Conceivability Errors and the Role of Imagination in Symbolization

n the years 1675-84, Leibniz sought to disprove Descartes’s account of clear and distinct perception by implementing a three-step argumentative strategy. The first part of the paper reconstructs the argument and highlights what aspects of Descartes’s epistemology it addresses. The reconstruction shows that the argument is based on conceivability errors. These are a kind of symbolic cognition that prove Descartes’s clear and distinct perception as introspectively indistinguishable from Leibniz’s symbolic cognition. The second part of the paper explores the epistemic implication of the indistinguishability between clear and distinct perception and symbolic cognition: the mind constitutively depends on products of the imagination. My conclusion addresses the role of the imagination in symbolization. Symbolization does not exceed imagination; it rather is an idealized use of cognitive surrogates, like characters, to submit to the imagination what is not subject to it.

Chuang Tzu’s selflessness: mind-state and the cultural semiotics of jingshen

The cognitive paradigm of symbols in ancient Chinese philosophy is quite distinct from that of Western semiotic circles. Chuang Tzu, one of the most influential ancient Chinese philosophers, concentrates his study on exploring the state of the subject’s selflessness and establishes his own cognitive paradigm of jingshen. This paper uses his statements of “I lost myself” and “The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror” in The adjustment of controversies of The Chuang Tzu, to investigate the ideal selfless mind-state and selflessness. It attempts to transfer the relationship between subject and object in symbolic cognition into the connection of intersubjectivity to construct jingshen’s cognitive paradigm of releasing symbolic meaning. The task of this research is to overcome the limitation created by the subject–object relation and finally to be “the Perfect Man” who can know the Dao.

Body schema dynamics in Merleau-Ponty

This chapter presents an account of Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the body schema as an operative intentionality that is not only opposed to, but also complexly intermingled with, the representation-like grasp of the world and one’s own body, or the body image. The chapter reconstructs Merleau-Ponty’s position primarily based on his preparatory notes for his 1953 lecture ‘The Sensible World and the World of Expression’. Here, Merleau-Ponty elaborates his earlier efforts to show that the body schema is a perceptual ground against which the perceived world stands out as a complex of perceptual figures. The chapter clarifies how Merleau-Ponty’s renewed interpretation of the figure-ground structure makes it possible for him to describe the relationship between body schema and perceptual (body) image as a strictly systematic phenomenon. Subsequently, the chapter shows how Merleau-Ponty understands apraxia, sleep, and perceptual orientation as examples of dedifferentiation and subtler differentiation of the body-schematic system. The last section clarifies how such body-schematic differentiating processes give rise to relatively independent superstructures of vision and symbolic cognition which constitute our body image. It, moreover, explains how, according to Merleau-Ponty, the cognitive superstructures always need to be supported by praxic operative intentionality to maintain their full sense, even though, in some cases, they have the power to compensate for praxic deficiencies.

A timeline for the acquisition of symbolic cognition in the human lineage

Human beings are symbolic in the sense that they—uniquely—partition the world into a vocabulary of mental symbols that can be recombined to make statements not only about things as they are, but as they might be. An appraisal of the archaeological and fossil records shows that this unusual way of manipulating information was a recent acquisition, and one that occurred within the tenure of Homo sapiens on the planet. Almost certainly, the necessary neural underpinnings were exaptively acquired along with the distinctive skeletal structure of Homo sapiens, although the new potential was only subsequently released by a necessarily cultural stimulus. This stimulus was most likely the spontaneous and sudden invention of language, the quintessential symbolic activity. That the algorithmic change in brain function involved was more frugal metabolically than its intuitive predecessor is strongly supported by the observed 12.7 percent diminution in average human brain volumes since the late Pleistocene.

Grounded separation: can the sensorimotor be grounded in the symbolic?

According to Lee and Schwarz, the sensorimotor experience of cleansing involves separating one physical entity from another and grounds mental separation of one psychological entity from another. We propose that cleansing effects may result from symbolic cognition. Instead of viewing abstract meanings as emerging from concrete physical acts of cleansing, this physical act may be appended with pre-existing, symbolic meaning.

The Cognitive Paradigm of Jingshen

At present, semiotic studies at home and abroad generally attach importance to the interpretation of symbols themselves, while the efforts in researching on the cognitive subject of symbols needs to be intensified and more attention should be paid to the process of symbolic activities. Cultural semiotics of jingshen attempts to construct a brand-new cognitive paradigm, not only to interpret the meaning of symbols, but also to develop the study of the relationship between the subject and the object in symbolic activities. In fact, the process of symbolic activities has been constantly emphasized in traditional Chinese culture. Although for an individual “the known” is infinite and “the knowable” is finite, the limitation of “the knowable” can be overcome through “self-cultivation.” The Chinese sages raised the concept of the “unity of three-tiered self-cultivation,” namely “unity of the mind and the body,” “unity of the mind and the objective world,” and “unity of apriorism and empiricism.” From the perspective of the cognitive paradigm, this concept gives due attention to the process of symbolic activities by emphasizing the effect of the cultivation of the cognitive subject on symbolic cognition and interpretation. The unity of the “three-tiered self-cultivation” of the cognitive subject can promote the development of a cultural semiotics of jingshen to construct an ideal cognitive paradigm in pursuing jingshen freedom and liberating symbolic meaning.

Symbolic Cognition in Poetic Experience: Re-representing the Paraphrase Paradox

This article considers an apparent tension between, on the one hand, a widespread belief among literature teachers that the appreciation of a poem involves an experience of form-content inseparability and, on the other hand, these same teachers’ use of paraphrase to encourage appreciation. Using Terrence Deacon’s model of art experience, I argue that the tensions of this ‘paraphrase paradox’ mirror tensions inherent in poetic experience. Section II draws upon work by Rafe McGregor, Peter Lamarque, and Peter Kivy to frame an approach to the form-content distinction, and to offer a brief overview of the paraphrase paradox. Sections III-IV summarize Deacon’s model of aesthetic experience, and argue that this model implies that poetic experience both triggers an impulse towards paraphrase, and frustrates this impulse. Section V looks at implications for the poetry teacher’s attempts to navigate the paraphrase paradox. Section VI tests these implications through an analysis of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Faith Healing’.