What resources does Merleau-Ponty’s account of the body schema offer to the Fanonian one? First I show that Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body schema is already a theory of affect: one that does not oppose affects to intentionality, positioning them not only as sense but as force, cultivating affective agencies rather than constituting static sense content. Then I argue that by foregrounding the role of affect in both thinkers, we can understand the way in which the historical-racial (...) class='Hi'>schema innovates, anticipating and influencing feminist theories of the affective turn – especially Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies. The historical-racial schema posits the constitution of affective agencies on a sociogenic scale, and these affective economies in turn account for the possibility of the collapse of the body schema into a racial epidermal schema, a disjunction of affective intentionality Fanon calls “affective tetanization.” Quelles ressources l’analyse du schéma corporel faite par Merleau-Ponty fournit-elle au schéma historico-racial proposé par Fanon? En premier lieu, je vise à montrer que la théorie du schéma corporel de Merleau-Ponty est déjà une théorie de l’affect : une théorie qui n’oppose pas les affects à l’intentionnalité, qui ne les considère pas seulement comme un sens, mais comme une force, en cultivant des agentivités affectives plutôt qu’en constituant des contenus de sens statiques. Ensuite, j’affirmerai qu’en mettant en premier plan le rôle de l’affect chez ces deux penseurs, nous pouvons comprendre les innovations qu’apporte le schéma historico-racial, en anticipant et en influençant les théories féministes du tournant affectif – surtout la théorie de Sara Ahmed au sujet des économies affectives. Le schéma historico-racial établit la constitution d’agentivités affectives sur une échelle sociogénique, et ces économies affectives expliquent à leur tour la possibilité d’une dégradation du schéma corporel en schéma épidermique racial, une disjonction de l’intentionnalité affective que Fanon appelle « tétanisation affective ».Quali risorse può offrire la nozione merleau-pontiana di schema corporeo a quella di Fanon? In primo luogo, mi propongo di mostrare che la teoria dello schema corporeo elaborata da Merleau-Ponty è allo stesso tempo una teoria dell’affetto: una teoria che non oppone la dimensione degli affetti all’intenzionalità, poiché li considera non solo come senso ma come forze, in quanto implicano delle agentività affettive piuttosto che costituire meri contenuti statici di senso. Intendo quindi sostenere che mettendo in evidenza il ruolo dell’affetto in questi due autori sia possibile comprendere il portato innovativo dello schema storico-razziale, che anticipa e influenza le teorie femministe legate all’affective turn – e in particolare la teoria delle economie affettive elaborata da Sara Ahmed. Lo schema storico-razziale afferma la costituzione di agentività affettive a un livello sociogenetico, mentre le economie affettive rendono conto della possibilità del collasso dello schema corporeo in uno schema razziale epidermico, una disgiunzione dell’intenzionalità affettiva che Fanon definisce “tetanizzazione affettiva”. (shrink)

Frantz Fanon offers a lucid account of his entrance into the white world where the weightiness of the ‘white gaze’ nearly crushed him. In chapter five of Black Skins, White Masks, he develops his historico-racial and epidermal racial schemata as correctives to Merleau-Ponty’s overly inclusive corporeal schema. Experientially aware of the reality of socially constructed (racialized) subjectivities, Fanon uses his schemata to explain the creation, maintenance, and eventual rigidification of white-scripted ‘blackness’. Through a re-telling of his own experiences (...) of racism, Fanon is able to show how a black person in a racialized context eventually internalizes the ‘white gaze’. In this essay I bring Fanon’s insights into conversation with Foucault’s discussion of panoptic surveillance. Although the internalization of the white narrative creates a situation in which external constraints are no longer needed, Fanon highlights both the historical contingency of ‘blackness’ and the ways in which the oppressed can re-narrate their subjectivities. Lastly, I discuss Fanon’s historically attuned ‘new humanism’, once again engaging Fanon and Foucault as dialogue partners. (shrink)

