Afterword

2021 ◽  
pp. 269-277
Author(s):  
Terence Cave

The Afterword reframes this volume’s questions by arguing in favour of an emphasis on the communicative properties of song as an amalgam of words and music: the functions of song and of ordinary language overlap and coalesce in human practices. In place of the polar opposites that characterise nineteenth-century theory, what is proposed is a spectrum account of the language–music relation as an embodied cognitive event: how does human cognition manage the complex territory opened up by the synchronicities of music and language? This cognitive frame rests on the assumption that human activity, however far it reaches beyond the material ecology it arose from, is essentially local and situated. Songs are artefacts, special kinds of cognitive objects which have evolved within given cultural ecologies. Such artefacts are not one-way acts of human ‘intelligence’ doing things to the world, but the material form of an ecological relationship.

Author(s):  
Г.К. Рысбаева ◽  
Ш.Б. Бәйнеш

Аннотация: Бул макалада араб, перси, түрк тилдеринен кабыл алынган кудай («алла», «теңир») темасына байланыштуу когнитивдик фразеологизмдери иликтѳѳгѳ алынган. Учурда жалпы адамзаттык деңгээлде дүйнѳ таанууга тиешелүү дүйнонүн тилдик элеси маселеси жана филологиялык түшүнүктѳрдүн катарына кирет. «Тил –ойлоо –дүйнѳ» триядасында «Дүйнѳнүн тилдик элеси, дүйнѳнүн концептуалдык элеси» маселелерин изилдѳѳ азыркы тил илиминдеги актуалдуу маселелердин алкагына кирет. Дүйнөнүн тилдик элеси –тил маселесинде борбордук орунду ээлеген адамга тиешелүү тилдик формада жана структурада реалдуу болмуштун ѳзгѳчѳ ыкмада чагылдырылышы, элестелиши макалада кеңири сөз болот. Түйүндүү сѳздѳр: антропонимдер, тотемизм, анимизм, семантика, адам аттары,дүйнѳнүн образы, культтук сѳздѳр. Аннотация: В статье рассматриваются антропонимы арабско-персидского происхождения, посвящённые культу Бога («Құдай», «Алла», «Тәңірі»), а также связанные с ними когнитивные фразеологизмы в тюркских языках. В настоящее время рассмотрение языковой картины мира в общечеловеческих понятиях познания мира, являются философским и филологическим понятиями. Исследование «Языковой картины мира» и «Концептуальной картины мира» в триединстве «Язык-мышление-мир» является одной из актуальных проблем современного языкознания. Языковая картина мира - специфический для данного языка способ отражения и представления действительности в языковых формах и структурах в ее отношении с человеком, который является центральной фигурой языка. Ключевые слова: антропонимы, тотемизм, анимизм, семантика, имена людей, образ мира, культовое слово. ABSTRACT: The article deals with anthroponomy of the Arab-Persian origin that are devoted to the cults of the God, and related to them cognitive phraseologies in Turkic languages. The main cognitive concepts that are reflected in the national Turkic in verbal parasitological units from lingo-cultural and ethno linguistic aspects are analyzed. Now consider the language picture of the world in general human cognition in the unity of the world model, and with the same conceptual view of the world is a philosophical and philological concept. The study «Language world» and «Linguistic Map of the World» in the trinity «Language-thought-world» is one of the urgent problems of modern linguistics. Language world - a specific method for the language of reflection and representation of reality in language forms and structures in its relation with the person who is the central figure of the language. Keywords: anthroponyms, totemism, animism, semantics, names of people, image of the world, cult word.


