The core of the language of thought program is the claim that thinking is the manipulation of symbols according to rules. Yet LOT has said little about symbol natures, and existing accounts are highly controversial. This is a major flaw at the heart of the LOT program: LOT requires an account of symbol natures to naturalize intentionality, to determine whether the brain even engages in symbol manipulations, and to understand how symbols relate to lower-level neurocomputational states. This paper (...) provides the much-needed theory of symbols, and in doing so, alters the LOT program in significant respects. (shrink)

Article is devoted to the social legitimation of knowledge. We study the contexts of implantation of knowledge products into the body of culture. The author proceeds from the need to study the process of objectification symbolic of object by applying the category of ‘facies‘, the introduction and justification of which on content and formal level were realized by the author in previous works. Such issues as the following are discussed in the article: the main stages of objectification, cognitions, different worlds (...) in science in the trend of unfolding cognitions, the basic principles of object-symbolic interpretation of the nature of knowledge. The author explores these questions by analyzing the basic epistemological trends that can be seen in the works of the greatest philosophers of both modern and recent times, globalizing the principle of a system approach on the basis of its synthesis with the elements of synergetics and semiotics. The author devotes a great place to criticism of Kant’s transcendental apriorism, revealing, however, its positive potential and determining its promising vector beating literally in the essence of contemporary cognitive science. Author takes on orbit of its original methodology conclusions of not only natural sciences and mathematics, but also poetic insights that allows creating of pulsating and at the same time quite certain interdisciplinary context. The main conclusions regarding the content of prerequisites of cognitive synthesis included in the final paragraph of article and are accompanied by convincing examples of modern physics. (shrink)

I propose here an image of knowledge based on the concept of symbol: according to it, the relation of representation that constituting cognition is a symbolization. It is postulated that both the representing conceptual model, i.e. a pre-linguistic entity acquired in cognition, and the true sentence it generates are of symbolic and not of mirroring character. The symbolic nature of cognition carries dialectical tension. We have at our disposal conceptual models and true sentences which symbolically represent reality. However, it (...) is not possible to lift the symbolic disguise over knowledge, because precisely this disguise is its essence. Reality appears only as symbolically, nonimitatively encoded. The proposed here symbolic realism rejects the traditional adopted dichotomy between, on one side, realism and the absence of the subject’s factors in the cognitive result, and, on the other, idealism and the subject as a factor which is viewed as inevitably leading to the idealistic nature of knowledge. (shrink)

This philosophical examination investigates the complex processes through which people develop their identities within various cultural settings and examines the function of symbolic interactionism in constructing cultural identities. Symbolic interactionism, which has its roots in the writings of academics like Herbert Blumer and George Herbert Mead, describe the role of relationships, meaning negotiation, and symbols in social reality and human behaviour. Symbolic interactionism provides a useful paradigm for comprehending how people use cultural symbols, customs, and social interactions to (...) negotiate their identities in particular cultural situations. This concept is relevant to the field of cultural identity formation. People manage their feelings of belonging within their cultural communities and express their cultural affinities through language, rituals, traditions, and other cultural artefacts. Furthermore, symbolic interactionism emphasizes how social interactions and alterations in the social environment constantly negotiate and redefine identities, describe cultural identity's dynamic and fluid nature. This approach also appearances at how power dynamics shape the construction of cultural identities, demonstrate the complexity of social inequity and resistance within cultural contexts. This philosophical investigation advances our knowledge of how cultural identities are formed and emphasizes the significant impact that symbolic connections have on social reality and the human experience. Overall, the research found that symbolic interactionism offers a useful framework for comprehending how interactions and symbols play a part in developing cultural identities. By analyzing how people interact with cultural symbols and navigate their identities in social settings, we may learn more about the intricate and ever-changing processes involved in forming cultural identities. This philosophical approach provides greater knowledge of how people create, manage, and traverse their cultural identities in various social settings. (shrink)

Essentials of Symbolic Logic is a concise and clearly written introduction to the topic. Based on years of use in colleges and universities, the book provides an accessible and thorough grounding in sentence logic and predicate logic. While technical jargon is kept to a minimum, all necessary logical concepts and vocabulary are explained clearly. A standard system of natural deduction is developed, and readers are given suggestions for developing strategies for creating derivations (proofs) in this system.

