Drawing Kafka’s Castle

We investigated the effects of narrative perspective on mental imagery by comparing responses to an English translation of Franz Kafka’s Das Schloß (The Castle) in the published version (narrated in the third person) versus an earlier (first-person) draft. We analysed participants’ pencil drawings of their imaginative experience for presence/absence of specific features (K. and the castle) and for image entropy (a proxy for image unpredictability). We also used word embeddings to perform cluster analysis of participants’ verbal free-response testimony, generating thematic clusters independently of experimenter expectations. We found no effects of text version on feature presence or overall entropy, but an effect on entropy variance, which was higher in the third-person condition. There was also an effect of text version on free responses: Readers of the third-person version were more likely to use words associated with mood and atmosphere. We offer conclusions on “Kafkaesque” aesthetics, cognitive realism, and the future of experimental literary studies.

Cognitive Penetration and Cognitive Realism

The paper addresses the issue of theory-ladenness of observation/experimentation. Motivated by a naturalistic reading of Thomas Kuhn's insights into the same topic, I draw on cognitive neuroscience (predictive coding under Free Energy Principle) to scrutinise theory-ladenness. I equate theory-ladenness with the cognitive penetrability of perceptual inferences and argue that strong theory-ladenness prevails only under uncertain circumstances. This understanding of theory-ladenness is in line with Thomas Kuhn's view on the same subject as well as a cognitive version of modest realism rather than downright antirealism.

The Relationship between Theology and Law on the Basis of the Encyclical Pacem in terris of John XXIII

The above research permits one to draw legal and theological conclusions. The first sub-point, presenting the legal value and social-political context of the papal teaching, permits the creation of a foundation for the following theological considerations. The second subpoint permits for the separation of the theology of the encyclical and its meaning for the whole document. The last sub-point reveals in what way the legal and theological elements intersect in the encyclical’s text and what consequences this has for ecclesiology and the methodology of research at the intersection of theology and law. This article presented many mutual points of reference for theology and law and emphasized their methodological and substantive autonomy. The encyclical Pacem in terris of John XXIII is a creative proposal for the cooperation between theology and law, in which the Pope follows the principle of efficacy, which is the desire that the catalogue created by him is not only theoretical but also actually used. His teaching focuses on the theme of peace, which seems to assume the meaning that has already placed on justice, and the Pope seems to make it the centre of all international relations. That, in turn, allows to distinguish peace as a clearly legal category and so decisive for the just character of law itself. Because of the connection between peace, God’s order and Christ’s mission, there is a perfect intersection between temporal matters regulated by law and supernatural ones, which are the subject of theology. There exist two alternative models of the unity of humankind: the natural and the ecclesial. They have a complementary character as the two paths leading to a common goal and take the form of attaining the commonly desired peace on earth and the unification of humanity in Christ, who is peace himself. The Pope uses legal language, which has characteristics manifesting the openness of theology to law and vice-versa. Among them are cognitive realism, universal concepts, universal themes, social efficacy, legal naturalism, and mutual inspiration.

Why post-cognitivism does not (necessarily) entail anti-computationalism

Post-cognitive approaches to cognitive science, such as enactivism and autopoietic theory, are typically assumed to involve the rejection of computationalism. We will argue that this assumption results from the conflation of computation with the notion of representation, which is ruled out by the post-cognitivist rejection of cognitive realism. However, certain theories of computation need not invoke representation, and are not committed to cognitive realism, meaning that post-cognitivism need not necessarily imply anti-computationalism. Finally, we will demonstrate that autopoietic theory shares a mechanistic foundation with these theories of computation, and is therefore well-equipped to take advantage of these theories.

What corpus-based Cognitive Linguistics can and cannot expect from neurolinguistics

This paper argues that neurolinguistics has the potential to yield insights that can feed back into corpus-based Cognitive Linguistics. It starts by discussing how far the cognitive realism of probabilistic statements derived from corpus data currently goes. Against this background, it argues that the cognitive realism of usage-based models could be further enhanced through deeper engagement with neurolinguistics, but also highlights a number of common misconceptions about what neurolinguistics can and cannot do for linguistic theorizing.

Challenging the classical notion of time in cognition: a quantum perspective

All mental representations change with time. A baseline intuition is that mental representations have specific values at different time points, which may be more or less accessible, depending on noise, forgetting processes, etc. We present a radical alternative, motivated by recent research using the mathematics from quantum theory for cognitive modelling. Such cognitive models raise the possibility that certain possibilities or events may be incompatible, so that perfect knowledge of one necessitates uncertainty for the others. In the context of time-dependence, in physics, this issue is explored with the so-called temporal Bell (TB) or Leggett–Garg inequalities. We consider in detail the theoretical and empirical challenges involved in exploring the TB inequalities in the context of cognitive systems. One interesting conclusion is that we believe the study of the TB inequalities to be empirically more constrained in psychology than in physics. Specifically, we show how the TB inequalities, as applied to cognitive systems, can be derived from two simple assumptions: cognitive realism and cognitive completeness. We discuss possible implications of putative violations of the TB inequalities for cognitive models and our understanding of time in cognition in general. Overall, this paper provides a surprising, novel direction in relation to how time should be conceptualized in cognition.