Human skin, photography, and consumer culture combine to produce striking images designed to promote visions of the good life. Branding and marketing imagery mobilize skin to resonate and communicate with consumers, which influences the meaning-making possibilities of skin more broadly. Representations of skin in consumer culture, including marketing communications, are anything but ‘blank’ backgrounds or ‘neutral’ meaning spaces. We analyse how skin ‘appears’ to work, and how its appearance in consumer culture imagery reveals ideological and pedagogical aspects of skin. Building (...) upon psychodynamic and interdisciplinary understandings of skin, we discuss dimensions of the body that feed marketing communications and branding. We highlight representational fetishization and the epidermal schema as conceptual tools to interrogate the commodification of skin and as constitutive elements in processes of skin commodification. We provide theoretical insights to address the ways in which skin is implicated in new and emerging concerns of digital representational practices. (shrink)

We review here the data indicating a role for epidermal growth factor receptor (EGF receptor) signalling in early mouse development. Embryonic development of the metazoan embryo generally begins with the formation of a cystic structure and epithelial layers that subsequently form anlagen of the definitive body parts and organs. For the mammalian embryo, this cystic structure is a blastocyst whose wall consists of trophectoderm, the first epithelium to develop during mammalian embryogenesis. The onset of expression and function of EGF (...) receptors is coincident with the onset of trophectoderm development. Modulating EGF receptor expression and function modulates trophectoderm differentiation, leading to the hypothesis that functional EGF receptors participate in the induction of trophectoderm development and perhaps of other embryonic epithelial derivatives such as nervous tissues. (shrink)

Following on from Shaun Gallagher's influential 2005 book How the Body Shapes the Mind, this volume brings together leading experts from the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry in a productive dialogue, exploring key questions and debates about the relationship between body schema and body image.

-/- A schema (plural: schemata, or schemas), also known as a scheme (plural: schemes), is a linguistic template or pattern together with a rule for using it to specify a potentially infinite multitude of phrases, sentences, or arguments, which are called instances of the schema. Schemas are used in logic to specify rules of inference, in mathematics to describe theories with infinitely many axioms, and in semantics to give adequacy conditions for definitions of truth. -/- 1. What is (...) a Schema? 2. Uses of Schemas 3. The Ontological Status of Schemas 4. Schemas in the History of Logic Bibliography. (shrink)

Cultural schemas are a central cognitive mechanism through which culture affects action. In this article, we develop a theoretical model of cultural schemas that is better able to support empirical work, including inferential, sensitizing, and operational uses. We propose a multilevel framework centered on a high-level definition of cultural schemas that is sufficiently broad to capture its major sociological applications but still sufficiently narrow to identify a set of cognitive phenomena with key functional properties in common: cultural schemas are socially (...) shared representations deployable in automatic cognition. We use this conception to elaborate the main theoretical properties of cultural schemas, and to provide clear criteria that distinguish them from other cultural or cognitive elements. We then propose a series of concrete tests empirical scholarship can use to determine if these properties apply. We also demonstrate how this approach can identify potentially faulty theoretical inferences present in existing work. Moving to a lower level of analysis, we elaborate how cultural schemas can be algorithmically conceptualized in terms of their building blocks. This leads us to recommend improvements to methods for measuring cultural schemas. We conclude by outlining questions for a broader research program. (shrink)

In this paper we present a schema for describing dualities between physical theories, and illustrate it in detail with the example of bosonization: a boson-fermion duality in two-dimensional quantum field theory. The schema develops proposals in De Haro : these proposals include construals of notions related to duality, like representation, model, symmetry and interpretation. The aim of the schema is to give a more precise criterion for duality than has so far been considered. The bosonization example, or (...) boson-fermion duality, has the feature of being simple, yet rich enough, to illustrate the most relevant aspects of our schema, which also apply to more sophisticated dualities. The richness of the example consists, mainly, in its concern with two non-trivial quantum field theories: including massive Thirring-sine-Gordon duality, and non-abelian bosonization. This prompts two comparisons with the recent philosophical literature on dualities:--- Unlike the standard cases of duality in quantum field theory and string theory, where only specific simplifying limits of the theories are explicitly known, the boson-fermion duality is known to hold {\it exactly}. This exactness can be exhibited explicitly. The bosonization example illustrates both the cases of isomorphic and {\it non-isomorphic} models: which we believe the literature on dualities has not so far discussed. (shrink)