The third edition of _Essentials of Symbolic Logic_ is a concise and clearly written introduction to the topic. Based on years of use in colleges and universities, the book provides an accessible and thorough grounding in sentence logic and predicate logic. While technical jargon is kept to a minimum, all necessary logical concepts and vocabulary are explained clearly. A standard system of natural deduction is developed, and readers are given suggestions for developing strategies for creating derivations in this system. An (...) instructor’s website is available with solutions to all the exercises in the text, including the many new exercises which have been added to this new edition. (shrink)

The main topic of this essay is symbolic mathematics or the method of symbolic construction, which I trace to the end of the sixteenth century when Franciscus Vieta invented the algebraic symbolism and started to use the word ‘symbolic’ in the relevant, non-ontological sense. This approach has played an important role for many of the great inventions in modern mathematics such as the introduction of the decimal place-value system of numeration, Descartes’ analytic geometry, and Leibniz’s infinitesimal calculus. It was also (...) central for the rigorization movement in mathematics in the late nineteenth century, as well as for the mathematics of modern physics in the 20th century.However, the nature of symbolic mathematics has been concealed and confused due to the strong influence of the heritage from the Euclidean and Aristotelian traditions. This essay sheds some light on what has been concealed by approaching some of the crucial issues from a historical perspective. Furthermore, I argue that the conception of modern mathematics as symbolic mathematics was essential to Wittgenstein’s approach to the foundations and nature of mathematics. This connection between Wittgenstein’s thought and symbolic mathematics provides the resources for countering the still prevalent view that he defended an uttrely idiosyncratic conception, disconnected from the progress of serious science. Instead, his project can be seen as clarifying ideas that have been crucial to the development of mathematics since early modernity. (shrink)

This book is a selection of papers from a conference which took place at the University of Keele in July 1982. The conference was an extraordinarily enjoyable one, and we would like to take this opportunity of thanking all participants for helping to make it so. The conference was intended to allow scholars working on different aspects of symbolic behaviour to compare findings, to look for common ground, and to identify differences between the various areas. We hope that it was (...) successful in these aims: the assiduous reader may judge for himself. Several themes emerged during the course of the conference. Some of these were: 1. There is a distinction to be made between those symbol systems which attempt, more or less directly, to represent a state of affairs in the world (e. g. language, drawing, map and navigational skill) and those in which the representational function is complemented, if not overshadowed, by properties of the symbol system itself, and the systematic inter-relations that symbols can have to one another (e. g. music, mathematics). The distinction is not absolute, for the nature of all symbolic skills is, in part, a function of the structure of the symbolic system employed. Nonetheless, this distinction helps us to understand some common acquisition difficulties, such as that experienced in mathematics, where mental manipulation of symbols can go awry if a child assumes too close a correspondence between mathematical symbols and the world they represent. 2. (shrink)

This paper evaluates several recent efforts to interpret the work of Nāgārjuna through the lens of modern symbolic logic. An attempt is made to uncover the premises that justify the use of symbolic logic for this purpose. This is accomplished through a discussion of (1) the historical origins of those premises in the Indian and Tibetan traditions, and (2) how such assumptions prejudice our understanding of Nāgā rjuna’s insistence that he has no “proposition” (pratijñā). Finally, the paper sets forth an (...) alternative interpretation that takes into account the literary dimensions of Nāgārjuna’s writing. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

More than half a century ago, the Supreme Court held that the free speech protection of the First Amendment is not limited to verbal communication, but also applies to such expressive conduct as saluting a flag or burning a flag. Even though the Supreme Court has decided a number of important cases involving expressive conduct, the Court has never announced any standards for distinguishing such conduct from conduct without communicative value. The aim of this paper is to examine which conceptions (...) of nonverbal expression underlie judicial decisions on expressive conduct, and to offer an account of expressive conduct grounded in contemporary semantic theory. The central hypothesis of this paper is that significance of expressive conduct can be explained by principles that explain important features of linguistic meaning. I propose an analysis of expressive conduct that takes the meaningfulness of conduct as a function of the action and its consequences in context. I develop a theory of expressive conduct whose underlying conception of expression is based on a number of ideas from speech act theory. These are Grice's account of nonnatural meaning, Austin's theory of illocutionary force, and Grice's work on conversational implicature. My analysis understands the meaningfulness of conduct in terms of its relational properties and relevant features of the context upon which illocutionary force, perlocutionary properties and implicature are predicated. The natural and conventional properties of types of conduct, features of the context, and underlying social and cultural presumptions and expectations about human conduct thus play a role in the constitution of symbolic speech. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

