This paper presents an approach to the belief system based on a computational framework in three levels: first, the logic level with the definition of binary local rules, second, the arithmetic level with the definition of recursive functions and finally the behavioural level with the definition of a recursive construction pattern. Social communication is achieved when different beliefs are expressed, modified, propagated and shared through social nets. This approach is useful to mimic the belief system because the defined functions (...) provide different ways to process the same incoming information as well as a means to propagate it. Our model also provides a means to cross different beliefs so, any incoming information can be processed many times by the same or different functions as it occurs is social nets. (shrink)

This article applies some conceptual tools from semiotics to better understand the disastrous impacts of the world economy on global ecology. It traces the accelerating production of material disorder and waste to the logic of the money sign, as economic production processes simultaneously increase exchange-values and entropy. The exchange of indexical and iconic signs is essential to the dynamics of ecological systems and the proliferation of biological diversity. The human species has added a third kind of sign, the symbol, (...) and more recently a fourth: all-purpose money. Money does not refer to any referent either through contiguity, similarity, or convention. It is an empty sign, capable of assuming any significance that its owner attributes to it. The article argues that the concept of symbolic reference should be restricted to cultural and linguistic phenomena. Money qualifies as a new species of sign based on its exceedingly open mode of reference. It does not refer to any object by social convention but owes its specific properties precisely to the absence of such conventions. The logic of money pivots on decontextualisation: it presupposes and encourages the detachment of exchange values, people, and concepts from the particular and the local. Selective advantage is no longer primarily about calibration within local contexts, but increasingly a matter of transcending or emancipating oneself from the specific. This drift toward decontextualisation reverses the evolution of complexity and diversity throughout the planetary biosphere. (shrink)

The locale corresponding to the real interval [ − 1, 1] is an interval object, in the sense of Escardó and Simpson, in the category of locales. The map, mapping a stream s of signs ±1 to, is a proper localic surjection; it is also expressed as a coequalizer. The proofs are valid in any elementary topos with natural numbers object.

The American Sign Language Sentence Reproduction Test (ASL-SRT) requires the precise reproduction of a series of ASL sentences increasing in complexity and length. Error analyses of such tasks provides insight into working memory and scaffolding processes. Data was collected from three groups expected to differ in fluency: deaf children, deaf adults and hearing adults, all users of ASL. Quantitative (correct/incorrect recall) and qualitative error analyses were performed. Percent correct on the reproduction task supports its sensitivity to fluency as test performance (...) clearly differed across the three groups studied. A linguistic analysis of errors further documented differing strategies and bias across groups. Subjects' recall projected the affordance and constraints of deep linguistic representations to differing degrees, with subjects resorting to alternate processing strategies when they failed to recall the sentence correctly. A qualitative error analysis allows us to capture generalizations about the relationship between error pattern and the cognitive scaffolding, which governs the sentence reproduction process. Highly fluent signers and less-fluent signers share common chokepoints on particular words in sentences. However, they diverge in heuristic strategy. Fluent signers, when they make an error, tend to preserve semantic details while altering morpho-syntactic domains. They produce syntactically correct sentences with equivalent meaning to the to-be-reproduced one, but these are not verbatim reproductions of the original sentence. In contrast, less-fluent signers tend to use a more linear strategy, preserving lexical status and word ordering while omitting local inflections, and occasionally resorting to visuo-motoric imitation. Thus, whereas fluent signers readily use top-down scaffolding in their working memory, less fluent signers fail to do so. Implications for current models of working memory across spoken and signed modalities are considered. (shrink)

Attempts to close the mind-body gap traditionally resort to a priori speculations. Motivated by dissatisfaction with such accounts, neurophenomenology constitutes one of the first attempts to close the mind-body gap non-metaphysically. Nonetheless, it faces significant challenges. Many of these challenges arise from its abandoning of transcendentality and its dim view of bioinformation. In this paper, I propose a superior non-metaphysical alternative: a combination of a reformed biosemiotics and transcendental phenomenology. My approach addresses the difficulties of neurophenomenology, while retaining the merit (...) of mutual constraints. Biosemiotics pays respect to bioinformation while imposing the sign-meaning duality on primitive forms of life, which is a relic of anthropomorphism. To avoid this unjustified commitment, I argue for a sign-free biosemantics which replaces Peirce’s semiotics with Husserl’s theory of meaning and exchanges naturalism for transcendentalism. Meaning, according to the resulting account, is the “intended as such”. The irreality of meaning results from what I term the ‘higher visibility’ of intentionality. I argue that the mind-body gap can be locally closed in a non-metaphysical manner as the result of reflection upon empirical biological investigations. Sign-free biosemantics uncovers the meanings for the organism that are implicit in biological research, while transcendental phenomenology analyses the experiences that biologists undergo when associating the physical with the biological level, while at the same time also analysing the very framework within which they work. Meanwhile, biosemiotics frees phenomenology from its methodological limitations, and the two domains establish mutual constraints in a more radical form than neurophenomenology. (shrink)