O presente estudo pretende investigar a concepção nietzscheana da Tragédia Clássica. Intui, portanto, apresentar as formas de experiências por ela engendradas, assim como as formas que ela engendra de pensamento e experiência. Essas formas remetem, por certo, a um universo de pensamento e experimentação (ética e estética) qualitativamente distinto do nosso. Servem-nos, entretanto, como fonte para se problematizar a prática educativa contemporânea em face da dimensão estética do viver e do próprio pensar. Partiremos assim, da hipótese de que Nietzsche postula (...) nas noções de dionisíaco e apolíneo as formas de configuração da experiência no pensamento e do pensamento na experiência. Em outras palavras, buscaremos explicitar o enlace entre a experiência e o pensamento naquela que segundo Nietzsche seria a grande obra de arte grega, a tragédia. (shrink)

Thirty years ago, I elaborated on a position that could be seen as a compromise between an "extreme," symbol-based AI, and a "neurochemical reductionism" in AI. The present article recalls aspects of the espoused framework of schema theory that, it suggested, could provide a better bridge from human psychology to brain theory than that offered by the symbol systems of A. Newell and H. A. Simon.

This chapter presents an account of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the body schema as an operative intentionality that is not only opposed to, but also complexly intermingled with, the representation-like grasp of the world and one’s own body, or the body image. The chapter reconstructs Merleau-Ponty’s position primarily based on his preparatory notes for his 1953 lecture ‘The Sensible World and the World of Expression’. Here, Merleau-Ponty elaborates his earlier efforts to show that the body schema is a perceptual (...) ground against which the perceived world stands out as a complex of perceptual figures. The chapter clarifies how Merleau-Ponty’s renewed interpretation of the figure-ground structure makes it possible for him to describe the relationship between body schema and perceptual (body) image as a strictly systematic phenomenon. Subsequently, the chapter shows how Merleau-Ponty understands apraxia, sleep, and perceptual orientation as examples of dedifferentiation and subtler differentiation of the body-schematic system. The last section clarifies how such body-schematic differentiating processes give rise to relatively independent superstructures of vision and symbolic cognition which constitute our body image. It, moreover, explains how, according to Merleau-Ponty, the cognitive superstructures always need to be supported by praxic operative intentionality to maintain their full sense, even though, in some cases, they have the power to compensate for praxic deficiencies. (shrink)

A body schema is an agent's model of its own body that enables it to act on affordances in the environment. This paper presents a body schema system for the Learning Intelligent Decision Agent (LIDA) cognitive architecture. LIDA is a conceptual and computational implementation of Global Workspace Theory, also integrating other theories from neuroscience and psychology. This paper contends that the ‘body schema' should be split into three separate functions based on the functional role of consciousness in (...) Global Workspace Theory. There is (1) an online model of the agent's effectors and effector variables (Current Body Schema), (2) a long-term, recognitional storage of embodied capacities for action and affordances (Habitual Body Schema), and (3) "dorsal" stream information feeding directly from early perception to sensorimotor processes (Online Body Schema). This paper then discusses how the LIDA model of the body schema explains several experiments in psychology and ethology. (shrink)

Most research on image schema examined the meaning configuration of words connotation. However, previous studies of adjectives are meaningful in cognitive linguistics because they provide insight into how those adjectives are involved with psychological movement. In this sense, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics, one’s conceptualization and cognition are closely associated with their bodily experience and surroundings; adjectives are no exception. The varieties of transformations of image schemas lay the foundation for the conception and perception. Accordingly, this study is (...) an investigation into the perception of adjectives and psychological activities associated with image schema. Data in this study come from adjectives in the novel The Great Gatsby, which were tagged and calculated with the help of software Python and the NLTK package. The results demonstrate that a significant amount of adjectives were used in the novel. Moreover, Nick’s psychological activities changed significantly from the SOURCE to the DESTINATION schematic stage, which is uncovered by his expression of adjectives. Finally, the results further suggest that transformations of image schema as BALANCE, CONTAINER, and PATH work together to motivate one’s linguistic expression of adjectives. The present findings have several implications for research on lexicons and literacy interpretation from cognitive linguistics. (shrink)