This is the first full-length, systematic study of Ernst Cassirer's fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, which was published in the German edition in 1995 and in the American edition in 1996 from Cassirer's Nachlass. Prior to the appearance of this volume it was generally held that Cassirer had little interest in a metaphysics of symbolic forms and had not formulated such. ;This study considers the nature of the basic elements of Cassirer's (...) metaphysics as they appear in this fourth volume and as they are connected to comments in other of his works. It also considers to what extent Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms requires a metaphysical grounding in a traditional sense. ;Part I is an analysis of Cassirer's writings of the 1920s concerning his distinction between life and spirit , their dialectical relationship and their connection to the conception of symbolic form. Highly significant is Cassirer's assertion in a fragment from this period that philosophy is not itself a symbolic form. ;Part II is an analysis of Cassirer's writings of the 1940s concerning his conception of three "basis phenomena" --the life-process and the I, action and the Other, and the sphere of work . Of particular importance is Cassirer's final description of the philosophy of symbolic forms as a Socratic philosophy grounded in the basis phenomenon of work. ;The study contains an appendix showing an analytic scheme of the volume and a comprehensive bibliography of Cassirer's works and critical literature relevant to the interpretation of his systematic philosophy. (shrink)

Beauty, or at least natural beauty, is famously a symbol of the morally good in Kant's theory of taste. Natural beauty is also, we argue, a symbol of the systematicity of nature. This symbolic connection of beauty and systematicity in nature sheds light on the relation between the principles underlying the use of reflecting judgement. The connection also motivates a more general interpretive proposal: the fact that the imagination can symbolize ideas plays a crucial role in the theory (...) of taste; it is the mechanism that underlies pure judgements of taste, the operation by which the imagination ‘schematizes without a concept’. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

The paper offers a systematic historical analysis of the origins, the meaning and the extension of the basic concept of Cassirer´s philosophy of the later period, seen from various points of view. Its main object is Cassirer's essay of 1921, in which his only explicit definition oh this concept can be find. Further the author examines, to what extent the philosophy of symbolic forms turned away from the "orthodox" neokantism , as well as the impact the discussions of the (...) class='Hi'>nature and status of Geisteseissenschaften had on Cassirer´s articulation of the universal symbolist philosophy of culture. (shrink)

To determine the role of physical self in body-involving consumption, we explore how body image influences purchasing intention toward hybrid products with body-involving features. In this study, we establish the dual nature of body image: specifically, body image influences intention to purchase via the perception of utilitarian value and symbolic value. Further, we find a competitive mediation in which positive body image negatively influences purchase intention, while PBI is positively related to purchase intention via utilitarian and symbolic value. This (...) indicates that without the mediation testing of the utilitarian-symbolic framework, the positive influence of body image will be “hidden.” Additionally, the mediated effect of symbolic value is moderated by personal innovativeness toward technology, suggesting that a consumer’s knowledge of wearables enhances the effect of body image. With the introduction of body image, this paper provides a more comprehensive model to analyze purchase intention with regard to digital products with body-involving features. (shrink)

The novel use of symbolism in early modern mathematics poses both philosophical and historical questions. How can we trace its development and transmission through manuscript sources? Is it intrinsically related to the emergence of symbolic algebra? How does symbolism relate to the use of diagrams? What are the consequences of symbolic reasoning on our understanding of nature? Can a symbolic language enable new forms of reasoning? Does a universal symbolic language exist which enable us to express all knowledge? This (...) book brings together a collection of papers that address all these and related questions which were initially posed at a conference held in Ghent (Belgium) in August 2009. Scholars working on philosophy of science, history of philosophy and history of mathematics provide an insight into the role and function of symbolic representations in the development of early modern mathematics. The papers cover the period from early abbaco arithmetic and algebra (14h century) up to Leibniz (early 18th century). (shrink)