Many secret signs and symbols area associated with the Yoruba as we have it amongst many tribes in Nigeria. Some of these signs and symbols have deep meanings and have connotations amongst the tribe. They form the everyday language of the people and a thorough understanding of them is key in their relationship with one another as a people. The objective of this study is to express the cultural connotations of selected symbols in relation to the Yoruba people (...) of Nigeria. The study hinges on the theories of Mimesis, Structural Formalism and Semiotics. This was validated through ethnographic study of symbols such as art, architecture, clothing, body marks and decorations among others to discover deep and hidden information about cultural beliefs and assumptions among the people under study. Pertinent literatures were reviewed, interviews were conducted, information was sourced from the internet and personal experience was explored. The study points out to the fact that a lot of deep and secret meanings are attached to the selected signs and symbols. The paper concludes that meanings expressed are generally accepted by a host of the Yoruba people; however, there could be slight differences in belief system from one locality to another. The paper had contributed to the pool of knowledge by bringing unknown and hidden meanings of selected signs and symbols of the Yoruba people to limelight. The paper recommends that signs and symbols commonly used in communication among the Yoruba people of Nigeria should incorporated into the curricula of schools; especially Yoruba as a subject and taught to preserve the tradition from extinction. It is also recommended that folklores, mythology and oral tradition be encouraged among younger generation so as to preserve cultural values. (shrink)

The process of obtaining informed consent in a teaching hospital in a developing country (e.g. Nigeria) is shaped by factors which, to the Western world, may be seen to be anti‐autonomomous: autonomy being one of the pillars of an ideal informed consent. However, the mix of cultural bioethics and local moral obligation in the face of communal tradition ensures a mutually acceptable informed consent process. Paternalism is indeed encouraged by the patients who prefer to see the doctor as all‐powerful (...) and all‐knowing, and this is buttressed by the cultural practice of customary obedience to those ‘above you’: either in age or social rank. The local moral obligation reassures the patients that those in authority will always look after others placed in their care without recourse to lengthy discussions or signed documentation, while the communal traditions ensure that the designated head of a family unit has the honor and sole responsibility of assenting and consenting to an operation to be carried out on a younger, or female, member of the family. Indeed it is to only a few educated patients that the informed consent process is deemed a shield against litigation by the doctors. This paper later addresses the need for physicians to update their knowledge on the process of informed consent through the attendance of biomedical ethics courses, which should highlight socio‐cultural practices that may make this process different from the Western concept, but perfectly acceptable in this setting. (shrink)

The process of obtaining informed consent in a teaching hospital in a developing country (e.g. Nigeria) is shaped by factors which, to the Western world, may be seen to be anti-autonomomous: autonomy being one of the pillars of an ideal informed consent. However, the mix of cultural bioethics and local moral obligation in the face of communal tradition ensures a mutually acceptable informed consent process. Paternalism is indeed encouraged by the patients who prefer to see the doctor as all-powerful (...) and all-knowing, and this is buttressed by the cultural practice of customary obedience to those ‘above you’: either in age or social rank. The local moral obligation reassures the patients that those in authority will always look after others placed in their care without recourse to lengthy discussions or signed documentation, while the communal traditions ensure that the designated head of a family unit has the honor and sole responsibility of assenting and consenting to an operation to be carried out on a younger, or female, member of the family. Indeed it is to only a few educated patients that the informed consent process is deemed a shield against litigation by the doctors. This paper later addresses the need for physicians to update their knowledge on the process of informed consent through the attendance of biomedical ethics courses, which should highlight socio-cultural practices that may make this process different from the Western concept, but perfectly acceptable in this setting. (shrink)

While claiming that diagrams can only be admitted as a method of strict proof if the underlying axioms are precisely known and explicitly spelled out, Hilbert praised Minkowski’s Geometry of Numbers and his diagram-based reasoning as a specimen of an arithmetical theory operating “rigorously” with geometrical concepts and signs. In this connection, in the first phase of his foundational views on the axiomatic method, Hilbert also held that diagrams are to be thought of as “drawn formulas”, and formulas as (...) “written diagrams”, thus suggesting that the former encapsulate propositional information which can be extracted and translated into formulas. In the case of Minkowski diagrams, local geometrical axioms were actually being produced, starting with the diagrams, by a process that was both constrained and fostered by the requirement, brought about by the axiomatic method itself, that geometry ought to be made independent of analysis. This paper aims at making a twofold point. On the one hand, it shows that Minkowski’s diagrammatic methods in number theory prompted Hilbert’s axiomatic investigations into the notion of a straight line as the shortest distance between two points, which start from his earlier work focused on the role of the triangle inequality property in the foundations of geometry, and lead up to his formulation of the 1900 Fourth Problem. On the other hand, it purports to make clear how Hilbert’s assessment of Minkowski’s diagram-based reasoning in number theory both raises and illuminates conceptual compatibility concerns that were crucial to his philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Ecosemiotics represents a theoretical approach to human ecology that can be applied across several disciplines. lts primary justification lies inthe ambition to transcend "Cartesian", conceptual dichotomies such as culture/nature. society/nature, mental/material. etc. It argues that ecosystems areconstituted no less by flows of signs than by flows of matter and energy. This paper discusses the roles of different kinds of hmnan sign systems in the ecologyof Amazonia, ranging from the phenomenology of unconscious sensations. through linguistic signs such as metaphors (...) and ethnobiological taxonomies, to money and the political economy of environmental destruction. Human-environmental relations mediated by direct, sensory and (oral) linguistic communication have tended to enhance biological diversity, suggesting modes of calibrating the long-term co-evolution of human and non-human populations. Economic sign systems, on the other hand, have rapidly and drastically transfonned human-environmental relations in Amazonia to the point where the entire rainforest ecosystem is illlder threat. In detaching themselves from the direct, "face-to-face" communication between humans and their natural environments, flows of money and commodities - and the decontextualized knowledge systems that they engender - have no means of staying geared to the long-term negotiation of local, ecological co-existence. It is argued that the ongoing deterioration of the biosphere can be viewed as a problem of communication, deserving semiotic analysis. (shrink)

