scholarly journals Making Sense of Infants’ Differential Responses to Incongruity

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-63
Author(s):  
Gina C. Mireault ◽  
Vasudevi Reddy

Infants show strikingly different reactions to incongruity: looking or smiling. The former occurs in response to magical events and the latter to humorous events. We argue that these reactions depend largely on the respective experimental methodologies employed, including the popular violation of expectation (VOE) paradigm. Although both types of studies involve infants’ reactions to incongruity, their literatures have yet to confront each other, and researchers in each domain are drawing strikingly different conclusions regarding infants’ understanding of the world. Here, we argue that infants are sensitive to and constrained by several contextual differences in the methodologies employed by incongruity researchers that afford one or the other reaction. We apply De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s participatory sense-making framework to further understand what infants are sensitive to in these paradigms. Understanding infants’ reactions to incongruity (i.e., VOE) is necessary to clear up claims regarding the sophistication of their knowledge of physical and social phenomena. Attention to several simple methodological details is recommended.

Paragraph ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Chare

This essay builds on Jacques Rancière's exploration of the relationship between aesthetics and politics to analyse queer sexuality in Don Siegel's prison film Escape from Alcatraz. The film both illustrates and embodies what Rancière refers to as a redistribution of the sensible, an opening up of a new way of making sense of the world. In Escape from Alcatraz this sense-making is bound up with same-sex desire. Rancière is usually concerned with aesthetic practices linked to class struggle. This essay, however, examines how Rancière's ideas are also illuminating in relation to subjugated sexual experiences.


Author(s):  
Seungeun Choi ◽  

The number of foreigners residing in Korea exceeded 2.5 million for the first time ever. As the ratio of foreigners to the total population approaches 5%, it is evaluated that Korea has actually entered a multicultural society. It is known that among the types of foreigners staying there are many young foreigners who visit Korea for the purpose of employment. The number of marriage immigrants was 16,025, an increase of 4.3% from the previous year. Of these, 82.6% were women. Entering a multicultural society in a situation where empathy for each other is insufficient can lead to social conflict. In particular, in the COVID-19 pandemic, hostility toward foreigners is more prevalent, and hatred for strangers is increasing. This study critically analyzes these social phenomena and seeks to raise the philosophical basis for multicultural education by establishing a concept with a new perspective on the other. This paper focuses on the philosophy of Buber and Levinas. By establishing 'I and You' as a meeting, Buber presented a new relationship with others. Meanwhile, Levinas emphasized human ethics and responsibility as the absolute and infinite being of the other. According to Buber, in the world there is a relationship between 'I-You' and 'I-It', and in order to live a true life, you must establish a relationship between 'I and you'. The relationship between 'I and it' is a temporary and mechanical relationship where objects can be replaced at any time by looking at the world from an instrumental point of view. However, the relationship between 'I and You' is a relationship that faces each other personally, and the only 'I' that cannot be changed with anything and the 'You' that cannot be replaced exist in deep trust. In phenomenology of otherness, Levinas intends to describe the encounter with the something outside the subject. The concepts of possession, distinctiveness and understanding are replaced by those of approaches, proximity, care and fecundity. In Korean society, a policy that seeks to use foreigners as human resources and, especially in the case of marriage immigrant women, as a solution to a society with low birthrates along with the labor force, shows how society treats others. Therefore, multicultural education must rethink the existence and dignity of human beings through the perspective of the other as asserted in the philosophy of Buber and Levinas.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
György Kalmár

