Positioning technologies, such as GPS are widespread in society but are used only sparingly in behavioural science research, e.g., because processing positioning technology data can be cumbersome. The current work attempts to unlock positioning technology potential for behavioural science studies by developing and testing a research tool to analyse GPS tracks. This tool—psyosphere—is published as open-source software, and aims to extract behaviours from GPSs data that are more germane to behavioural research. Two field experiments were conducted to test application of (...) the research tool. During these experiments, participants played a smuggling game, thereby either smuggling tokens representing illicit material past border guards or not. Results suggested that participants varied widely in variables, such as course and speed variability and distance from team members in response to the presence of border guards. Subsequent analyses showed that some of these GPS-derived behavioural variables could be linked to self-reported mental states, such as fear. Although more work needs to be done, the current study demonstrates that psyosphere may enable researchers to conduct behavioural experiments with positioning technology, outside of a laboratory setting. (shrink)

In the last twenty years, a large number of studies have investigated judgments of the identity of various objects (e.g., persons, material objects, institutions) over time. One influential strand of research has found that identity judgments are shaped by normative considerations. People tend to believe that moral improvement is more compatible with the continuity of identity of a person than moral deterioration, suggesting that persons are taken to be essentially morally good. This asymmetry is often referred to as the “Phineas (...) Gage effect”. However, normativity extends beyond morality. In particular, it is unknown whether changes in aesthetic value have a similar impact on identity judgments. We investigate whether works of art would be analogously seen as essentially aesthetically valuable. We ran four studies (N=1264) to explore whether aesthetic considerations have a similar influence on judgments of the identity of artworks. We presented the participants with stories describing either a painting or a musical work which undergoes changes and becomes either more or less aesthetically valuable. Overall, we found only mixed evidence for the Phineas Gage effect in relation to the aesthetic value of artworks. Other factors, such as moral value, seem to have a bigger impact on judgments of persistence. (shrink)

In two experiments (total N=693) we explored whether people are willing to consider paintings made by AI-driven robots as art, and robots as artists. Across the two experiments, we manipulated three factors: (i) agent type (AI-driven robot v. human agent), (ii) behavior type (intentional creation of a painting v. accidental creation), and (iii) object type (abstract v. representational painting). We found that people judge robot paintings and human painting as art to roughly the same extent. However, people are much less (...) willing to consider robots as artists than humans, which is partially explained by the fact that they are less disposed to attribute artistic intentions to robots. (shrink)

In his article “The Ontology of Musical Versions: Introducing the Hypothesis of Nested Types,” Nemesio Puy raises a hypothesis that continuity of the purpose is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for musical work’s identity. Puy’s hypothesis is relevant to two topics in cognitive psychology and experimental philosophy. The first topic is the prevalence of teleological reasoning about various objects and its influence on persistence and categorization judgments. The second one is the importance of an artist’s intention in the (...) categorization of artworks. We tested the teleological hypothesis across three studies. Vignettes in these three studies describe a musical work being changed in some of these aspects: purpose either changed or retained; score either changed or retained; change is made either by the same or a different composer. The results suggest that teleological considerations impact judgments on the persistence of musical works, but this impact appears to be relatively weak. The results also suggest that persistence judgments strongly depend on whether acoustical properties were changed, while whether the change was made by the original composer seems to be relatively unimportant. (shrink)

Philosophers often consider better compliance with prevalent pre-theoretical intuitions to be an advantage of a theory of ontology of musical works. However, despite many predictions of what these intuitions on relevant questions might be, so far there is only one experimental philosophy study on the repeatability of musical works by Christopher Bartel. We decided to examine the intuitions concerning the individuation of musical works by creating scenarios reflecting the differences in the positions of musical ontologists: pure and timbral sonicism, instrumentalism, (...) and contextualism. The results show that emotional expressivity, instrument, timbre, and images evoked in the listeners were not considered as properties individuating musical works. However, the musical works were held to be different if the composers were different. In most cases, the participants had clear intuitions. Pure sonicism, complemented with additional stress on significance of the composer’s creativity, seems to be the most intuitive position. (shrink)