Using the method of Descriptive Experience Sampling, some subjects report experiences of thinking that do not involve words or any other symbols [Hurlburt, R. T., and C. L. Heavey. 2006. Exploring Inner Experience. Amsterdam: John Benjamins; Hurlburt, R. T., and S. A. Akhter. 2008. “Unsymbolized Thinking.” Consciousness and Cognition 17 : 1364–1374]. Even though the possibility of this unsymbolized thinking has consequences for the debate on the phenomenological status of cognitive states, the phenomenon is still insufficiently examined. This paper (...) analyzes the main properties of unsymbolized thinking and advances an explanation of its origin. According to our analysis, unsymbolized thoughts appear as propositional states, that is, they are experienced as compositional conceptual phenomena, with semantic and syntactic features analogous to those of the contents of utterances. Based on this characterization, we hypothesize that UT is continuous with the activity of inner speech, in particular, it i... (shrink)

At his death in 1945, the influential German philosopher Ernst Cassirer left manuscripts for the fourth and final volume of his magnum opus, _The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms_. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene have edited these writings and translated them into English for the first time, bringing to completion Cassirer's major treatment of the concept of symbolic form. Ernst Cassirer believed that all the forms of representation that human beings use—language, myth, art, religion, history, science—are symbolic, and the (...) concept of symbolic forms was the basis of his thinking on these subjects. In this volume, which contains one text written in 1928 and another in about 1940, Cassirer presents the metaphysics that is implicit in his epistemology and phenomenology of culture. The earlier text grounds the philosopher's conception of symbolic forms on a notion of human nature that makes a general distinction between Geist and life. In the later text, he discusses Basis Phenomena, an original concept not mentioned in any of his previous works, and he compares his own viewpoint with those of other modern philosophers, notably Bergson and Heidegger. (shrink)

First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

The _Symbolic Forms_ has long been considered the greatest of Cassirer’s works. Into it he poured all the resources of his vast learning about language and myth, religion, art, and science—the various creative symbolizing activities and constructions through which man has expressed himself and given intelligible objective form to this experience. “These three volumes alone make an outstanding contribution to epistemology and to the human power of abstraction. It is rather as if ‘The Golden Bough’ had been written in philosophical (...) rather than in historical terms.”—F.I.G. Rawlins, _Nature_. (shrink)

Most evidence for the role of regular inflection as a default operation comes from languages that confound the morphological properties of regular and irregular forms with their phonological characteristics. For instance, regular plurals tend to faithfully preserve the base’s phonology, whereas irregular nouns tend to alter it. The distinction between regular and irregular inflection may thus be an epiphenomenon of phonological faithfulness. In Hebrew noun inflection, however, morphological regularity and phonological faithfulness can be distinguished: Nouns whose stems change in the (...) plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix, and nouns whose stems are preserved in the plural may take either a regular or an irregular suffix. We use this dissociation to examine two hallmarks of default inflection: its lack of dependence on analogies from similar regular nouns, and its application to nonroots such as names. We show that these hallmarks of regularity may be found whether or not the plural form preserves the stem faithfully: People apply the regular suffix to novel nouns that don’t resemble existing nouns, and to names that sound like irregular nouns, regardless of whether the stem is ordinarily preserved in the plural of that family of nouns. Moreover, when they pluralize names, they do not apply the stem changes that are found in their homophonous nouns, replicating an effect found in English and German. These findings show that the distinction between regular and irregular phenomena cannot be reduced to differences in the kinds of phonological changes associated with those phenomena in English. Instead, regularity and irregularity must be distinguished in terms of the kinds of mental computations that effect them: symbolic operations versus memorized idiosyncrasies. A corollary is that complex words are not generally dichotomizable as “regular” or “irregular”; different aspects of a word may be regular or irregular depending on whether they violate the rule for that aspect and hence must be stored in memory.. (shrink)

Most scholars regard Ernst Cassirer as a thinker in the Marburg Neo-Kantian tradition whose writings take him from its concern with the analysis of the logical foundations of science to problems in intellectual history, theory of language, and culture. The critical work on his thought has reflected and supported this view. There is a second image of Cassirer which is shared by the large number of students and general readers who have come to his thought through two works that appeared (...) at the end of his life—An Essay on Man and the Myth of the State. These works have gone through numerous printings and have appeared in editions in most major Western and Oriental languages. These readers have found in Cassirer not primarily an epistemologist and historian of thought but a philosopher of humanity, an interpreter of the fragmentation of contemporary cultural life and the nature of the political world. These two sides shown by Cassirer’s thought are not exactly opposed, but also they are not joined. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to analyse the mathematical practices leading to Rafael Bombelli’s L’algebra (1572). The context for the analysis is the Italian algebra practiced by abbacus masters and Renaissance mathematicians of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. We will focus here on the semiotic aspects of algebraic practices and on the organisation of knowledge. Our purpose is to show how symbols that stand for underdetermined meanings combine with shifting principles of organisation to change the character of algebra.