Abstract As the world is struggling with the Covid crisis and its numerous aftereffects, it is easy to forget that the present pandemic is only the latest of a whole series of paradigm-changing 21st-century crises. Indeed, the word “crisis” has become one of the key concepts for the understanding of the early 21st century. Thus, crisis seems very much to be the default position of the 21st century, the new norm. In this paper, I argue that the 21st century has a recognizably different cultural logic from what the previous one had: most of our social, ideological, political, financial, and ecological paradigms are either changing or will (or must) change soon. As most of our critical concepts, intellectual tools, and ideological frameworks were made during the boom years of the late 20th century, they are clearly outdated and inadequate today. Thus, in this paper, through taking account of these shifting intellectual and artistic paradigms, I attempt to indicate how the present crisis of knowledge and sense-making may be turned into a process of knowing and making sense of crisis, and thus help us meet the challenges of the new century. It is often through these fault-lines, breakdowns, and inconsistencies of our narratives that one may recognize those pre-crisis assumptions that we have to critically re-evaluate and update in order to understand the new century.1


2017 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniël P. Veldsman

Metaphysics has no place in the science-religion discourses (or dialogues) if understood as an a priori universal content of the nature and causes of all things. From an overview of the positive and negative dimensions and challenges of the contemporary science-religion discourses within each conversation partner itself and between the two, it is argued that metaphysical reflection represents a contextual-linguistic event that ‘takes place’ only after the contextual giveness is taken up within a very concrete historical-linguistic frame of reference for sense making. In a metaphoric sense, it is conclusively compared with the movements of atoms of which we can only state afterwards where the atoms have been. In this sense, McGrath’s remark that ‘(m)etaphysics is not the precondition of any engagement with the world, but its inferred consequence’ is supported. The ‘was’ of metaphysical thinking represents the emergent product of the concrete and specific lifeworlds in which they have ‘taken place’, that is, ‘eventuated’. The ‘was’ of metaphysical reflection is the most powerful (a posteriori) event of credofication (i.e. understanding life in terms of convictions of faith) for human beings in living, making sense of and participating empathically in the question ‘why there is something rather than nothing?’.


Daedalus ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 141 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Wood
Keyword(s):  

This essay explores the suggestion that many American narratives are supplementary, correcting narratives – alternatives to the main story on offer. The guiding thought is that of Henry James's “possible other case,” and the chief example is Cormac McCarthy's “No Country for Old Men,” in which one story after another fails to cope with the ongoing mystery it faces. The novel may imply, then, that narrative itself, rather than any individual report or fiction, is in crisis or has come to the end of its road. A coda to the essay proposes the option of nonnarrative understandings of the world in those extreme situations where storytelling is no longer the sense-making activity we so often take it to be.


2021 ◽  
pp. 122-165
Author(s):  
Marco Bernini

Beckett’s fictional minds are pensive and tensive cognitive agents. If rumination feels to many of them a task to be performed or a “pensum to discharge” (U, 304), it is the way they think, however, that sparks a sustained and unsolvable cognitive differential or tension: a state of liminality due to the fact that they are not yet, or not anymore, endowed with what it takes to navigate the world effortlessly and meaningfully. The twilight atmosphere of Beckett’s boundary storyworlds or innerscapes therefore exponentially resonates with the wavering cognitive processes of what this chapter will define as liminal minds. After an overture section reinforcing how liminality is a structural principle that applies to many of Beckett’s storyworlds on several domains, the chapter heads on to the cognitive functioning of Beckett’s fictional minds. The second section focuses on Beckett’s alteration of the enactive scaffolding co-operation of language, narrative, and motility in human development. The third section analyzes his lesioning of human teleological dispositions on the motivational and emotional level, as well as the malfunctioning of predictive processes. In the final section, it addresses what kind of readerly experience results from engaging with cognitive liminalism, where liminal minds are constantly occupied by the activity of sense-making without the functional possibility of making sense.


