosophers report on all aspects of compositionality, the notion that the meaning of an expression can be derived from its parts. This book explores every dimension of this field, reporting critically on different lines of research, revealing connections between them, and highlighting current problems and opportunities.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  4. Constructing a wider view on memory: Beyond the dichotomy of field and observer perspectives.Anco Peeters, Erica Cosentino & Markus Werning - 2022 - In Anja Berninger & Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Memory and Imagination. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 165-190.
    Memory perspectives on past events allegedly take one of two shapes. In field memories, we recall episodes from a first-person point of view, while in observer memories, we look at a past scene from a third-person perspective. But this mere visuospatial dichotomy faces several practical and conceptual challenges. First, this binary distinction is not exhaustive. Second, this characterization insufficiently accounts for the phenomenology of observer memories. Third, the focus on the visual aspect of memory perspective neglects emotional, agential, and self-related (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  5.  32
    The Compositionality of Meaning and Content. Volume I - Foundational Issues,.Markus Werning, Edouard Machery & Gerhard Schurz (eds.) - 2005 - De Gruyter.
    Representational systems such as language, mind and perhaps even the brain exhibit a structure that is often assumed to be compositional. That is, the semantic value of a complex representation is determined by the semantic value of their parts and the way they are put together. Dating back to the late 19th century, the principle of compositionality has regained wide attention recently. Since the principle has been dealt with very differently across disciplines, the aim of the two volumes is to (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  6. The Time-Course of Sentence Meaning Composition. N400 Effects of the Interaction between Context-Induced and Lexically Stored Affordances.Erica Cosentino, Giosuè Baggio, Jarmo Kontinen & Markus Werning - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8:248173.
    Contemporary semantic theories can be classified along two dimensions: (i) the way and time-course in which contextual factors influence sentence truth-conditions; and (ii) whether and to what extent comprehension involves sensory, motor and emotional processes. In order to explore this theoretical space, our ERP study investigates the time-course of the interaction between the lexically specified telic component of a noun (the function of the object to which the noun refers to, e.g., a funnel is generally used to pour liquids into (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  7.  67
    Doing without metarepresentation: Scenario construction explains the epistemic generativity and privileged status of episodic memory.Markus Werning & Sen Cheng - 2018 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41.
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  8. Compositionality, context, categories and the indeterminacy of translation.Markus Werning - 2004 - Erkenntnis 60 (2):145-178.
    The doctrine that meanings are entitieswith a determinate and independent reality is often believed tohave been undermined by Quine's thought experiment of radicaltranslation, which results in an argument for the indeterminacy oftranslation. This paper argues to the contrary. Starting fromQuine's assumption that the meanings of observation sentences arestimulus meanings, i.e., set-theoretical constructions of neuronalstates uniquely determined by inter-subjectively observable facts,the paper shows that this meaning assignment, up to isomorphism,is uniquely extendable to all expressions that occur inobservation sentences. To do so, (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   11 citations  
  9. (1 other version)Synesthesia, sensory-motor contingency, and semantic emulation: how swimming style-color synesthesia challenges the traditional view of synesthesia.Aleksandra Mroczko-Wąsowicz & Markus Werning - 2012 - Frontiers in Psychology / Research Topic Linking Perception and Cognition in Frontiers in Cognition 3 (279):1-12.
    Synesthesia is a phenomenon in which an additional nonstandard perceptual experience occurs consistently in response to ordinary stimulation applied to the same or another modality. Recent studies suggest an important role of semantic representations in the induction of synesthesia. In the present proposal we try to link the empirically grounded theory of sensory-motor contingency and mirror system based embodied simulation to newly discovered cases of swimming-style color synesthesia. In the latter color experiences are evoked only by showing the synesthetes a (...)
    Direct download (12 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  10.  87
    Descartes discarded? Introspective self-awareness and the problems of transparency and compositionality☆.Markus Werning - 2010 - Consciousness and Cognition 19 (3):751-761.
    What has the self to be like such that introspective awareness of it is possible? The paper asks if Descartes’s idea of an inner self can be upheld and discusses this issue by invoking two principles: the phenomenal transparency of experience and the semantic compositionality of conceptual content. It is assumed that self-awareness is a second-order state either in the domain of experience or in the domain of thought. In the former case self-awareness turns out empty if experience is transparent. (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  11. Reliable knowledge and social epistemology: essays on the philosophy of Alvin Goldman and replies by Goldman.Gerhard Schurz & Markus Werning (eds.) - 2009 - New York: Rodopi.
    The volume contains the written versions of all papers given at the workshop, divided into five chapters and followed by Alvin Goldman's replies in the sixth.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  12.  68
    Complex First? On the Evolutionary and Developmental Priority of Semantically Thick Words.Markus Werning - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (5):1096-1108.