At the 1993 Annual meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic, the Council of the association voted to establish a new journal to be called The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic. The intended goal of the Council was to produce a journal that would be both accessible and of interest to as wide an audience as possible, with the stated purpose of keeping the logic community abreast of important developments in all parts of our discipline. The first issue was to appear (...) in March of 1995 and you now have it in your hands.In accordance with the Council resolution, we intend to publish primarily two types of papers. The first section of The Bulletin, Articles, will usually be devoted to works of an expository or survey nature. These papers will generally present topics of broad interest in a way that should be accessible to a large majority of the members of the Association. Topics will be drawn from all areas of logic including mathematical or philosophical logic, logic in computer science or linguistics, the history or philosophy of logic, logic education and applications of logic to other fields. One view of a role that this section of The Bulletin will play is as an ongoing handbook of logic. (shrink)

Introduction: schema, substance, and symbol -- Linguistic form: the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture -- Mythical thought: beginning the ladder of consciousness -- Phenomenology of knowledge: taking phenomenology in the Hegelian, not the modern sense -- Metaphysics of symbolic forms: spirit, life, and Werk -- Logic of the cultural sciences: nature and culture -- Animal symbolicum -- Human freedom and politics.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The aim of this paper is to provide a complete Natural Kind Semantics for an Essentialist Theory of Kinds. The theory is formulated in two-sorted first order monadic modal logic with identity. The natural kind semantics is based on Rudolf Willes Theory of Concept Lattices. The semantics is then used to explain several consequences of the theory, including results about the specificity (species–genus) relations between kinds, the definitions of kinds in terms of genera and specific differences and the existence of (...) negative kinds. First, I show under which conditions the Hierarchy principle, which has been subjected to counterexamples in the literature, holds. I also show that a different principle about the species–genus relations between kinds, namely Kant’s Law, follows from the essentialist theory. Second, I introduce two new operations for kinds and show that they can be used to provide traditional definitions of kinds in terms of genera and specific differences. Finally, I show that these operations of specific difference induce, for each kind, a uniquely specified contrary kind and a uniquely specified subcontrary kind, which can be used as semantic values for non-classical predicate negations of kind terms. (shrink)

The proposition I elucidates and defend in this paper is that the Transcendent can be an object of genuine knowledge and that the knowledge the philosophical mystic claims of it is symbolic in nature. In my endeavor to achieve this aim I rely on Małgorzata Czarnocka’s conception of symbolic truth as a model of explanation. I am inclined to think that, as a model of explanation, this conception sheds ample light on the possibility of having a cognitive experience of (...) the Transcendent. The paper is composed of four parts. The first part raises the question of the Transcendent as an object of knowledge. The second part advances a brief analysis of the main elements of Czarnozka’s conception of symbolic truth with special emphasis on her view of human nature. The third part explicates the sense in which the conception of symbolic truth functions as a model of explanation. The fourth part analyzes the conditions under which the Transcendent can be an object of knowledge. (shrink)

The proposition I elucidate and defend in this paper is that the explanatory power of Malgorzata Czarnocka’s conception of symbolic truth extends beyond our knowledge of empirical reality and includes our knowledge of human nature and human values. The paper is composed of two parts. In the first part I present a detailed analysis of the conception of symbolic truth. The focus in this analysis is on the nature of the correspondence relation which connects a true statement and (...) the cognitive object. Czarnocka persuasively argues that this relation is neither isomorphic nor homomorphic in character. She advances a detailed analysis of sensual perception as the locus of the cognitive act. The outcome of this analysis is that the structure of the statement which is articulated in this act does not copy or mirror the structure of the object but is a linguistic representation. In the second part of the paper I argue that empirical reality is not the paradigm of reality and that scientific knowledge is not the paradigm of knowledge. The domain of humanity is as real as the domain of empirical reality, and our knowledge of this domain is as central to our life as scientific knowledge is. Moreover, I argue that Czarnocka’s conception of symbolic truth functions adequately in explaining the possibility of knowledge of human nature and human values with special focus on the literary work of art. (shrink)