There seems to be no dimension of bodily awareness that cannot be disrupted. To account for such variety, there is a growing consensus that there are at least two distinct types of body representation that can be impaired, the body schema and the body image. However, the definition of these notions is often unclear. The notion of body image has attracted most controversy because of its lack of unifying positive definition. The notion of body schema, onto which there (...) seems to be a more widespread agreement, also covers a variety of sensorimotor representations. Here, I provide a conceptual analysis of the body schema contrasting it with the body image as well as assess whether the body schema can be specifically impaired, while other types of body representation are preserved; and the body schema obeys principles that are different from those that apply to other types of body representation. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that rather than exclusively focusing on trying to determine if an idealized model fits a particular account of scientific explanation, philosophers of science should also work on directly analyzing various explanatory schemas that reveal the steps and justification involved in scientists’ use of highly idealized models to formulate explanations. We develop our alternative methodology by analyzing historically important cases of idealized statistical modeling that use a three-step explanatory schema involving idealization, mathematical operation, and explanatory (...) interpretation. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe new paradigm in the psychology of reasoning redirects the investigation of deduction conceptually and methodologically because the premises and the conclusion of the inferences are assumed to be uncertain. A probabilistic counterpart of the concept of logical validity and a method to assess whether individuals comply with it must be defined. Conceptually, we used de Finetti's coherence as a normative framework to assess individuals' performance. Methodologically, we presented inference schemas whose premises had various levels of probability that contained non-numerical (...) expressions and, as a control, sure levels. Depending on the inference schemas, from 60% to 80% of the participants produced coherent conclusions when the premises were uncertain. The data also show that except for schemas involving conjunction, performance was consistently lower with certain than uncertain premises, the rate of conjunction fallacy was consistently low (not exceeding 20%,.. (shrink)

Growth and morphogenesis in the mammary gland depend on locally derived growth factors such as those in the epidermal growth factor (EGF) superfamily. Cripto-1 (CR-1, human; Cr-1, mouse)—also known as teratocarcinoma-derived growth factor-1—is a novel EGF-related protein that induces branching morphogenesis in mammary epithelial cells both in vitro and in vivo and inhibits the expression of various milk proteins. In the mouse, Cr-1 is expressed in the growing terminal end buds in the virgin mouse mammary gland and expression increases (...) during pregnancy and lactation. Cr-1/CR-1 is overexpressed in mouse and human mammary tumors and inappropriate overexpression of Cr-1 in mouse mammary epithelial cells can lead to the clonal expansion of ductal hyperplasias. Taken together, this evidence suggests that Cr-1/CR-1 performs a role in normal mammary gland development and that it might contribute to the early stages of mouse mammary tumorigenesis and the pathobiology of human breast cancer. BioEssays 1999;21:61–70. Published 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

The way in which a schema represents something is precisely by abstracting from some of its features; in a schema, representation and abstraction are thus not opposed to each other but rather internally related. The first part of this paper investigates this internal relation by delineating Kant’s concept of schema as the term mediating concept and intuition. Due to its pivotal position, however, the schema tends to collapse either into the conceptual or into the intuitive. The (...) second part of the paper turns to Heidegger who tries to overcome this difficulty: he does not conceive the schema as a supplementary representation that connects already determinate concepts and intuitions, but rather locates schematization immanently in the very articulation of concept and intuition themselves. The third part of the paper proposes that the schematicity of our representations can be reflected in three pictorial strategies that are important for contemporary art: reduction, serialization, and reconstruction. These strategies are exemplified in certain images which put us in a position to see through our own representational form, as it were, and observe the procedures of figuration involved in that very form. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s “Schema” and J. G. Fichte’s “Bild” are parallel figures of activity that serve as bridges. For both Kant and Fichte, it is not the image/schema taken as product that is primary, but the act of imaging. I show how Fichte leans on the Kantian argumentation of the schematism in order to attempt bridging the gulf critical philosophy leaves between theoretical and practical philosophy. My broader purpose is to indicate how two German Idealists emphasize activity as a (...) way of solving philosophical problems. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s “Schema” and J. G. Fichte’s “Bild” are parallel figures of activity that serve as bridges. For both Kant and Fichte, it is not the image/schema taken as product that is primary, but the act of imaging. I show how Fichte leans on the Kantian argumentation of the schematism in order to attempt bridging the gulf critical philosophy leaves between theoretical and practical philosophy. My broader purpose is to indicate how two German Idealists emphasize activity as a (...) way of solving philosophical problems. (shrink)