Ecosemiotics represents a theoretical approach to human ecology that can be applied across several disciplines. lts primary justification lies inthe ambition to transcend "Cartesian", conceptual dichotomies such as culture/nature. society/nature, mental/material. etc. It argues that ecosystems areconstituted no less by flows of signs than by flows of matter and energy. This paper discusses the roles of different kinds of hmnan sign systems in the ecologyof Amazonia, ranging from the phenomenology of unconscious sensations. through linguistic signs such as metaphors (...) and ethnobiological taxonomies, to money and the political economy of environmental destruction. Human-environmental relations mediated by direct, sensory and (oral) linguistic communication have tended to enhance biological diversity, suggesting modes of calibrating the long-term co-evolution of human and non-human populations. Economic sign systems, on the other hand, have rapidly and drastically transfonned human-environmental relations in Amazonia to the point where the entire rainforest ecosystem is illlder threat. In detaching themselves from the direct, "face-to-face" communication between humans and their natural environments, flows of money and commodities - and the decontextualized knowledge systems that they engender - have no means of staying geared to the long-term negotiation of local, ecological co-existence. It is argued that the ongoing deterioration of the biosphere can be viewed as a problem of communication, deserving semiotic analysis. (shrink)

While much has been written about the uniquely Hawaiian take on the category “local” – usually in terms of resistance to colonization, the alternative or counterhegemonic – little has been written about “haole”, the trope that served to silhouette the “local” and has evolved in dialectical opposition to it. A term that emerged during the plantation era to represent working-class immigrant workers mostly from Asia, “local” is constructed by exclusion. It has evolved to represent solidarity against all (...) “external forces” controlling Hawai'i from without, such as land development, tourism and the military – all readily equated with haole, the visible sign of whiteness. The prevalence of the prescription “local vs. haole” in contemporary Hawai'i begs an inquiry into other interpretations that are being suppressed. This paper explores some suppressed histories, imaginings and subconscious aspects of identity in Hawai'i through the figure of the white person whose parents – and possibly great-great-great-grandparents – were born and raised in Hawai'i. (shrink)

What does it mean to spatialize food? Why combine such an analysis with law, or with signs and spaces? Leveraging Peircean-inspired legal semiotic theory, the spatialized nature of food will serve as a porthole through which a semiotic view of the spatial dimensions of legal experience can be discerned and elaborated. Specifically, case studies of the simultaneously material and immaterial aspects of food will support an analysis that seeks to open avenues of conceptualization regarding categories. The semiotic nature of (...) both food and law will drive a discussion of the “dis-composition” of categories. Though such an effort may appear overly scholarly and far from pragmatic, exactly the opposite claim will be made. Case studies such as that of the “Meatball Wars” will illustrate in plain terms how subject position struggles for space cannot be adequately addressed within traditional disciplinary boundaries. The essay will conclude with a demonstration of how a “discomposing” semiotic approach has the potential to serve as a means of enabling conflict resolution on a broader scale. The overall investigation is motivated by the struggle within academia – seen across the humanities – to rethink traditional foundational assumptions and dichotomies. The argument seeks to ground itself in the interconnectedness increasingly advanced, joining scholars who insist on the importance of anthro-historical context, local particulars, and the impossibility of assuming an objective position that can coolly observe phenomena from “outside.”. (shrink)

A macroscopic experiment capable of detecting a signature of spinorial sign changes is discussed. If realized, it would determine whether Bell inequalities are satisfied for a manifestly local, classical system. By providing an explicitly local-realistic derivation of the EPR-Bohm type spin correlations, it is demonstrated why Bell inequalities must be violated even in such a manifestly local, macroscopic domain, just as strongly as they are in the microscopic domain. The proposed experiment has the potential to transform our (...) understanding of the relationship between classical and quantum physics. (shrink)

This essay aims to identify a semiotic consciousness found in New England Transcendentalism, consisting of the worldview that signs are pervasively present throughout nature and society. It finds that this worldview exists as a historical strand of thought stretching through the 19th century and, ultimately, further beyond, thereby making up an early movement in American semiotics. In this context, I furthermore see Transcendentalist thought informing the backdrop of Charles Peirce’s groundbreaking theory of signs later in the century, especially (...) his metaphysical claims about a “universe... perfused with signs”1 (1906: EP 2.394). In order to bring into full view the presence of a semiotic consciousness in Transcendentalism, I first address the intellectual history and genealogical roots that helped shape the minds of the Transcendentalists. Relevant influences include those both local to New England and imported from abroad, in particular the theologies of Jonathan Edwards and of Emanuel Swedenborg. Next, I directly examine the ideas of the figurehead of the Transcendentalist movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, together with his Concord peers, Amos Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau. Taking them as my case studies, I track the different ways a like-minded interest in signs takes shape within their individual projects. Focus-ing on their descriptions of nature, we find it in their experiences of the natural environment, their understanding of phenomena as representational and poetic, and their belief in the dialogical sharing of ideas across minds and species. Along the way, I further work out some of the aspects of a general theory of signs identifi-able within the Transcendentalist perspective, as well as distinguish it from other theoretical alternatives. Ultimately, I contend that the Transcendentalists held a similar idea of nature existing as a sign representing deep and varied meanings. (shrink)

