The authoress attempts at organizing the concepts of contemporary cognitive science and showing definitions and relations between concepts of brain, mind, consciousness, and thinking.
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In the twentieth century the phenomenon of the subjective body was integrated into ontology in philosophy, moving from Phenomenology to Existentialism. The rediscovery of the body and affect as a way of thinking also led contemporary cognitive science to the topic of the relationship between emotion and cognition, to the necessity of expanding the model of the mind and of experiencing emotions and physical sensation. The extension of the explanatory possibilities of a scholarly metalanguage into the area of the emotions and physical sensation is also important for the analysis of the acoustic aspect of lyric verse. In the acoustic flow of verse, the sounds of language have, apart from a phonemic function, their own sensuous (emotional) effect of the articulating body. In literary studies so far the acoustic flow has been interpreted only at the segmental level as a sequence of phonemes or sounds (for example in constructs of acoustic succession, phonetic instrumentation, or phonetic composition). At the suprasegmental level the acoustic flow must be conceived of as a sequence of syllables, a sequence of articulated phonations, the semantic movement of the phonemic flow. A syllable has no semantic value, but does have an experiential form, which influences motivation, behaviour, and experience. In addition to sonic and tonal modulation at the suprasegmental level, qualitative modulation, modulation of timbre, and the sequences of tones and of noise are also employed. In modelling the semantic movement of syllables in a phonemic flow the methodological approaches of experimental psychosemantics have been used. Connotational objectivization took place in three dimensions that were polarized on the basis of domestic and alien, light and darkness, activity and passivity, and research was conducted with a sample of 2,800 respondents. The analysis of the acoustic side of lyric verse would be incomplete if in addition to accentual rhythm and melody we did not also consider qualitative modulation, the semantic movement of the phonic flow. At the segmental level of verse, phonemes are semantically completed by the lexical meanings of words. This semantic process is parallel to the semantic process of the phonemic flow, but apart from the metrical correspondence between them there is no causal connection, only similar semantic content. In addition to the semantic movement of the phonational flow and the semantic saturation of phonemes, the dynamic of the acoustic process of verse completes the phonic line of the verse, which in itself links occurrences of sonic and tonal modulation.
The study briefly reflects on the Slovak interest in cognitive science, in the cognitive research of language. It is conceived as a kind of polemics with the idea of cognitive literary science as a so-called hard discipline. The authoress of the study seeks the arguments for the polemics in the literary scientific research close to linguistics, cognitive/cultural linguistics, cognitive psychology and last but not least in the present direction of literary theory. The closest is the conception of the Krakow literary scholars which they call 'cultural theory of literature'. A reply to the hard research conception of 'cognitive literary science' are the examined transdisciplinary 'cognitive-literary symptoms', as for instance 'the modality of a literary statement', or the 'support points' of the common orientation in the literary events.
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There has been an ongoing intensive research of the nature of human mind in contemporary cognitive science. The author ś aim is to point out the role of metaphorical language in the experimental and theoretical mind studies. The analysis subject is to emphasize heuristic and argumentative function of metaphor in models of cognitive science representatives. Viability of this strategy appears by solving problems reaching beyond the imaginary boundaries of disciplines, f.e. reality-fiction, literal-metaphorical, text understanding, the nature of truth etc. putting significance on the function of metaphorical language in art, philosophy and science has become a great challenge for reconsidering traditional approaches to the study of human mind, body and reality.
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It is now conventional wisdom that conscious experience — or in Nagel’s canonical characterization, “what it is like to be” for an organism — is what makes the mind-body problem so intractable. By the same token, our current conceptions of the mind-body relation are inadequate and some conceptual development is urgently needed. Our overall aim in this paper is to make some progress towards that conceptual development. We first examine a currently neglected, yet fundamental aspect of consciousness. This aspect is the spontaneity of consciousness, by which we mean its inner plasticity and inner purposiveness. We then sketch a “neurophenomenological” framework for thinking about the relationship between the spontaneity of consciousness and dynamic patterns of brain activity as studied in cognitive neuroscience. We conclude by proposing that the conscious mentality of sentient organisms or animals is active and dynamic, and that this “enactive” conception of consciousness can help us to move beyond the classical dichotomy between materialism and dualism.
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Abstract In this article I take an unusual starting point from which to argue for a unified cognitive science, namely a position defined by what is sometimes called the ‘life-mind continuity thesis’. Accordingly, rather than taking a widely accepted starting point for granted and using it in order to propose answers to some well defined questions, I must first establish that the idea of life-mind continuity can amount to a proper starting point at all. To begin with, I therefore assess the conceptual tools which are available to construct a theory of mind on this basis. By drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines, especially from a combination of existential phenomenology and organism-centered biology, I argue that mind can indeed be conceived as rooted in life, but only if we accept at the same time that social interaction plays a constitutive role for our cognitive capacities.
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Philosophical hermeneutics, understood as the theory of interpretation, investigates some questions that are also asked in the cognitive sciences. The nature of human understanding, the way that we gain and organize knowledge, the role played by language and memory in these considerations, the relations between conscious and unconscious knowledge, and how we understand other persons, are all good examples of issues that form the intersection of hermeneutics and the cognitive sciences. Although hermeneutics is most often contrasted with the natural sciences, there are some clear ways in which hermeneutics can contribute to the cognitive sciences and vice versa.
In his book 'How Homo Became Sapiens: On the Evolution of Thinking', Peter Gardenfors, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Lund, presents his original concept concerning the order of the increase of the number of functions of human mind such as planning, imitation, understanding of reasons or self-consciousness. Gardenfors assumes the modular theory of mind and tries to substantiate why natural selection prefers those organisms which minds were equipped with these functions. The present article is a summary of the main idea of Gardenfors, an explanation of his terms and an attempt to draw a philosophical conclusions of Gardenfors' concept.