Author(s):  
Steven Vogel

Environmentalismshould deal with theenvironment, meaning that which environs us; instead it too frequently deals with “nature.” If the latter term means that part of the world that humans haven’t transformed, the trouble is that naturedoesn’tenviron us: in the Anthropocene, we’re surrounded by an environment that humans have built. An environmentalism of the built environment would worry about why we’ve built it so badly, and would focus on the phenomenon of “reification,” whereby the actual practices of humans in constructing their world are hidden and the things and institutions surrounding us come to seem like “facts of nature.” Environmental problems are not problems about nature: they are social and political problems about how human practices ought to be organized and about the norms by which those practices ought to be guided.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (20) ◽  
pp. 01-09
Author(s):  
Mark Louis ◽  
Angelina Anne Fernandez ◽  
Nazura Abdul Manap ◽  
Shamini Kandasamy ◽  
Sin Yee Lee

Information technology is taking the world by storm. The technological world is changing rapidly and drastically. Human activities are taken over by robots and computers. The usage of computers and robots has increased productivity in various sectors. The emergence of artificial intelligence has stirred up many debates on both its importance and limitations. Artificial intelligence is directed to the usage of Information Technology in conducting tasks that normally require human intelligence. The expectation of artificial intelligence is high, nevertheless, artificial intelligence has its shortcomings namely the impact of artificial intelligence on the concept of a legal personality. The problem with artificial Intelligence is the debate on whether does it have a legal personality? And another problem is under what situation does the law treat artificial intelligence as an entity with its own rights and obligations. The objective of this article is to examine the various definitions of legal personality and whether artificial intelligence can become a legal person. The article will also examine the criminal liability of artificial intelligence when a crime has been committed. The methodology adopted is qualitative namely Doctrinal Legal Research by analyzing the relevant legal views from various journals on artificial intelligence. The study found out that artificial intelligence has its limitations in defining its legal personality and also in examining the criminal liability when a crime has been committed by robots.


Author(s):  
Alexey D. Koshelev ◽  

The paper presents a language of thought (a set of cognitive units and relations) used to provide non-verbal definitions for the following five concepts: ARMCHAIR, MUG, RAVINE, LAKE, TREE. These definitions make it possible to describe concepts on two levels of specificity. On the first level, a concept is presented as a holistic cognitive unit. On the second, more specific, level, the same concept is viewed as a partitive system, i.e. a hierarchical system of its parts, the latter being smaller concepts into which the original holistic unit is decomposed. A hypothesis is advanced that such structure is inherent to all visible objects. The partitive system is argued to play a major role in human cognition. It, first, provides for an in-depth understanding of the perceived objects through understanding the role of their parts, and, second, underlies the formation of the hierarchy of concepts with respect to their generality. Besides, it can be considered as one of the defining properties of the human species as it accounts for the human ability to purposefully change the world.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-86
Author(s):  
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.

Most everyone agrees that context is critical to the pragmatic interpretation of speakers’ utterances. But the enduring debate within cognitive science concerns when context has its influence in shaping people’s interpretations of what speakers imply by what they say. Some scholars maintain that context is only referred to after some initial linguistic analysis of an utterance has been performed, with other scholars arguing that context is present at all stages of immediate linguistic processing. Empirical research on this debate is, in my view, hopelessly deadlocked. My goal in this article is to advance a framework for thinking about the context for linguistic performance that conceives of human cognition and language use in terms of dynamical, self-organized processes. A self-organizational view of the context for linguistic performance demands that we acknowledge the multiple, interacting constraints which create, or soft-assemble, any specific moment of pragmatic experience. Pragmatic action and understanding is not producing or recovering a “meaning” but a continuously unfolding temporal process of the person adapting and orienting to the world. I discuss the implications of this view for the study of pragmatic meaning in discourse.