Most work on the public-private division concerns itself with identifying the lines between both and the historical developments that shifted this line. These contributions provide an aerial view that pays little attention to the interactional micropolitics of privacy. The present article uses a pragmatist approach to analyze the local negotiation of privacy and publicity. It relies on scholarship on “accounts” and “aligning actions” to view “privacy-work” as an attempt to remove actions from having to account for them in a (...) specific social group and “publicity-work” as a converse attempt to draw them out by demanding that actors account. Thus, I will understand privacy as whatever is hidden, situationally, behind “moving armies of stop signs” for alignment demands. (shrink)

For Millikan, purpose pervades the biological order, including the genes and genetically encoded traits of every living thing, the unconditioned reflexes and conditioned behavior of every animal, artifacts produced by humans or non-humans. There are also the conscious, explicit purposes and intentions of human beings. These are purposes in “a quite univocal sense,” Millikan insists. “In all cases,” she says, “the thing’s purpose is … what it was selected for doing.” Moreover, “…the purposes we attribute to whole persons … are (...) composed of no more than the purposes of [their] parts and aspects, and of the ways these have been designed to work together.” (13) The chain of purposes forms a double helix with another great chain -- the great chain of signs. At the bottom of the great chain, sit locally recurrent natural signs. These are wholly natural occurrences or states of affairs that carry “local information.” Locally recurrent natural signs are not yet intentional signs but they are the ground on which intentionality ultimately rests. Local natural signs are “basic” representations in the following sense: … when the systems that produce and/or use intentional representations perform the tasks they were designed to perform and perform these tasks by means of their normal mechanism … then the intentional representations are basic representations. (69) When an intentional sign producing/consuming system is functioning “normally” its intentional signs will just be local natural signs. Systems don’t always function normally; So we can’t quite say that intentional signs are built out of locally recurrent natural signs. Still, without such signs subsisting at the ground level, there apparently could not be intentional signs. But it is far from clear whether locally recurrent natural sign can really carry the load Millikan needs them to carry. Locality seems designed to exorcise the ghost of disjunction that haunts many correlational theories of content.. (shrink)

On the Stumpf-Lotze debate on the theory of local signs.

Many questions concerning the future of the urban Indian landscape have at their core the conflict of a modernist design aesthetic, which privileges uniformity and predictability, with what many consider to be the unsightly presence of a chaotic local aesthetic. The hand-painted signboard, a hallmark of Indian urban experience, is largely disdained by modernist planners, who became especially vocal in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010, when the goal of transforming Delhi into a ‘world class city’ envisioned, (...) among other measures, a reining in of the city’s frenetic signboard culture. This paper examines the ingenuity of the hand-painted signboard which employs complex visual strategies such as three-dimensional depth cues, typographic innovation and visual metaphor, while assessing the unique ways in which hand-painted signage shapes the experience of public space in an urban environment. Against ideas of uniformity and order which underpin liberal modernist visions of the city both in relation to its visual cultures and the use of public spaces, this paper proposes what we call an ‘aesthetic of accommodation’: the visual and the social order here become sites for the expression of an ‘adjustment’ ethic visible in the hybrid art practice of hand-painted signboards and the multiple rather than single usage of public spaces evident in the manner in which signboards spill onto sidewalks and sidewalks onto streets. (shrink)

Many questions concerning the future of the urban Indian landscape have at their core the conflict of a modernist design aesthetic, which privileges uniformity and predictability, with what many consider to be the unsightly presence of a chaotic local aesthetic. The hand-painted signboard, a hallmark of Indian urban experience, is largely disdained by modernist planners, who became especially vocal in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010, when the goal of transforming Delhi into a ‘world class city’ envisioned, (...) among other measures, a reining in of the city’s frenetic signboard culture. This paper examines the ingenuity of the hand-painted signboard which employs complex visual strategies such as three-dimensional depth cues, typographic innovation and visual metaphor, while assessing the unique ways in which hand-painted signage shapes the experience of public space in an urban environment. Against ideas of uniformity and order which underpin liberal modernist visions of the city both in relation to its visual cultures and the use of public spaces, this paper proposes what we call an ‘aesthetic of accommodation’: the visual and the social order here become sites for the expression of an ‘adjustment’ ethic visible in the hybrid art practice of hand-painted signboards and the multiple rather than single usage of public spaces evident in the manner in which signboards spill onto sidewalks and sidewalks onto streets. (shrink)

There are close parallels between perception (the interpretation of sensory experience as representing physical objects) and hermeneutics (the interpretation of signs as having meaning). Perceptual illusions corresponds to ambiguities in texts; naive realism corresponds to fundamentalism; the scientist's reinterpretation of the "manifest image" to the global/local interplay of the "hermeneutic circle" in the interpretation of large texts.

