The Prometheus Challenge Redux

Following up on its predecessor in this Journal, the article defends philosophy as a guide to making and analyzing art; identifies Cubist solutions to the Prometheus Challenge, including a novel analysis of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; defines a new concept of aesthetic attitude; proves the compatibility of Prometheus Challenge artworks with logic; and explains why Plato would have welcomed such artworks in his ideal state

Affect and Group Attachments: The Role of Shared Responsibility

This paper theorizes the role of shared responsibility in the development of affective group attachments, interweaving ideas from social exchange and social identity theories. The main arguments are that (1) people engaged in task interaction experience positive or negative emotions from those interactions; (2) tasks that promote more sense of shared responsibility across members lead people to attribute their individual emotions to groups or organizations; and (3) group attributions of own emotions are the basis for stronger or weaker group attachments. The paper suggests that social categorization and structural interdependence promote group attachments by producing task interactions that have positive emotional effects on those involved

Entertaining situated messaging at home

Leisure and entertainment-based computing has been traditionally associated with interactive entertainment media and game playing, yet the forms of engagement offered by these technologies only support a small part of how we act when we are at leisure. In this paper, we move away from the paradigm of leisure technology as computer-based entertainment consumption, and towards a broader view of leisure computing. This perspective is more in line with our everyday experience of leisure as an embodied, everyday accomplishment in which people artfully employ the everyday resources in the world around them in carrying out their daily lives outside of work. We develop this extended notion of leisure using data from a field study of domestic communication focusing on asynchronous and situated messaging to explore some of these issues, and develop these findings towards design implications for leisure technologies. Central to our discussion on the normal, everyday and occasioned conduct of leisure lie the notions of playfulness and creativity, the interweaving of the worlds of work and leisure, and in the creation of embodied displays of affect, all of which may be seen manifested in the use of messaging artefacts. This view of technology in support of leisure-in-the-broad is strongly divergent from traditional entertainment computing models in its coupling of the mechanics of the organisation of everyday life to the ways that we make entertainment for ourselves. This recognition allows us to draw specific implications for domestic situated messaging technologies, but also more generally for technology design by tying activities that we tend to regard as purely functional to other multifaceted and leisure-related purposes

Social positioning: Designing the Seams between Social, Physical and Digital Space

Mobile settings are not only physically and digitally mediated; they are also inhabited by people - a social space. We argue that careful design exposing the connections, gaps, overlays and mismatches within and between physical, digital and social space allow for a better understanding and thereby mastering of the resulting combined space. Two concepts are explored in MobiTip, a social mobile service for exchanging opinions among peers: intramedia seams concerning network coverage and position technology, and intermedia seams between digitally transmitted tips and the physical, social context surrounding the user. We introduce social positioning as an alternative and complement to the current strive for seamless connectedness and exact positioning in physical space

An Affect Theory of Social Exchange

This article develops a theory that explains how and when emotions, produced by social exchange, generate stronger or weaker ties to relations, groups, or networks. It is argued that social exchange produces positive or negative global feelings, which are internally rewarding or punishing. The theory indicates that social units (relations, groups, networks) are perceived as a source of these feelings, contingent on the degree of jointness in the exchange task. The jointness of the task is greatest if (1) actors find it difficult to distinguish their individual effects on or contributions to solving the exchange task (nonseparability) and (2) actors perceive a shared responsibility for success or failure at the exchange task. The theory explicates the effects of different exchange structures on these conditions and, in turn, on cohesion and solidarity. Implications are developed for network-to-group transformations

The Prometheus Challenge

Degas, Manet, Picasso, Dali and Lipchitz produced works of art exemplifying a seeming impossibility: Not only combining incompatible attributes but doing so consistently with aesthetic strictures Horace formulated in Ars Poetica. The article explains how these artists were able to do this, achieving what some critics have called ‘a new art,’ ‘a miracle,’ and ‘a new metaphor.’ The article also argues that the author achieved the same result in sculpture by means of philosophical analysis – probably a first in the history of art

Significance of Textile Production the Argaric Culture (Spain)

In recent decades, research on the Bronze Age in the south-east of the Iberian Peninsula has focused mainly on analysis of the processes of hierarchy and social development. The valued archaeological indicators have been very diverse: from the ceramic and metallurgical specialization, to the normalization of funeral practices or the settlement pattern. However, only in recent years the importance of textile production in these processes has begun to be considered. With the present work we intend to evaluate the importance of this basic and fundamental craft, assessing the set of labour processes involved, the degree of specialization achieved, and the social value granted to textile products in the Bronze Age culture of El Argar.En las últimas décadas, las investigaciones sobre la Edad del Bronce en el Sudeste de la península ibérica se han centrado preferentemente en análisis de los procesos de jerarquización y desarrollo social. Los indicadores arqueológicos valorados han sido muy diversos: desde la especialización cerámica y metalúrgica, a la normalización de las prácticas funerarias o el patrón de asentamiento. Sin embargo, sólo en los últimos años comienza a ser considerada la importancia de la producción textil en dichos procesos. Con el presente trabajo pretendemos evaluar la importancia de esta artesanía básica y fundamental, valorando el conjunto de procesos laborales implicados, el grado de especialización alcanzado y el valor social otorgado a los productos textiles en la cultura de El Argar.This research has been carried out within the framework of the project “Espacios sociales y espacios de frontera durante el Calcolítico y la Edad del Bronce en el Levante de la península ibérica” (HAR2016-76586-P),” funded by el Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad del gobierno de España

An integrated theory of language production and comprehension

Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume that actors construct forward models of their actions before they execute those actions, and that perceivers of others' actions covertly imitate those actions, then construct forward models of those actions. We use these accounts of action, action perception, and joint action to develop accounts of production, comprehension, and interactive language. Importantly, they incorporate well-defined levels of linguistic representation (such as semantics, syntax, and phonology). We show (a) how speakers and comprehenders use covert imitation and forward modeling to make predictions at these levels of representation, (b) how they interweave production and comprehension processes, and (c) how they use these predictions to monitor the upcoming utterances. We show how these accounts explain a range of behavioral and neuroscientific data on language processing and discuss some of the implications of our proposal

Towards a complete multiple-mechanism account of predictive language processing [Commentary on Pickering & Garrod]

Although we agree with Pickering & Garrod (P&G) that prediction-by-simulation and prediction-by-association are important mechanisms of anticipatory language processing, this commentary suggests that they: (1) overlook other potential mechanisms that might underlie prediction in language processing, (2) overestimate the importance of prediction-by-association in early childhood, and (3) underestimate the complexity and significance of several factors that might mediate prediction during language processing