The aim of the paper is to rethink the concept of thinking. The author attempts to show that, despite the recent developments of cognitive science, the present understanding of the phenomenon of human thinking is far from perfect. However, one can improve this understanding by using the conceptual apparatus of the Lvov-Warsaw school.
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In the article, I propose that the body phantom is a phenomenal and functional model of one’s own body. This model has two aspects. On the one hand, it functions as a tacit sensory representation of the body that is at the same time related to the motor aspects of body functioning. On the other hand, it also has a phenomenal aspect as it constitutes the content of conscious bodily experience. This sort of tacit, functional and sensory model is related to the spatial parameters of the physical body. In the article, I postulate that this functional model or map is of crucial importance to the felt ownership parameters of the body (de Vignemont 2007), which are themselves considered as constituting the phenomenal aspect of the aforementioned model.
Jesensky‘s 'Democrats' is not a realistic work in the sense that it would provide an account of the outer phenomenal reality. Such a view of realism is generally accepted, though no doubt misleading. The novel 'The Democrats' depicts the Slovak society in the 1930s. Time and history are related to the thematic layer of the literary work - the 'real' thematic framework is usually considered the main indicator of the realistic character of artistic prose. The authoress of the study approaches the novel from the cognitive perspective. Her aim is to create a certain foundation from which it would be possible to start the research of the so-called realism in modernism. Therefore, one should take seriously the arguments of cognitive science that the objective theory of meaning based on probabilistic conditions failed; that most of the terms are not classical (completely definable) but on the contrary, most of the every-day language is metaphorical. A rhetorical question may be asked: Is not the classical literary theoretical distinction between semantics and pragmatics useless, if it is obvious that in the human, and thus, also in the literary language, it is not possible to ignore the width and the depth of human experience?
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No more than a few years ago could open an article concerning neurophenomenology with a statement describing recent rediscovery of the problem of consciousness by the cognitive sciences and pointing to the fact that right now, explaining conscious experience in neuroscientific or computational terms poses the greatest challenge for those sciences. Today however, constatations of this sort start to sound like trivial descriptions of a universally recognized state of affairs. The question of “how the water of the physical brain is turned into a wine of consciousness” is now among the mainstream problems of cognitive science.
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Author comments Rick Grush’s statements about emulation and embodied approach to representation. He proposes his modification of Grush’s definition of emulation, criticizing notion of “standing in for”. He defends of notion of representation. He claims that radical embodied theories are not applicable to all cognition, [editorial abstract]
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This paper responds to the issues raised by D. Chalmers by offering a research direction which is quite radical because of the way in which methodological principles are linked to scientific studies of consciousness. Neuro-phenomenology is the name I use here to designate a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience, thereby placing myself in the lineage of the continental tradition of Phenomenology. My claim is that the so-called hard problem that animates these Special Issues can only be addressed productively by gathering a research community armed with new pragmatic tools for the development of a science of consciousness. I will claim that no piecemeal empirical correlates, nor purely theoretical principles, will really help us at this stage. We need to turn to a systematic exploration of the only link between mind and consciousness that seems both obvious and natural: the structure of human experience itself. In what follows I motivate my choice by briefly examining the current debate about consciousness at the light of Chalmer's hard problem. Next, I outline the (neuro)phenomenological strategy. Finally I conclude by discussing some of the main difficulties and consequences of this strategy.
The article reflects on influential views of the mind that come from cognitive science and seem to undermine the traditional philosophical view that the mind is simply unified and transparent to itself. Specifically, the modularity thesis is presented, along with its important modifications and criticisms, suggesting that the apparent unity can be ascribed only to higher cognition, if at all. Various theories of why the mind seems to be unified while being composed of autonomous modules are discussed. The overview results in the conclusion that our linguistic capacity plays a prominent role in the unity of the mind.
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The first two parts of this article outline the context of cognitive and cultural linguistics. It discusses, first, its starting point in empirical realism and anthropocentrism and its conception of the universal and the relative. It then briefly explains the basic concepts and the bases of this approach to language and the human mind: the linguistic picture of the world, corporeality, conceptual metaphor, and categorization (particularly in connection with linguistic meaning). The third and most important part of the article demonstrates, on using examples from the poetry of Holan, Skácel, and Topinka, the stimuli that might link cognitive experience with the conception of the poetic text, and thus aid the interpretation of poetry. This is primarily a matter of connotations. According to the chief representatives of cognitive-cultural linguistics, the Polish scholars Ryszard Tokarski and Anna Pajdzinska, poetry provides ample evidence, from the point of view of semantics, for verbal connotations that are otherwise unregistrable. This implies processes of recategorization and relativization of normal functional meanings, which are most blatant, in Pajdzinska's terms, in 'poetic definitions'. Re-evaluation and relativization apply also to normal conceptual schemes. Here, I write about 'linking' and 'container'. The last part of the article concerns the conceptualization of speech, as it may be interpreted on the basis of Miloslav Topinka's collection of verse 'Krysí hnizdo' (Rat Hole).
The current paper puts forward the relationship between morality and evolutionary sciences and limits of evolutionary explanation. In order to study these connections, the following steps are taken: firstly, structure of evolutionary theory is presented. General evolutionary mechanisms (natural selection, sexual selection, kin selection) are summarized in detail. Secondly, middle-level evolutionary theories (reciprocal altruism, parental investment, parent-offspring conflict) are presented in context of morality and ethics. Thirdly, relationships between two visions of morality - 'Veneer Theory' and 'View of Morality as an Outgrowth of the Social Instincts' - are discussed in the light of the scientific arguments. Finally, the need to consider cognitive science and evolutionary psychology in naturalizing morality is demonstrated.
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