Theoretical and empirical arguments for the reassessment of the notion of paradigm

The volume discusses the breadth of applications for an extended notion of paradigm. Paradigms in this sense are not only tools of morphological description but constitute the inherent structure of grammar. Grammatical paradigms are structural sets forming holistic, semiotic structures with an informational value of their own. We argue that as such, paradigms are a part of speaker knowledge and provide necessary structuring for grammaticalization processes. The papers discuss theoretical as well as conceptual questions and explore different domains of grammatical phenomena, ranging from grammaticalization, morphology, and cognitive semantics to modality, aiming to illustrate what the concept of grammatical paradigms can and cannot (yet) explain

Communication and the Origins of Personhood

This thesis presents a communicative account of personhood that argues for the inseparability of the metaphysical and the practical concepts of a person. It connects these two concepts by coupling the question “what is a person” (concerning the necessary conditions of personhood) with the question "how does one become a person"(concerning its genetic conditions). It argues that participation in social interactions that are characterized by mutual recognition and giving-and-taking reasons implied by the practical concept of a person is in fact an ecological and developmental condition for an entity to possess the kind of characteristics and capacities such as reflexive self-consciousness addressed by the metaphysical concept. The chief theoretical contribution of the dissertation research lies, accordingly, in demonstrating that an adequate metaphysical concept of a person has to make reference to the kind of social processes that are necessary for the emergence and development of the distinguishing attributes of persons among other moving, perceiving, desiring and cognizing agents. Methodologically, it undertakes an original philosophical analysis that is enriched by an interdisciplinary investigation of several notions and insights from semiotics, comparative and developmental psychology, cognitive science and anthropology. The main argument of the thesis is that one becomes a person through internally recreating a social, communicative process; namely, that of dialogical transformation of habits. We find the paradigmatic case of this social process in mutual persuasion. The internalization of this process in the form of an inner dialogue cultivates a social self that is in ongoing communication with the embodied, organismic self of uncritically habituated attitudes, convictions and desires. This inner dialogue can be conceived as a temporally extended process of self-persuasion, which is characterized by an ongoing strive for attaining higher degrees of self-control; that is, for achieving a more coherent alignment between our habits and the kind of person we would like to be. It starts with self-interpretation and self-evaluation, and culminates in the formation of higher-order desires that facilitate habit-change and novel habit formation in accordance with certain social, moral, aesthetical or intellectual categories and norms one comes to endorse. For this reason, self-induced, deliberate habit-change is also a process of appropriation or self-appropriation, through which we strive to cultivate habits of feeling, thinking, acting that we can deem more truly ours. The thesis demonstrates that the capacity for engaging in this kind of self-persuasion consists chiefly in the capacities for metasemiosis, perspective-taking, and for cultivating habits of reflexivity. It explicates how all these capacities have a social origin and ultimately a social function by showing that they all presuppose certain higher-order communicative patterns that arose through an evolutionary and cultural history, and develop through the internal reconstruction of these patterns as cognitive-semiotic processes. The thesis concludes that becoming a kind of being who can engage in self-persuasion, thus a person, consists ultimately in internalizing the patterns of communicative social interactions in the form of an ongoing auto-communication.  Väitöskirjassa käsitellään persoonuuden kommunikatiivista prosessia ja osoitetaan, että persoonan metafyysiset ja käytännölliset käsitteet ovat erottamattomat. Nämä kaksi käsitettä yhdistetään tarkastelemalla kysymyksiä ”mikä on persoona” ja ”miten tullaan persoonaksi”. Väitöskirjassa osoitetaan, että osallistuminen sosiaaliseen kanssakäymiseen, johon kuuluu persoonan käytännön käsitteeseen kuuluva vastavuoroinen tunnustaminen sekä kompromissi, on itse asiassa entiteetin ekologinen ja kehityksellinen olotila, jossa se saavuttaa piirteitä ja taitoja, kuten persoonan metafyysisen käsitteen mukainen refleksiivinen itsetietoisuus. Väitöskirjan keskeinen teoreettinen tavoite on osoittaa, että persoonan onnistuneessa metafyysisessä käsitteessä on otettava huomioon sosiaaliset prosessit, jotka ovat välttämättömiä persoonan erityisten attribuuttien kehittymiselle, kuten liikkuminen, havaitseminen, haluaminen sekä kognitiiviset agentit. Väitöskirjan metodologia koostuu filosofisesta analyysista, jota monitieteisesti rikastutetaan semiotiikan, vertailevan ja kehityspsykologian, kognitiivisten tieteiden ja antropologian lähestymistavoilla. Väitöskirjan keskeinen teesi on, että agentista tulee persoona, kun se luo uudestaan sisäisesti sosiaalisen, kommunikatiivisen prosessin, toisin sanoen tapojen dialogisen transformaation kautta. Tämän sosiaalisen prosessin paradigmaattinen esimerkki on molemminpuolinen vakuuttaminen. Sen sisäistäminen sisäisen dialogin muotoon kehittää sosiaalista minuutta, joka on jatkuvassa kommunikaatiossa epäkriittisten asenteiden, vakaumusten ja halujen elimellisesti ruumiillistuneen minän kanssa. Tämä sisäinen dialogi voidaan mieltää itsensä suostuttelun prosessiksi. Itsensä suostuttelu on jatkuva pyrkimys saavuttaa itsehillinnän korkeampia tasoja, toisin sanoen saattaa yhteen tapamme ja se persoona, joka haluaisimme olla. Se alkaa itsearviolla ja huipentuu niiden ylevämpien halujen muodostumiseen, jotka edistävät persoonan tapojen muutosta niiden tiettyjen sosiaalisten, moraalisten, esteettisten ja intellektuaalisten normien mukaisesti, joita yksilö alkaa noudattamaan. Tästä syystä itse toteutettu tapojen muutos on myös itsensä hallitsemisen prosessi, jonka kautta me voimme kehittää tapoja, joita pidämme aidommin ominamme. Väitöskirja osoittaa, että taito ryhtyä itsensä suostutteluun muodostuu pääsääntöisesti kyvystä metasemioosiin, perspektiivin ottamisesta sekä refleksiivisyyden kehittämisestä. Se esittää, että kaikilla näillä taidoilla on sosiaalinen alkuperä ja viime kädessä sosiaalinen merkitys, osoittamalla, että ne kaikki edellyttävät tiettyjä ylevämpiä kommunikatiivisia malleja, jotka nousevat kehitys- ja kulttuurihistoriasta ja kehittyvät näiden mallien sisäisen rekonstruktion kautta kognitiivis-semioottisina prosesseina. Lopuksi väitöskirja osoittaa, että tuleminen sellaiseksi olevaksi, joka voi toteuttaa itsensä suostuttelun, toisin sanoen persoonaksi, muodostuu viime kädessä sosiaalisen kanssakäymisen kommunikatiivisten mallien sisäistämisestä jatkuvan autokommunikaation muodossa.