I want now to argue that just as no intentional representations of retinal images intervene between physical objects and the seeing of those objects, no representations of speaker intentions in speaking need intervene between world affairs spoken of by speakers and hearers' understandings of those words.1 When conventional signs are true or satisfied and when this has come about in the normal way, conventional signs are locally recurrent natural signs. True, tokens of the same conventional sign may (...) have diverse etiologies, through different people's perceptual systems and cognitive systems. They differ from more ordinary recurrent natural signs in that there will usually be numerous different kinds of causal paths to their production, depending on the ways that different speakers have managed to translate diverse prior natural signs into a uniform medium of thought and expression. But there are reasons why the same linguistic form continues to coincide with the same kind of represented affair over a certain domain --it is no accident-- and we have decided to take that as the primary criterion for a locally recurrent sign. Assuming that this step in the production of a conventional sign has been accomplished through normal mechanisms --the speaker is not confused, does not lie, and so forth-- then reading a conventional sign is mainly a matter of tracking its natural domain, that is, determining what reproducing family it has been copied from. Compare tracking the. (shrink)

The development of a methodologically naturalistic approach to physiological and experimental psychology in the nineteenth century was not primarily driven by a naturalistic agenda. The work of R. Hermann Lotze and G. T. Fechner help to illustrate this claim. I examine a selected set of central commitments in each thinkers philosophical outlook, particularly regarding the human soul and the nature of God, that departed strongly from a reductionist materialism. Yet, each contributed significantly to the formation of experimental and physiological psychology. (...) Their work was influenced substantively by their respective philosophical commitments. Nevertheless, the evaluation of the merits of their specific proposals, Fechner's psychophysics and Lotze's local sign hypothesis respectively, did not depend upon sharing their metaphysical views regarding the human soul or the nature of God. A moderate, but significant, distinction between the contexts of discovery and of justification aids in understanding this balancing act. (shrink)

Immigration politics are almost universally characterized by their complexity, their ability to raise public passions, and misinformation, often based on generalizations and stereotypes. Recently, immigration has been intrinsically linked to crime, and public agendas have squarely focused on security issues as nativist political forces have successfully created a prominent image of migrants as threats to public security. This article argues that immigrant participation in criminal markets should be studied at the local level, where micro-criminal economies often dominated by migrants (...) actually develop. By examining criminal activity at its base, the article investigates the nature of power in these markets. Specifically, it examines migrant crime in four cities and compares it to migrant integration in regular labour markets. By doing so, the article studies levels of migrant autonomy in both criminal and regular markets and argues that this autonomy indicates whether migrant crime is entrepreneurial or a sign of social deviance. (shrink)

This article introduces an experimental paradigm to selectively probe the multiple levels of visual processing that influence the formation of object contours, perceptual boundaries, and illusory contours. The experiments test the assumption that, to integrate contour information across space and contrast sign, a spatially short-range filtering process that is sensitive to contrast polarity inputs to a spatially long-range grouping process that pools signals from opposite contrast polarities. The stimuli consisted of thin subthreshold lines, flashed upon gaps between collinear inducers which (...) potentially enable the formation of illusory contours. The subthreshold lines were composed of one or more segments with opposite contrast polarities. The polarity nearest to the inducers was varied to differentially excite the short-range filtering process. The experimental results are consistent with neurophysiological evidence for cortical mechanisms of contour processing and with the Boundary Contour System model, which identifies the short-range filtering process with cortical simple cells, and the long-range grouping process with cortical bipole cells. (shrink)

The most ambitious effort in many years to reform the U.S. health insurance system was signed into law earlier this year in Massachusetts. In the essay below, a health economist who advised the state on the reform describes the plan and how it unfolded. Five commentaries weigh its odds of success and ask whether it can provide a model for the nation.

This paper compares two explanations of the process by which human communication systems evolve: iterated learning and social collaboration. It then reports an experiment testing the social collaboration account. Participants engaged in a graphical communication task either as a member of a community, where they interacted with seven different partners drawn from the same pool, or as a member of an isolated pair, where they interacted with the same partner across the same number of games. Participants’ horizontal, pair‐wise interactions led (...) “bottom up” to the creation of an effective and efficient shared sign system in the community condition. Furthermore, the community‐evolved sign systems were as effective and efficient as the local sign systems developed by isolated pairs. Finally, and as predicted by a social collaboration account, and not by an iterated learning account, interaction was critical to the creation of shared sign systems, with different isolated pairs establishing different local sign systems and different communities establishing different global sign systems. (shrink)

Since Aristotle, touch has been found especially hard to define. One of the few unchallenged intuition about touch, however, is that tactile awareness entertains some especially close relationship with bodily awareness. This article considers the relation between touch and bodily awareness from two different perspectives: the body template theory and the body map theory. According to the former, touch is defined by the fact that tactile content matches proprioceptive content. We raise some objections against such a bodily definition of touch (...) and suggest, as an alternative, to revive the proposal according to which touch is essentially a sense of pressure. According to the body map theory, tactile sensations are localized within the frame of reference provided by the mental representation of the space of the body. We argue that this approach of the location of bodily sensations fares better that the Local Sign theory that denies intrinsic spatiality to touch. (shrink)