More than half a century ago, the Supreme Court held that the free speech protection of the First Amendment is not limited to verbal communication, but also applies to such expressive conduct as saluting a flag or burning a flag. Even though the Supreme Court has decided a number of important cases involving expressive conduct, the Court has never announced any standards for distinguishing such conduct from conduct without communicative value. The aim of this paper is to examine which conceptions (...) of nonverbal expression underlie judicial decisions on expressive conduct, and to offer an account of expressive conduct grounded in contemporary semantic theory. The central hypothesis of this paper is that significance of expressive conduct can be explained by principles that explain important features of linguistic meaning. I propose an analysis of expressive conduct that takes the meaningfulness of conduct as a function of the action and its consequences in context. I develop a theory of expressive conduct whose underlying conception of expression is based on a number of ideas from speech act theory. These are Grice's account of nonnatural meaning, Austin's theory of illocutionary force, and Grice's work on conversational implicature. My analysis understands the meaningfulness of conduct in terms of its relational properties and relevant features of the context upon which illocutionary force, perlocutionary properties and implicature are predicated. The natural and conventional properties of types of conduct, features of the context, and underlying social and cultural presumptions and expectations about human conduct thus play a role in the constitution of symbolic speech. (shrink)

“Dissecting Bioethics,” edited by Tuija Takala and Matti Häyry, welcomes contributions on the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of bioethics.The section is dedicated to the idea that words defined by bioethicists and others should not be allowed to imprison people's actual concerns, emotions, and thoughts. Papers that expose the many meanings of a concept, describe the different readings of a moral doctrine, or provide an alternative angle to seemingly self-evident issues are therefore particularly appreciated.The themes covered in the section so far (...) include dignity, naturalness, public interest, community, disability, autonomy, parity of reasoning, symbolic appeals, and toleration. (shrink)

Kant uses the concept of the symbol to show the complicated relationship between the autonomy of beauty and its systematic function as a transition from nature to freedom, which are the two most important topics in the third Critique. Beauty’s symbolism of morality lies in the analog between aesthetic reflection and moral disposition; concretely, it lies in the purity or disinterestedness and self-legislation as negative and positive freedom in both subjective states of mind. In this scenario, beauty’s symbolism does (...) not refer to aesthetic ideas that either involve intelligent interests (in the beauty of nature) or presuppose an end (in the beauty of art); it also cannot be grounded in the supersensible substrate, which is an elevated and metaphysical principle of the judgment of taste given in the Dialectic but not the original principle of subjective purposiveness in the Analytic. With this formal relationship, beauty and morality accelerate each other in the empirical-anthological sense—but they are also not a sufficient or necessary condition for each other. Furthermore, through symbolism, taste looks toward the intelligible and serves as a transition from nature to freedom from the transcendental perspective. (shrink)

The final volume in the fine translation of Cassirer's central work deals with the problem of knowledge, "the structure and articulation of a theoretical world view." The analysis proceeds from perception and representation, through the function of signification and the idea of concept, to mathematics and the highest forms of natural science. Cassirer's introduction offers a concise discussion in historical context of the idea of symbolic form itself.--F. M. S.

Is mental imagery pictorial? In Pylyshyn's view no empirical data provides convincing support to the “pictorial” hypothesis of mental imagery. Phenomenology, Pylyshyn says, is deeply deceiving and offers no explanation of why and how mental imagery occurs. We suggest that Pylyshyn mistakes phenomenology for what it never pretended to be. Phenomenological evidence, if properly considered, shows that mental imagery may indeed be pictorial, though not in the way that mimics visual perception. Moreover, Pylyshyn claims that the “pictorial hypothesis” is flawed (...) because the interpretation of “picture-like” objects in mental imagery takes a homunculus. However, the same point can be objected to Pylyshyn's own conclusion: if imagistic reasoning involves the same mechanisms and the same forms of representation as those that are involved in general reasoning, if they operate on symbol-based representations of the kind recommended by Pylyshyn (1984) and Fodor (1975), don't we need a phenomenological homunculus to tell an imagined bear from the real one? (shrink)