Il saggio affronta la relazione tra nazionalismo e razzismo ruotando attorno alle nozioni di etnicità fittizia e di schema genealogico, rinvianti all’idea che la nazione debba trovare un meccanismo, istituzionale e immaginario, per trasferire e riprodurre al livello politico la funzione simbolica che lega il susseguirsi delle generazioni sotto il segno del ‘retaggio culturale’ e della ‘identità ereditaria’. Da un’analisi attenta risulta come tali nozioni siano il residuo dell’idea di ‘razza’ dopo che la sua applicazione alla violenta discriminazione dei (...) soggetti coloniali, o dei discendenti degli schiavi, o dell’alterità etnica, è stata delegittimata. Si può comprendere come la nozione di razza, qualunque sia la giustificazione biologica adottata, non sia mai stata altro che una costruzione mitologica volta ad autorizzare il pensiero che riproduzione, trasmissione, educazione, memoria, tradizione, avvengano nei limiti di una comunità dotata di una identità riconoscibile.This essay deals with the relationship between nationalism and racism, and it revolves around the notions of fictitious ethnicity and genealogical scheme. Both these notions refer to the idea that the nation must find an institutional and imaginary mechanism in order to transfer and reproduce at a political level the symbolic function which binds the succession of generations under the sign of ‘cultural heritage’ and ‘hereditary identity’. A careful analysis shows how these notions are the residue of the idea of ‘race’ after the de-legitimation of its application to the violent discrimination of colonial subjects, or descendants of slaves, or ethnic alterity. It can be understood how the notion of race, whatever biological justification is adopted, was nothing else than a mythological construction, its aim being to support the idea that reproduction, transmission, education, memory, tradition, occur within the limits of a community with a recognizable identity. (shrink)

This study investigates the relationship between moral schemas and corruption in public procurement. It adopts a moral schema framework to examine procurement-induced corruption from Uganda. Experiences, attitudes, and values of respondents are used to construct future behavior of public procurement staff. The schema framework was built around the premise that procurement-related corruption is a function of the social framework and human nature paradox, constructing logical justification for the acts of corruption. The study uses data from 474 public procurement (...) staff to demonstrate that social identity, ethical egoistic, legislative, amoral, and religious moral schemas account for 78.51% of the variance in moral schema of respondents. All these schemas were found to be significant predictors, accounting for 73.3% of public procurement corruption. The paper urges managers of procuring and disposing entities to utilize moral scripts in reducing corruption. Managers are encouraged to engage in morally responsible behaviors to promote ethics and value-for-money transactions. The paper provides an alternative framework for examining corruption in sub-Saharan Africa where explicit elaboration of insights on corruption is still lacking. (shrink)

A tight connection between competence and performance is a central tenet of the usage-based model. Methodologically, however, corpus frequency is a poor predictor of acceptability – a phenomenon known as the “frequency/acceptability mismatch”. This article argues that the mismatch arises from a “methodological mismatch”, when simple frequency measures are mapped onto complex grammatical units. To illustrate, we discuss the results of acceptability judgments of go/come-v. The construction is subject to a formal constraint (Go see the doctor! vs. *He goes sees (...) the doctor), which results from its mandative semantics (directives, commissives). While a formal model makes no prediction with regard to gradient acceptability of bare (“grammatical”) go/come-v, the usage-based view assumes that acceptability is a function of compatibility with an abstract schema. The experimental ratings are compared with a number of corpus-derived measures: while acceptability is largely independent of (raw) frequency, it is not independent of frequency-related usage distribution. The results add to recent suggestions that the frequency/acceptability mismatch is substantially reduced if the syntactic complexity of a unit is appropriately captured in usage data. (shrink)