An impressive variety of theories of ontology of musical works has been offered in the last fifty years. Recently, the ontologists have been paying more attention to methodological issues, in particular, the problem of determining criteria of a good theory. Although different methodological approaches involve different views on the importance and exact role of intuitiveness of a theory, most philosophers writing on the ontology of music agree that intuitiveness and compliance with musical practice play an important part when judging theories. (...) A multitude of diverse claims exist regarding folk intuitions and matters of musical practice in the literature on the ontology of musical works. In this review paper, a systematized collection of about one hundred empirical claims extracted from the theoretical literature is presented. All of the empirical claims are categorized thematically. The paper also includes a short discussion on the role of appeals to common intuitions in methodological literature, as well as some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the methodological challenges and practical implications of the experimental ontology of music. It offers an overview of the existing research, primarily focusing on how people judge whether two musical performances are of one and the same or two distinct musical works, followed by a discussion of the current methodological debates in this field and, finally, an exploration of its potential legal implications.

Realism about musical works is often tied to some type of Platonism. Nominalism, which posits that musical works exist and that they are concrete objects, goes with ontological realism much less often than Platonism: there is a long tradition which holds human-created objects (artifacts) to be mind-dependent. Musical Platonism leads to the well-known paradox of the impossibility of creating abstract objects, and so it has been suggested that only some form of nominalism becoming dominant in the ontology of art could (...) cause a great change in the field and open up new possibilities. This paper aims to develop a new metaontological view starting from the widely accepted claim that musical works are created. It contends that musical works must be concrete and created objects of some sort, but, nevertheless, they are mind-independent, and we should take the revisionary methodological stance. Although musical works are artifacts, what people think about them does not determine what musical works are. Musical works are similar to natural objects in the following sense: semantic externalism applies to the term ‘musical work’ because, firstly, they possess a shared nature, and, secondly, we can be mistaken about what they are. (shrink)

In two experiments (N=888), we explore to what extent the folk concept of art is compatible with the leading philosophical definitions of art, and whether it is an essentialist or a non-essentialist concept. We manipulate three factors: whether an object is created intentionally, whether it has aesthetic value, and whether it is institutionally recognized. In addition, we also manipulate the artistic domain (visual art or music). The results suggest that none of the three properties is seen by the folk as (...) necessary for an object to be considered art, which suggests that the folk concept of art might be a cluster concept. (shrink)

The dynamics-from-permutations of classical Ising spins is generalized here for an arbitrarily long chain. This serves as an ontological model with discrete dynamics generated by pairwise exchange interactions defining the unitary update operator. The model incorporates a finite signal velocity and resembles in many aspects a discrete free field theory. We deduce the corresponding Hamiltonian operator and show that it generates an exact terminating Baker–Campbell–Hausdorff formula. Motivation for this study is provided by the Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. We (...) find that our ontological model, which is classical and deterministic, appears as if of quantum mechanical kind in an appropriate formal description. However, it is striking that small deformations of the model turn it into a genuine quantum theory. This supports the view that quantum mechanics stems from an epistemic approach handling physical phenomena. (shrink)

What is the folk concept of art? Does it track any of the major definitions of art philosophers have proposed? In two preregistered experiments (N=888) focusing on two types of artworks (paintings and musical works), we manipulate three potential features of artworks: intentional creation, the possession of aesthetic value, and institutional recognition. This allows us to investigate whether the folk concept of art fits an essentialist definition drawing on one or more of the manipulated factors, or whether it might be (...) a disjunctive or cluster concept. The results suggest that none of the three manipulated properties are necessary for an object to be art, though some, even by themselves, suffice. The folk concept of art might thus well be a cluster concept instead of an essentialist concept. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to analyze the possibility of semantic content in pure music. The paper argues that pure music does not have semantic content. This conclusion relies on the Gricean analysis of meaning in terms of speakers’ intentions and on Peter Kivy’s argument that pure music does not meet the Gricean requirement for the composers’ intention. First, we analyze the results of empirical studies of metaphorical conceptualization of music; they show that the connections between properties of sound (...) and various metaphors are not “one-to-one” but “one-to-many”. These results support a further argument that it is not possible for a composer to have an intention to communicate by his work of music what is, as we know from the empirical studies, perceived in music by the listeners; and if he has an intention to communicate something more specific than what is perceived by the listeners, the communication is bound to fail. This failure shows the absence of a Gricean communicative intention in the composer, even if an informative intention would be present. (shrink)