Drama, a connectionist model for robot learning: experiments on grounding communication through imitation in autonomous robots

The present dissertation addresses problems related to robot learning from demonstra¬ tion. It presents the building of a connectionist architecture, which provides the robot with the necessary cognitive and behavioural mechanisms for learning a synthetic lan¬ guage taught by an external teacher agent. This thesis considers three main issues: 1) learning of spatio-temporal invariance in a dynamic noisy environment, 2) symbol grounding of a robot's actions and perceptions, 3) development of a common symbolic representation of the world by heterogeneous agents.We build our approach on the assumption that grounding of symbolic communication creates constraints not only on the cognitive capabilities of the agent but also and especially on its behavioural capacities. Behavioural skills, such as imitation, which allow the agent to co-ordinate its actionn to that of the teacher agent, are required aside to general cognitive abilities of associativity, in order to constrain the agent's attention to making relevant perceptions, onto which it grounds the teacher agent's symbolic expression. In addition, the agent should be provided with the cognitive capacity for extracting spatial and temporal invariance in the continuous flow of its perceptions. Based on this requirement, we develop a connectionist architecture for learning time series. The model is a Dynamical Recurrent Associative Memory Architecture, called DRAMA. It is a fully connected recurrent neural network using Hebbian update rules. Learning is dynamic and unsupervised. The performance of the architecture is analysed theoretically, through numerical simulations and through physical and simulated robotic experiments. Training of the network is computationally fast and inexpensive, which allows its implementation for real time computation and on-line learning in a inexpensive hardware system. Robotic experiments are carried out with different learning tasks involving recognition of spatial and temporal invariance, namely landmark recognition and prediction of perception-action sequence in maze travelling.The architecture is applied to experiments on robot learning by imitation. A learner robot is taught by a teacher agent, a human instructor and another robot, a vocabulary to describe its perceptions and actions. The experiments are based on an imitative strategy, whereby the learner robot reproduces the teacher's actions. While imitating the teacher's movements, the learner robot makes similar proprio and exteroceptions to those of the teacher. The learner robot grounds the teacher's words onto the set of common perceptions they share. We carry out experiments in simulated and physical environments, using different robotic set-ups, increasing gradually the complexity of the task. In a first set of experiments, we study transmission of a vocabulary to designate actions and perception of a robot. Further, we carry out simulation studies, in which we investigate transmission and use of the vocabulary among a group of robotic agents. In a third set of experiments, we investigate learning sequences of the robot's perceptions, while wandering in a physically constrained environment. Finally, we present the implementation of DRAMA in Robota, a doll-like robot, which can imitate the arms and head movements of a human instructor. Through this imitative game, Robota is taught to perform and label dance patterns. Further, Robota is taught a basic language, including a lexicon and syntactical rules for the combination of words of the lexicon, to describe its actions and perception of touch onto its body

Dwelling in Political Landscapes

People all over the globe are experiencing unprecedented and often hazardous situations as environments change at speeds never before experienced. This edited collection proposes that anthropological perspectives on landscape have great potential to address the resulting conundrums. The contributions build particularly on phenomenological, structuralist and multi-species approaches to environmental perception and experience, but they also argue for incorporating political power into analysis alongside dwelling, cosmology and everyday practice. The book’s 13 ethnographically rich chapters explore how the material and the conceptual are entangled in and as landscapes, but it also looks at how these processes unfold at many scales in time and space, involving different actors with different powers. Thus it reaches towards new methodologies and new ways of using anthropology to engage with the sense of crisis concerning environment, movements of people, climate change and other planetary transformations. Dwelling in political landscapes: contemporary anthropological perspectives builds substantially upon anthropological work by Tim Ingold and others, which emphasises the ongoing and open-ended, yet historically conditioned ways in which humans and nonhumans produce the environments they inhabit. In such work, landscapes are understood as the medium and outcome of meaningful life activities, where humans, like other animals, dwell. This means that landscapes are neither social/cultural nor natural, but socio-natural. Protesting against and moving on from the proverbial dualisms of modern, Western and maybe capitalist thought, is only the first step in renewing anthropology’s methodology for the current epoch, however. The contributions ask how seemingly disconnected temporal, representational, economic and other systemic dynamics fold back on lived experience that are materialised in landscapes