This article explores the ethics of migrant marketers in Guangzhou. Data were collected from 357 migrant marketers who lived in Guangzhou. A model of Ethical Action has been developed to test the antecedents and outcomes of the ethical decision-making process. It measured moral intention using four ethical scenarios. The results show that the egoistic schema had a positive effect on their intention to act unethically, while the legislative schema exerted a negative effect. The results confirm that moral intention (...) was a strong predictor of an individual's subsequent actual behavior, and it fully mediated the influence of the legislative schema on actual behavior. This study adds to ethics literature by incorporating the construct of social identity and found a moderating effect between the legislative schema and moral intention. The relationships were stronger for individuals who were lower rather than higher in social identity. Analysis of these results lead to a discussion of the implications for marketing ethics in China. (shrink)

We propose that people typically reason about realistic situations using neither content-free syntactic inference rules nor representations of specific experiences. Rather, people reason using knowledge structures that we term pragmatic reasoning schemas, which are generalized sets of rules defined in relation to classes of goals. Three experiments examined the impact of a “permission schema” on deductive reasoning. Experiment 1 demonstrated that by evoking the permission schema it is possible to facilitate performance in Wason's selection paradigm for subjects who (...) have had no experience with the specific content of the problems. Experiment 2 showed that a selection problem worded in terms of an abstract permission elicited better performance than one worded in terms of a concrete but arbitrary situation, providing evidence for an abstract permission schema that is free of domain-specific content. Experiment 3 provided evidence that evocation of a permission schema affects not only tasks requiring procedural knowledge, but also a linguistic rephrasing task requiring declarative knowledge. In particular, statements in the form if p then q were rephrased into the form p only if q with greater frequency for permission than for arbitrary statements, and rephrasings of permission statements produced a pattern of introduction of modals totally unlike that observed for arbitrary conditional statements. Other pragmatic schemas, such as “causal” and “evidence” schemas can account for both linguistic and reasoning phenomena that alternative hypotheses fail to explain. (shrink)

Discovery proceeds in stages of construction, evaluation, and revision. Each of these stages is constrained by what is known or conjectured about what is being discovered. A new characterization of mechanism aids in specifying what is to be discovered when a mechanism is sought. Guidance in discovering mechanisms may be provided by the reasoning strategies of schema instantiation, modular subassembly, and forward/backward chaining. Examples are found in mechanisms in molecular biology, biochemistry, immunology, and evolutionary biology.

A review of the literature on the subject and a discussion involving philosophical analysis, philosophy of science and phenomenology in the style of Merleau-Ponty. The study has practical interest in addition to scientific and philosophical relevance: the way a person conceptualizes his body is important to the way he behaves and the quality of his social interactions. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

If we want to retain classical logic and standard syntax in light of the liar, we are forced to restrict the T-schema. The traditional philosophical justification for this is sentential – liar sentences somehow malfunction. But the standard formal way of implementing this is conditional, our T-sentences tell us that if “p” does not malfunction, then “p” is true if and only if p. Recently Bacon and others have pointed out that conditional T-restrictions like this flirt with incoherence. If (...) we want to keep the “malfunction” motivation, our only other option is to non-conditionally restrict the T-schema, but Field and others have given powerful philosophical and technical arguments against this kind of approach. Here I argue that if we really take the philosophical motivation for restricting T-sentences seriously, we can explain why conditional restrictions fail, answer Field's argument, and reason in a coherent way about truth using a non-conditional restriction strategy. This cracks the door open for a fully classical response to the liar and related paradoxes. In closing, I argue that, when properly understood, this kind of “restriction” is not really a restriction at all. If this is right, then the holy grail of liar studies (classical logic, naïve truth, and standard syntax) may yet be attainable. (Note for readers: when this paper was first put online, the typesetters had changed some instances of corners to brackets, leading to confusion. The paper has now been corrected online by PPR, so please make sure you have the corrected version before reading or citing.). (shrink)