Kant’s critique/doctrine distinction tracks the difference between a canon for the understanding’s proper use and an organon for its dialectical misuse. The latter reflects the dogmatic use of reason to attain a doctrine of knowledge with no antecedent critique. In the 1790s, Fichte collapses Kant’s distinction and redefines dogmatism. He argues that deriving a canon is essentially dialectical and thus yields an organon: critical idealism is properly a doctrine of science or Wissenschaftslehre. Criticism is furthermore said to refute dogmatism, by (...) which Fichte means Spinozism. Schelling repudiates Fichte’s position in his Philosophical Letters by reviving Kant’s distinction. First, ‘critique’ for Schelling names a canon that is valid for all systems—including Spinozism—and thus favours none—not even the Wissenschaftslehre. Second, Schelling coins ‘dogmaticism’ to refer to what Kant calls ‘dogmatism’: reason’s uncritical claim to doctrine. Hence, he says all systems—even Fichte’s—are susceptible to the ‘enthusiasm’ of mistaking themselves for doctrines or ‘objects of knowledge’, instead of subjectively valid ‘objects of freedom’. I reconstruct Schelling’s argument for reviving Kant’s distinction, while noting two consequences for German idealism. First, if criticism favours no system, a system’s origin cannot be an act of knowledge, e.g., intellectual intuition, but only an act of endorsement. Second, if dogmaticism entails enthusiasm, a system’s goal cannot be absolute knowledge, but only infinite striving. Hence, by retrieving Schelling’s notion of dogmaticism, we can both gain a better understanding of the Letters and register the impact of a core Kantian distinction on the German idealist project. (shrink)

Meillassoux seeks knowledge of transcendental reality, blaming Kant for the ‘correlationist’ proscription of independent access to either thought or being. For Meillassoux, correlationism blocks an account of the meaning of ‘ancestral statements’ regarding reality prior to humans. I examine three charges on which Meillassoux’s argument depends: (1) Kant distorts ancestral statements’ meaning; (2) Kant fallaciously infers causality’s necessity; (3) Kant’s transcendental idealism cannot grasp ‘the great outdoors’. I reject these charges: (1) imposes a Cartesian misreading, hence Meillassoux’s false assumption that, (...) for Kant, objects don’t exist without subjects; (2) misreads Kant, who infers causality’s necessity from the possibility of experience; (3) casts Kant’s idealism as subjective, ignoring his perspectival portrayal of it. (shrink)

[...] it would seem natural to assume that the disciplines of literary studies and linguistics should by rights converge regularly to exchange views as each pursues its own goals. Is such a convergence possible on the question of sense and nonsense? James W. Underhill (this volume) The contributors to the present volume have focused their attention on two sets of problems that are leitmotifs in all the articles gathered. Firstly, should literary semantics - the linguistic study of texts/discourses marked with (...) the feature of 'literariness' and 'poeticalness' - strive after an interpretation of all such texts at all costs? Are all literary texts interpretable? How do we cope with such troublesome linguistic phenomena as anomaly, deviance, and absurdity? Aren't we, by any chance, fascinated by nonsense? Do we try to make it at least partly meaningful? Is interpretability our default value? The introductory article by the renowned scholar Margaret H. Freeman is an important voice, indeed a manifesto of sorts of literary semanticists in this respect. Secondly, while trying to answer all these questions, well aware of the fact that literary semantics is a fuzzy branch of linguistic studies, we have attempted at exploring its borderline zone to see to what extent we have to draw from various theoretical sources. Literary semanticists have often proved that they are capable of arguing contrastively in the atmosphere of openness to such neighbouring fields as: discourse analysis, literary pragmatics and reader-response theories, narratology, literary semiotics and hermeneutics, translation studies and - very importantly - the philosophy of language. The authors contributing to this book, an international company of regularly cooperating linguists and literary scholars, strike a nice balance between the cognitive and the more traditionally or philosophically-oriented frameworks of study, being a vivid proof that cognitive and other "denominations" are perfectly capable of fruitful coexistence. The volume ends with a short presentation by RadosÅaw Nowakowski, already known to academic and artistic audiences in Europe as a creator and propagator of liberature - the art of unusual bookmaking, the art of the book liberated from our traditional preconceptions. We hope that our volume will be of interest to academics and students of literary theory and linguistics alike, especially those involved in literary semantics, stylistics and poetics. Naturally, the book is also addressed to members and sympathizers of IALS (International Association of Literary Semantics) and the readers of Journal of Literary Semantics, scattered across the world. (shrink)