Discourse ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (5) ◽  
pp. 87-96
Author(s):  
N. K. Genidze

Introduction. The article analyses the vowel-consonant ratio as one of the most important criteria of phonetic typology in the world languages. Scientific relevance of the research is based on quantitative and qualitative analysis and comparison of grammar and phonetics in typologically, genetically and historically different languages.Methodology and sources. Certain language is determined by vocalic ratio – a concept introduced to identify the vowels-consonant relation and measured  through  vk = V/C. Thus, all the languages can be either vocalic (vk > 1.3), consonantal (vk < 0.7) or mixed (0.7 > vk > 1.3). The article concerns the ideas by Ferdinand de Saussure (Indo-European root’s structure) and Aleksander V. Isachenko (phonetic typology).Results and discussion. The author conducts a comparative analysis of phonological systems and phonetic analysis of text fragments in several languages of different families and different historical periods: Gothic, old English, old Icelandic, English, Danish, French, and Finnish. The research reveals how the language’s structure matches its vowel-consonant ratio, i. e. disclose a link between its phonetic and morphology-syntactic classifications.Conclusion. The research has proved the fact that analytic trends in phonemes, on the one hand, depend on the vowel-consonant distribution in the language and speech, and on historically determined difference between the phonemes’ function – on the other. Inevitably, too, the language’s evolution from inflectional-synthetic to analytic or agglutinative (analytic-agglutinative) type affects all language levels, including the phonetic one. Consonants are stronger and almost resistible  to  changes;  they  function  to distinguish the sense, making relative words so similar. The development of vowel system triggers the development of analytic functions, which are bound to impact the language system. Increasing number of vowels, emerging diphthongs and triphthongs are the result of analytic abilities of the language.


2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 413-422
Author(s):  
Paolo Costa

In broad terms, realism, relativism and pluralism can be regarded as the theoretical articulations of the following insights. Realism embodies the sense that what is at stake in our beliefs is something serious, i.e. that there is a fact of the matter, independent from our desire, which is going to decide whether what we believe in is true or not. Relativism, on the other hand, incorporates the realization that our cognitive take on the world is always perspectival, that there is no way to overcome the blind spot which enables the knower to have a world in view at all. Pluralism, finally, draws on the intuition that every human being and every human community cannot fully understand, let alone save themselves, without the help of others’ sense-making efforts. Against the background of Charles Taylor’s philosophy, the core of truth of the above insights will be discussed and arranged to develop an active view of toleration that not only urges us to put up with others, but encourages us to rely on the benefit of coming to terms with different outlooks and ways of life.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-93
Author(s):  
Hanna Meretoja

AbstractThis article analyses two major problems in the dichotomous framing of the question of whether narratives in fiction and “real life” are the same or different. The dichotomy prevents us from seeing, first, that there are both crucial similarities and differences between them and, second, that there are important similarities between variants of the “similarity approach” and the “difference approach”, both of which tend to rely on ahistorical, universalizing and empiricist-positivistic assumptions concerning factuality, raw experience and the non-referentiality of narrative fiction. The article presents as an alternative to both approaches narrative hermeneutics, which sees all narratives as culturally mediated and historically changing interpretative practices but approaches literary narratives as specific modes of making sense of the world – as ones that have truth-value on a different level than non-literary narratives. Narrative hermeneutics shares with (at least some forms of) unnatural narratology and the Örebro School a passion for the uniqueness of literary narratives, but it places the emphasis on the ability of literature to disclose the world to us in existentially charged ways that would not be otherwise culturally available – in ways that open up new possibilities of thought, action and affect.


TEKNOSASTIK ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Dina Amelia

There are two most inevitable issues on national literature, in this case Indonesian literature. First is the translation and the second is the standard of world literature. Can one speak for the other as a representative? Why is this representation matter? Does translation embody the voice of the represented? Without translation Indonesian literature cannot gain its recognition in world literature, yet, translation conveys the voice of other. In the case of production, publication, or distribution of Indonesian Literature to the world, translation works can be very beneficial. The position of Indonesian literature is as a part of world literature. The concept that the Western world should be the one who represent the subaltern can be overcome as long as the subaltern performs as the active speaker. If the subaltern remains silent then it means it allows the “representation” by the Western.


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