Discovery proceeds in stages of construction, evaluation, and revision. Each of these stages is constrained by what is known or conjectured about what is being discovered. A new characterization of mechanism aids in specifying what is to be discovered when a mechanism is sought. Guidance in discovering mechanisms may be provided by the reasoning strategies of schema instantiation, modular subassembly, and forward/backward chaining. Examples are found in mechanisms in molecular biology, biochemistry, immunology, and evolutionary biology.

Jakob von Uexküll’s problematic is manifested in his paradoxical portraiture of form within the plan of nature: the one a sensual schema and the other a transsensual ideal form. At first sight, Uexküll’s belief in the Platonic and the Reformational notions of the immobile becoming of form seems to be a resignation from the heated debates among his contemporary materialists, vitalists, dynamists, and evolutionists. However, in terms of the Kantian subjective teleology, Uexküll’s appropriation of the ancient philosophy reinstates the (...) invisible, static, but repetitive cycle as his regulating principle in the observation of the activity of animals. This regulating principle distinguishes itself from the rule of resemblance established by the appearances and fossil remains of animals, which is linear, incomplete, and digressive. In the light of Michel Foucault, the transition from the visible to the invisible recoups the study of nature from the living beings (les êtres vivants) to the life itself (la vie), from natural philosophy to biology. My study suggests that we recast Uexküll’s sign theory from his observations on the crux that models and triggers an animal to action in its Umwelt. Bracketing Uexküll’s transcendental configuration of form and image, we still find that schema, in itssensual and functional context, evolves from a reflection of the objects to a summary of their features plus an ignorance of their proper names. Uexküll's erasure of proper names (in different languages) that directs our attention to the presentation in its pure form (Gestalt) not only constitutes an important step in epistemology, but also in a life science that meticulously delves into the genotypes. (shrink)

Ancient schematic systems originating in the Jewish and Chinese traditions that demonstrate dynamic integration of human consciousness with the material world offer fresh insights into the process through which technoetic art forms are created at the intersections of art, science, technology, and culture. Kabbalah is Judaism's esoteric tradition that reveals the deep structure of biblical consciousness through a symbolic language, conceptual schema, and graphic model for exploring the creative process. The Tree of Life schema is a network of (...) 22 pathways linking 10 nodes (sephirot) that represent stages in the creative process. The first three sephirot represent the artist's undifferentiated intention to create and the cognitive dyad in which a flash of insight begins to crystallize into a viable idea. Two affective dyads, largess/restraint and success/gracefulness, are balanced by the sephirah (singular for sephirot) of Beauty, the aesthetic heart of the entire process. The ninth sephirah funnels the integrated flow of intention, thought, and emotion into the world of physical action that is the tenth sephirah. The Kabbalistic schema is used to trace the process of creating Inside/Outside: P'nim/Panim, a technoetic moist- media artwork in which a biofeedback imaging system forms a feedback loop between changing mind/body processes and corresponding changes in digital self-portraits. (shrink)

Mandler's target article claims that infants' capacity to abstract certain kinds of information from perceptual ldisplays occurs through a special mechanism of ?perceptual meaning analysis?, which generates abstract, ?image-schemas? that are analogical representations summarizing spatial relations and movement in space. Under this view, perceptual processes give input to forming conceptual representations, but higher-order concepts are disembodied, symbolic representations that are stripped of their embodied roots. My alternative argument is that bodily experience has an enduring role in early conceptual development, and (...) throughout the lifespan, with image-schemas being continually tied to ongoing perceptual and kinesthetic actions. Many global and abstract concepts may be created in the moment given specific task demands and retain deep connections to embodied actions and experiences. (shrink)