Author(s):  
Georg Northoff

Some recent philosophical discussions consider whether the brain is best understood as an open or closed system. This issue has major epistemic consequences akin to the scepticism engendered by the famous Cartesian demon. Specifically, one and the same empirical theory of brain function, predictive coding, entailing a prediction model of brain, have been associated with contradictory views of the brain as either open (Clark, 2012, 2013) or closed (Hohwy, 2013, 2014). Based on recent empirical evidence, the present paper argues that contrary to appearances, these views of the brain are compatible with one another. I suggest that there are two main forms of neural activity in the brain, one of which can be characterized as open, and the other as closed. Stimulus-induced activity, because it relies on predictive coding is indeed closed to the world, which entails that in certain respects, the brain is an inferentially secluded and self-evidencing system. In contrast, the brain’s resting state or spontaneous activity is best taken as open because it is a world-evidencing system that allows for the brain’s neural activity to align with the statistically-based spatiotemporal structure of objects and events in the world. This model requires an important caveat, however. Due to its statistically-based nature, the resting state’s alignment to the world comes in degrees. In extreme cases, the degree of alignment can be extremely low, resulting in a resting state that is barely if at all aligned to the world. This is for instance the case in schizophrenia. Clinical symptoms such as delusions and hallucinations in schizophrenics are indicative of the fundamental delicateness of the alignment between the brain’s resting-state and the world’s phenomena. Nevertheless, I argue that so long as we are dealing with a well-functioning brain, the more dire epistemic implications of predictive coding can be forestalled. That the brain is in part a self-evidencing system does not yield any generalizable reason to worry that human cognition is out of step with the real world. Instead, the brain is aligned to the world accounting for “world-brain relation” that mitigates sceptistic worries.


Author(s):  
Jay Schulkin

Sport as a practice and cognitive event is largely action-oriented: there is thought in action, even if it is not particularly conscious thought. Habits codified in the motor regions of the brain underlie action. Muscle memory is fundamental; it is a metaphor for the organization of action. Importantly, neurotransmitters such dopamine are tied to the organization of action, salience, cognition, and, perhaps, the prediction of events. Diverse regions of the brain (e.g., the amygdala) and neuropeptides (oxytocin) are linked to social contact and play-related behaviors, and these same regions are crucial to a broad-based assessment of social context and meaning.


Author(s):  
Alex Oliver

The name ‘logical atomism’ refers to a network of theses about the parts and structure of the world and the means by which language represents the world. Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, expounds a version of logical atomism developed by him around the time of the First World War, as does Russell in works published contemporaneously. It is no accident that their work on logical atomism shares a common surface description since it resulted from their mutual influence at Cambridge. The common theme is that the meaning of our sentences is rooted in a primitive relation between simple expressions and their simple worldly bearers, the logical atoms. In a logically perfect language, atomic sentences describe configurations of these atoms, and complex sentences are combinations of the atomic sentences. But sentences of ordinary language may have a misleading surface form which is revealed as such by analysis. The common theme masks considerable differences of doctrine. In particular, there are differences in the nature of logical atoms and in the arguments for the existence of these atoms.


Author(s):  
Cym Anthony Ryle

This chapter considers the fundamental characteristics of human cognition. It suggests that the capacity to make sense of the world involves a complex interaction between external realities and mental models. It considers that there are two complementary types of model—holistic representations, and models consisting of abstract componentsorganized in categories and hierarchies. It suggests that knowledge can be described as stable sets of models and their connections. It notes that reasoning is usually described as having two modes: Intuition operates rapidly and unconsciously; analysis requires sustained conscious effort. It argues that an absolute distinction between the two modes is artificial; intuition is usually the driving force, but effective reasoning depends on the synergy of both modes. It introduces the concept of bias and suggests that bias and intuition are inseparable.


2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-216
Author(s):  
Stéphanie Walsh Matthews ◽  
Marcel Danesi

Abstract Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a powerful new form of inquiry unto human cognition that has obvious implications for semiotic theories, practices, and modeling of mind, yet, as far as can be determined, it has hardly attracted the attention of semioticians in any meaningful analytical way. AI aims to model and thus penetrate mentality in all its forms (perception, cognition, emotion, etc.) and even to build artificial minds that will surpass human intelligence in the near future. This paper takes a look at AI through the lens of semiotic analysis, in the context of current philosophies such as posthumanism and transhumanism, which are based on the assumption that technology will improve the human condition and chart a path to the future progress of the human species. Semiotics must respond to the AI challenge, focusing on how abductive responses to the world generate meaning in the human sense, not in software or algorithms. The AI approach is instructive, but semiotics is much more relevant to the understanding of human cognition, because it studies signs as paths into the brain, not artificial models of that organ. The semiotic agenda can enrich AI by providing the relevant insight into human semiosis that may defy any attempt to model them.


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