BackgroundAs Canadian global health researchers who conducted a qualitative study with adults with and without disabilities in Uganda, we obtained ethics approval from four institutional research ethics boards (two in Canada and two in Uganda). In Canada, research ethics boards and researchers follow the research ethics norms of the Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS2), and the National Guidelines for Research Involving Humans as Research Participants of Uganda (NGRU) in Uganda. The preparation and implementation of this (...) qualitative research raised specific ethical issues related to research participant privacy and the importance of availability and management of financial resources.Main bodyOur field experience highlights three main issues for reflection. First, we demonstrate that, in a global health research context, methodological and logistic adjustments were necessary throughout the research implementation process to ensure the protection of study participants’ privacy, especially that of people with disabilities, despite having followed the prescribed Canadian and Ugandan ethics norms. Data collection and management plans were adapted iteratively based on local realities. Second, securing financial support as a key aspect of financial management was critical to ensure privacy through disability-sensitive data collection strategies. Without adequate funding, the recruitment of research participants based on disability type, sex, and region or the hiring of local sign language interpreters would not have been possible. Third, although the TCPS2 and NGRU underscore the significance of participants’ privacy, none of these normative documents clearly express this issue in the context of global health research and disability, nor broadly discuss the ethical issue related to financial availability and management.ConclusionsConducting research in resource limited settings and with study participants with different needs calls for a nuanced and respectful implementation of research ethics in a global health context. We recommend a greater integration in both the TCPS2 and NGRU of global health research, disability, and responsible conduct of research. This integration should also be accompanied by adequate training which can further guide researchers, be they senior, junior, or students, and funding agencies. (shrink)

The conclusions drawn by Benjamin Libet from his work with collegues on the timing of somatosensorial conscious experiences has met with a lot of praise and criticism. In this issue we find three examples of the latter. Here I attempt to place the divide between the two opponent camps in a broader perspective by analyzing the question of the relation between physical timing, neural timing, and experiential timing. The nervous system does a sophisticated job of recombining and recoding messages from (...) the sensorial surfaces and if these processes are slighted in a theory, it might become necessary to postulate weird operations, including subjective back-referral. Neuroscientifically inspired theories are of necessity still based on guesses, extrapolations, and philosophically dubious manners of speech. They often assume some neural correlate of consciousness as a part of the nervous system that transforms neural activity in reportable experiences. The majority of neuroscientists appear to assume that the NCC can compare and bind activity patterns only if they arrive simultaneously at the NCC. This leads to a search for synchrony or to theories in terms of the compensation of differences in neural delays . This is the main dimension of the Libet discussion. Examples from vision research, such as “temporal-binding-by-synchrony” and the “flash-lag” effect, are then used to illustrate these reasoning patterns in more detail. Alternatively one could assume symbolic representations of time and space that are not coded in their own dimension . Unless such tags are multiplexed with the quality message , one gets a binding problem for tags. One of the hidden aspects of the discussion between Libet and opponents appears to be the following. Is the NCC smarter than the rest of the nervous system, so that it can solve the problems of local sign and timing on its own, or are these pieces of information coded symbolically early on in the system? A supersmart NCC appears to be the assumption of Libet's camp . The wish to distribute the smartness evenly across all stages of processing in the nervous system appears to motivate the opponents. I argue that there are reasons to side with the latter group. (shrink)

Action is a means of acquiring perceptual information about the environment. Turning around, for example, alters your spatial relations to surrounding objects and, hence, which of their properties you visually perceive. Moving your hand over an object’s surface enables you to feel its shape, temperature, and texture. Sniffing and walking around a room enables you to track down the source of an unpleasant smell. Active or passive movements of the body can also generate useful sources of perceptual information (Gibson 1966, (...) 1979). The pattern of optic flow in the retinal image produced by forward locomotion, for example, contains information about the direction in which you are heading, while motion parallax is a “cue” used by the visual system to estimate the relative distances of objects in your field of view. In these uncontroversial ways and others, perception is instrumentally dependent on action. According to an explanatory framework that Susan Hurley (1998) dubs the “Input-Output Picture”, the dependence of perception on action is purely instrumental: "Movement can alter sensory inputs and so result in different perceptions… changes in output are merely a means to changes in input, on which perception depends directly" (1998: 342). -/- The action-based theories of perception, reviewed in this entry, challenge the Input-Output Picture. They maintain that perception can also depend in a noninstrumental or constitutive way on action (or, more generally, on capacities for object-directed motor control). This position has taken many different forms in the history of philosophy and psychology. Most action-based theories of perception in the last 300 years, however, have looked to action in order to explain how vision, in particular, acquires either all or some of its spatial representational content. Accordingly, these are the theories on which we shall focus here. -/- We begin in Section 1 by discussing George Berkeley’s Towards a New Theory of Vision (1709), the historical locus classicus of action-based theories of perception, and one of the most influential texts on vision ever written. Berkeley argues that the basic or “proper” deliverance of vision is not an arrangement of voluminous objects in three-dimensional space, but rather a two-dimensional manifold of light and color. We then turn to a discussion of Lotze, Helmholtz, and the local sign doctrine. The “local signs” were felt cues for the mind to know what sort of spatial content to imbue visual experience with. For Lotze, these cues were “inflowing” kinaesthetic feelings that result from actually moving the eyes, while, for Helmholtz, they were “outflowing” motor commands sent to move the eyes. -/- In Section 2, we discuss sensorimotor contingency theories, which became prominent in the 20thcentury. These views maintain that an ability to predict the sensory consequences of self-initiated actions is necessary for perception. Among the motivations for this family of theories is the problem of visual direction constancy—why do objects appear to be stationary even though the locations on the retina to which they reflect light change with every eye movement?—as well as experiments on adaptation to optical rearrangement devices (ORDs) and sensory substitution. -/- Section 3 examines two other important 20th century theories. According to what we shall call the motor component theory, efference copies generated in the oculomotor system and/or proprioceptive feedback from eye-movements are used together with incoming sensory inputs to determine the spatial attributes of perceived objects. Efferent readiness theories, by contrast, look to the particular ways in which perceptual states prepare the observer to move and act in relation to the environment. The modest readiness theory, as we shall call it, claims that the way an object’s spatial attributes are represented in visual experience can be modulated by one or another form of covert action planning. The bold readiness theory argues for the stronger claim that perception just is covert readiness for action. -/- In Section 4, we move to the disposition theory, most influentially articulated by Gareth Evans (1982, 1985), but more recently defended by Rick Grush (2000, 2007). Evans’ theory is, at its core, very similar to the bold efferent readiness theory. There are some notable differences, though. Evans’ account is more finely articulated in some philosophical respects. It also does not posit a reduction of perception to behavioral dispositions, but rather posits that certain complicated relations between perceptual input and behavioral provide spatial content. Grush proposes a very specific theory that is like Evans’ in that it does not posit a reduction, but unlike Evans’ view, does not put behavioral dispositions and sensory input on an undifferentiated footing. (shrink)