    The Complex-First Paradox consists in a set of collectively incompatible but individually well-confirmed propositions that regard the evolution, development, and cortical realization of the meanings of concrete nouns. Although these meanings are acquired earlier than those of other word classes, they are semantically more complex and their cortical realizations more widely distributed. For a neurally implemented syntaxsemantics interface, it should thus take more effort to establish a link between a concept and its lexical expression. However, in ontogeny and phylogeny, capabilities (...)
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  13.  81
    The evolutionary and social preference for knowledge: How to solve meno’s problem within reliabilism.Markus Werning - 2009 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 79 (1):137-156.
    This paper addresses various solutions to Meno's Problem: Why is it that knowledge is more valuable than merely true belief? Given both a pragmatist as well as a veritist understanding of epistemic value, it is argued that a reliabilist analysis of knowledge, in general, promises a hopeful strategy to explain the extra value of knowledge. It is, however, shown that two recent attempts to solve Meno's Problem within reliabilism are severely flawed: Olsson's conditional probability solution and Goldman's value autonomization solution. (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  14. The temporal dimension of thought: Cortical foundations of predicative representation.Markus Werning - 2005 - Synthese 146 (1-2):203-224.
    The paper argues that cognitive states of biological systems are inherently temporal. Three adequacy conditions for neuronal models of representation are vindicated: the compositionality of meaning, the compositionality of content, and the co-variation with content. Classicist and connectionist approaches are discussed and rejected. Based on recent neurobiological data, oscillatory networks are introduced as a third alternative. A mathematical description in a Hilbert space framework is developed. The states of this structure can be regarded as conceptual representations satisfying the three conditions.
    Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  15. Conceptual fingerprints: Lexical decomposition by means of frames – a neuro-cognitive model.Wiebke Petersen & Markus Werning - 2007 - In U. Priss, S. Polovina & R. Hill (eds.), Conceptual structures: Knowledge architectures for smart applications. Heidelberg: pp. 415-428.
    Frames, i.e., recursive attribute-value structures, are a general format for the decomposition of lexical concepts. Attributes assign unique values to objects and thus describe functional relations. Concepts can be classified into four groups: sortal, individual, relational and functional concepts. The classification is reflected by different grammatical roles of the corresponding nouns. The paper aims at a cognitively adequate decomposition, particularly, of sortal concepts by means of frames. Using typed feature structures, an explicit formalism for the characterization of cognitive frames is (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  16.  5
    Introduction.Edouard Machery, Markus Werning & Wolfram Hinzen - 2012 - In Markus Werning, Wolfram Hinzen & Edouard Machery (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality. Oxford University Press.
    The notion of compositionality was first introduced as a constraint on the relation between the syntax and the semantics of languages. It was later postulated as an adequacy condition also for other representational systems such as structures of mental concepts, computer programs, and even neural architectures. Syntax is compositional in that it builds more complex well-formed expressions recursively, on the basis of smaller ones, while semantics is compositional in that it constructs the meanings of larger expressions on the basis of (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  17.  10
    Right and Wrong Reasons for Compositionality.Markus Werning - 2005 - In Markus Werning, Edouard Machery & Gerhard Schurz (eds.), The Compositionality of Meaning and Content. Volume I - Foundational Issues,. De Gruyter. pp. 285-310.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  18. (2 other versions)Reading Words Hurts: The impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words.Erica Cosentino, Markus Werning & Kevin Reuter - 2015 - In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings & P. P. Maglio (eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society. pp. 453-458.
    This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people (based on their self-report) associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like syringe, wound, knife, and cactus, are considered to be more pain-related for those who are more pain-sensitive. We discuss our results in (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  19.  56
    Composition and replay of mnemonic sequences: The contributions of REM and slow-wave sleep to episodic memory.Sen Cheng & Markus Werning - 2013 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (6):610-611.
    We propose that rapid eye movement (REM) and slow-wave sleep contribute differently to the formation of episodic memories. REM sleep is important for building up invariant object representations that eventually recur to gamma-band oscillations in the neocortex. In contrast, slow-wave sleep is more directly involved in the consolidation of episodic memories through replay of sequential neural activity in hippocampal place cells.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  20.  15
    High- vs Low-Level Cognition and the Neuro- Emulative Theory of Mental Representation.Markus Werning, Michela C. Tacca & Aleksandra Mroczko-Wąsowicz - 2013 - In Ulrich Gähde, Stephan Hartmann & Jörn Henning Wolf (eds.), Models, Simulations, and the Reduction of Complexity. Boston: De Gruyter. pp. 141-152.
  21.  31
    Applications to Linguistics, Psychology and Neuroscience.Markus Werning, Edouard Machery & Gerhard Schurz (eds.) - 2005 - De Gruyter.
    The second volume is devoted to issues of compositionality that arouse in the sciences of language, the investigation of the mind, and the modeling of representational brain functions. How could compositional languages evolve? How many sentences are needed to learn a compositional language? How does compositionality relate to the interpretation of texts, the generation of idioms and metaphors, and the understanding of aberrant expressions? What psychological mechanism underlies the combination of complex concepts? And finally, what neuronal structure can possibly realize (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  22.  6
    Diachronicity Matters! How Semantics Supports Discontinuism About Remembering and Imagining.Kristina Liefke & Markus Werning - forthcoming - Topoi:1-23.