Signed into law in early 2011, the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) marked the first major overhaul of the United States’ regulatory system for food safety since the 1930s. This presidential address explores how the social movement for local and regional food systems influenced the debates around the FSMA and, in particular, how issues of scale became pivotal in those debates. Specifically, a key question revolved around whether or not the proposed regulations should apply to small farms and processors (...) who sell directly to consumers in local markets. Advocates of the so-called “Tester amendment” aimed to create a scale-sensitive alternative to the requirements in the bill. This address lays out the three interrelated arguments that amendment advocates used. The first was the idea that food safety risks are different at different scales, and therefore the rules should reflect those differences. Their second argument revolved around the character of the local, direct markets of small producers and the social relationships embedded within them. The third argument used to support the Tester amendment is that the costs of complying with the detailed regulatory requirements of the new food safety law place a disproportionately large burden on small producers and that might thwart the emerging market for local food as an alternative to industrial agriculture. I conclude by suggesting some research and policy questions that could be explored more fully, both with respect to this case and with respect to alternative agri-food movements more generally. (shrink)

Reid maintained that the perceptions that we obtain from the senses of smell, taste, hearing, and touch are ‘suggested’ by corresponding sensations. However, he made an exception for the sense of vision. According to Reid, our perceptions of the real figure, position, and magnitude of bodies are suggested by their visible appearances, which are not sensations but objects of perception in their own right. These visible appearances have figure, position, and magnitude, as well as ‘colour,’ and the standard view among (...) Reid scholars has been that Reid maintained that our perceptions of visible figure, position, and magnitude are also not suggested by any sensation. They are instead suggested by the material impression on the retina. Gideon Yaffe challenges the standard interpretation. According to Yaffe, Reid believed that our perceptions of visible figure are suggested by corresponding sensations, by sensations of colour. We defend the standard interpretation of Reid. According to Reid, there is no “local sign” in our sensations of colour. The same colour sensation can be associated with different positions on the visual field, and different colour sensations can be associated to the same position on the visual field. According to Reid, we only have evidence for a correlation between the image on the retina and the perception of visible figure. (shrink)

A MAJOR PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETER of Kant and critic of Herbart and Hegel, Hermann Lotze ( 1817-1881) is known to historians of psychology primarily for his theory of spatial perception.' As Professor of Philosophy at Gottingen University from 1845 to 1880, he published his theory of the physiological mechanism for spatial consciousness no less than six times.2 Standard accounts present his local sign theory as an associationistic, empiricistic, or empiristic view.3 Yet they also mention its influence among nativists such as (...) Lotze's own student Carl Stumpf. Certainly there is an historical irony here which deserves explanation. This paper will describe Lotze's theory, indicate its origins in the work of scientists such as E. H. Weber and Johannes Muiller and philosophers such as Jakob Friedrich Fries and Johann Friedrich Herbart, and trace its transformation at the hands of psycholo- gists of various theoretical persuasions.4 The intent is not to argue for Lotze's personal influence so much as to illustrate how one fertile idea in the history of science can serve as the catalyst for a much broader conceptual development. (shrink)

Is the position of a moving target ? I argue that we should regard moving targets as the natural (veridical) position references. Motion is probably perceptually absolute, whereas position and time are relative quantities, as in physics. According to this view, processing delays are incorporated in the abstract local signs of motion signals. The flash-lag effect is one case in point.

Lotze’s influence on the development of the XIXth and XXth century philosophy and psychology remains largely neglected still today. In this paper, I examine some Lotzean elements in Husserl’s early conception of intentionality, and more specifically in his rejection of the Brentanian concept of intentionality. I argue that Husserl and Lotze, pace Brentano, share a qualitative conception of experiences, what they both call the Zumutesein of experiences. Furthermore, I discuss other issues upon which Husserl and Lotze share common intuitions: the (...) perception of space, the theory of local signs, the realisations of thinking (Leistungen des Denkens) and phenomenology. (shrink)

Embodiment, Vesey maintains, is the term applied to our experience of an unmediated movement of our body and an unmediated awareness within perceptual experience. Vesey argues for embodiment as the most satisfying explanation of the mind-body relationship chiefly by arguing against substance dualism as presented by the Local Sign theory of sensation and the Ideo-motor theory of bodily movement. The former is deficient because it rests on the false empirical assumption that all perceptual capacities are learned; the latter is (...) inadequate for more complex reasons, the development of which leads Vesey through his own theory of perception and movement. Vesey's own theory rests on contrast between causal, substance dualism and his own favored, non-causal, subject-object duality, which avoids an absolute dualism because of the internal relatedness of its key terms from the outset. The first half of the book presents a concise review and criticism of current non-dualistic views of the mind-body relation other than that of embodiment; here Vesey has a brief and somewhat unsatisfying skirmish with double aspect and identity theories.—E. A. R. (shrink)

The aim of this work is to identify and analyze a set of challenges that are likely to be encountered when one embarks on fieldwork in linguistic communities that feature small, young, and/or non-standard languages with a goal to elicit big sets of rich data. For each challenge, we (i) explain its nature and implications, (ii) offer one or more examples of how it is manifested in actual linguistic communities, and (iii) where possible, offer recommendations for addressing it effectively. Our (...) list of challenges involves static characteristics (e.g., absence of orthographic conventions and how it affects data collection), dynamic processes (e.g., speed of language change in small languages and how it affects longitudinal collection of big amounts of data), and interactive relations between non-dynamic features that are nevertheless subject to potentially rapid change (e.g., absence of standardized assessment tools or estimates for psycholinguistic variables). The identified challenges represent the domains of data collection and handling, participant recruitment, and experimental design. Among other issues, we discuss population limits and degree of power, inter- and intraspeaker variation, absence of metalanguage and its implications for the process of eliciting acceptability judgments, and challenges that arise from absence of local funding, conflicting regulations in relation to privacy issues, and exporting large samples of data across countries. Finally, the ten experimental challenges presented cover a broad typological spectrum, encompassing both spoken and sign, extant and nearly extinct languages. (shrink)

As a philosopher, psychologist, and physician, the German thinker Hermann Lotze defies classification. Working in the mid-nineteenth-century era of programmatic realism, he critically reviewed and rearranged theories and concepts in books on pathology, physiology, medical psychology, anthropology, history, aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, and religion. Leading anatomists and physiologists reworked his hypotheses about the central and autonomic nervous systems. Dozens of fin-de-siècle philosophical contemporaries emulated him, yet often without acknowledgment, precisely because he had made conjecture and refutation into a method. In spite (...) of Lotze's status as a pivotal figure in nineteenth-century intellectual thought, no complete treatment of his work exists, and certainly no effort to take account of the feminist secondary literature. Hermann Lotze: An Intellectual Biography is the first full-length historical study of Lotze's intellectual origins, scientific community, institutional context, and worldwide reception. (shrink)

Signe des temps, Cafebabel, est un webzine gratuit paneuropéen publiant quotidiennement en six langues . Il vise l’eurogénération, « la première génération qui vit l’Europe au quotidien ». S’appuyant sur un réseau de 31 rédactions locales dans 13 pays européens, coordonnées par une rédaction centrale à Paris, les articles partent de toutes ces rédactions, sont traduits par un réseau de traducteurs bénévoles, puis revus pour le travail final de secrétariat de rédaction par des journalistes professionnels, en fonction du lectorat de (...) l’aire linguistique à laquelle la traduction s’adresse sans nécessairement être juxtaposée sur l’original. La diversité des thèmes, la jeunesse du lectorat comme celle de la rédaction, l’amour des langues partagé par ses lecteurs, la diversité de son réseau et l’optique de proximité de Cafebabel en font un média européen original, différent de Courrier international, Euronews, Arte ou Presseurop.“Cafebabel” is a sign of the times, a free-access, pan-European webzine published every day in six languages . Its target audience is the “Eurogeneration”, “the first generation of people whose daily lives are European”. A network of 31 editorial committees in 13 European countries, coordinated by a central editorial board in Paris, sends out articles that are translated by a network of volunteer translators, before reaching the final copydesk stage where they are revised by professional journalists according to the linguistic area targeted by the translation, and not necessarily in juxtaposition with the original. The variety of topics, the youthfulness of both readership and writers and their shared love of languages, the diversity of its contributors and the “corner café” feel of “Cafebabel” have made it a highly distinctive Europe-wide media outlet, on a different register from “Courrier international”, “Euronews”, “Arte” or “Presseurop”. (shrink)

Thomas Reid claims to have learned of Idomenians, “an order of beings” in “sublunary regions” whose visual system is very much like ours except that they could detect only the direction of rays reaching their eyes, not the distance of origin. The properties of Idomenian vision are here examined in the light of the physiological optics of Reid’s time and of the scientific developments that have since augmented our knowledge of the discipline.