    Much work in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience has argued for _continuism_ about remembering and imagining (see, e.g., Addis J R Soc N Z 48(2–3):64–88, 2018). This view claims that episodic remembering is just a form of imagining, such that memory does not have a privileged status over other forms of episodic simulation (esp. imagination). Large parts of contemporary philosophy of memory support continuism. This even holds for work in semantics and the philosophy of language, which has pointed out substantial similarities (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  23.  66
    Synchrony and composition: Toward a cognitive architecture between classicism and connectionism.Markus Werning - 2003 - In Benedikt Löwe, Thoralf Räsch & Wolfgang Malzkorn (eds.), Foundations of the Formal Sciences II. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 261--278.
  24. Ventral versus dorsal pathway: The source of the semantic object/event and the syntactic noun/verb distinction?Markus Werning - 2003 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (3):299-300.
    Experimental data suggest that the division between the visual ventral and dorsal pathways may indeed indicate that static and dynamical information is processed separately. Contrary to Hurford, it is suggested that the ventral pathway primarily generates representations of objects, whereas the dorsal pathway produces representations of events. The semantic object/event distinction may relate to the morpho-syntactic noun/verb distinction.
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  25. Minds, persons, and space: An fMRI investigation into the relational complexity of higher-order intentionality.Anna Abraham, Markus Werning, Hannes Rakoczy, D. Yves von Cramon & Ricarda I. Schubotz - 2008 - Consciousness and Cognition 17 (2):438-450.
    Mental state reasoning or theory-of-mind has been the subject of a rich body of imaging research. Although such investigations routinely tap a common set of regions, the precise function of each area remains a contentious matter. With the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we sought to determine which areas are involved when processing mental state or intentional metarepresentations by focusing on the relational aspect of such representations. Using non-intentional relational representations such as spatial relations between persons and between (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  26.  28
    Introduction to the special issue “Logical perspectives on science and cognition”.Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla, Peter Brössel, Alexander Gebharter & Markus Werning - 2020 - Synthese 197 (4):1381-1390.
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  27. The biological species as a Gene-flow community. Species essentialism does not imply species universalism.Werner Kunz & Markus Werning - unknown
    We defend a realistic attitude towards biological species. We argue that two species are not different species because they differ in intrinsic features, be they phenotypic or genomic, but because they are separated with regard to gene flow. There are no intrinsic species essences. However, there are relational ones. We argue that bearing a gene flow relation to conspecifics may serve as the essence of a species. Our view of the species as a Gene-Flow Community differs from Mayr’s definition of (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  28. Lexicon in action: N400 effect on affordances and telicity.Erica Cosentino, Giosue Baggio, Theresa Garwels, & Markus Werning - 2014 - In Paul Bello, Marcello Guarini, Marjorie McShane & Brian Scassellati (eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society. pp. 2079-84.
  29.  69
    Introduction to the 2nd Synthese Special Issue: trends in philosophy of language and mind.Hanoch Ben-Yami, Robyn Carston & Markus Werning - 2018 - Synthese 195 (8).
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  30.  21
    Investigating the Comprehension of Negated Sentences Employing World Knowledge: An Event-Related Potential Study.Viviana Haase, Maria Spychalska & Markus Werning - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31.  21
    How to Compose Contents A Review of Jerry Fodor's In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind.Markus Werning - 2002 - PSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 8.
    The paper critically reviews Jerry Fodor's book In Critical Condition: Polemic Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind. It focuses on Fodor's compositionality arguments and their relevance to the following questions: How should concepts be individuated? What has semantics to do with epistemology? Who is right in the debate over classical and connectionist theories of cognition? How can the semantic properties of a mental state be inherited from the semantic properties of the state's constituents? The paper finally argues (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  32.  17
    Neuronal Synchronization, Covariation, and Compositional Representation.Markus Werning - 2005 - In Markus Werning, Edouard Machery & Gerhard Schurz (eds.), Applications to Linguistics, Psychology and Neuroscience. De Gruyter. pp. 283-312.
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  33.  25
    The “complex first” paradox: Why do semantically thick concepts so early lexicalize as nouns?Markus Werning - 2008 - Interaction Studies 9 (1):67-83.
  34.  18
    (1 other version)The “complex first” paradox.Markus Werning - 2008 - Interaction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies / Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies 9 (1):67-83.
    The Complex-First Paradox regards the semantics of nouns and consists of a set of together incompatible, but individually well confirmed propositions about the evolution and development of language, the semantics of word classes and the cortical realization of word meaning. Theoretical and empirical considerations support the view that the concepts expressed by concrete nouns are more complex and their neural realizations more widely distributed in cortex than those expressed by other word classes. For a cortically implemented syntax–semantics interface, the more (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation