Unity in Variety: Theoretical, Practical and Aesthetic Reason in Kant

The main task of the paper is to explore Kant’s understanding of what unites the three kinds of judgment that he regards as the signature judgments of the three fundamental faculties of the mind--theoretical, practical and aesthetic judgments--in a way that preserves their fundamental differences. I argue that these are differences in kind not only in degree; or, in the terms I motivate in the paper, differences in form. Thus, I aim to show that (1) the Romantic unity of knowing, doing, and enjoying is not only inspired by Kant, but is in Kant’s own writings, and that (2) Kant understands this unity as a unity within a categorical variety: for him, theoretical judgment, practical judgment, and aesthetic judgment are the paradigmatic judgments of three formally different and irreducible rational capacities. I argue that a chief component in understanding the unity in this multiplicity is the imagination. This is because lawfulness turns out to be an essential mark of the “high” or “rational” aspects of the mind. But, for Kant, human beings can be lawful, and thus rational, in and of their world, only insofar as they are also imaginative. It is the imagination that allows us to be rational in our empirical world: to be rational animals

Contextual Effects on Metaphor Comprehension: Experiment and Simulation

This paper presents a computational model of referential metaphor comprehension. This model is designed on top of Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a model of the representation of word and text meanings. Compre­hending a referential metaphor consists in scanning the semantic neighbors of the metaphor in order to find words that are also semantically related to the context. The depth of that search is compared to the time it takes for humans to process a metaphor. In particular, we are interested in two independent variables : the nature of the reference (either a literal meaning or a figurative meaning) and the nature of the context (inductive or not inductive). We show that, for both humans and model, first, metaphors take longer to process than the literal meanings and second, an inductive context can shorten the processing time

Category theory and set theory as theories about complementary types of universals

Instead of the half-century old foundational feud between set theory and category theory, this paper argues that they are theories about two different complementary types of universals. The set-theoretic antinomies forced naïve set theory to be reformulated using some iterative notion of a set so that a set would always have higher type or rank than its members. Then the universal u_{F}={x|F(x)} for a property F() could never be self-predicative in the sense of u_{F}∈u_{F}. But the mathematical theory of categories, dating from the mid-twentieth century, includes a theory of always-self-predicative universals--which can be seen as forming the "other bookend" to the never-self-predicative universals of set theory. The self-predicative universals of category theory show that the problem in the antinomies was not self-predication per se, but negated self-predication. They also provide a model (in the Platonic Heaven of mathematics) for the self-predicative strand of Plato's Theory of Forms as well as for the idea of a "concrete universal" in Hegel and similar ideas of paradigmatic exemplars in ordinary thought

Visual Reference and Iconic Content

Evidence from cognitive science supports the claim that humans and other animals see the world as divided into objects. Although this claim is widely accepted, it remains unclear whether the mechanisms of visual reference have representational content or are directly instantiated in the functional architecture. I put forward a version of the former approach that construes object files as icons for objects. This view is consistent with the evidence that motivates the architectural account, can respond to the key arguments against representational accounts, and has explanatory advantages. I draw general lessons for the philosophy of perception and the naturalization of intentionality

The Linguistic Determination of Conscious Thought Contents

In this paper we address the question of what determines the content of our conscious episodes of thinking, considering recent claims that phenomenal character individuates thought contents. We present one prominent way for defenders of phenomenal intentionality to develop that view and then examine ‘sensory inner speech views’, which provide an alternative way of accounting for thought-content determinacy. We argue that such views fare well with inner speech thinking but have problems accounting for unsymbolized thinking. Within this dialectic, we present an account of the nature of unsymbolized thinking that accords with and can be seen as a continuation of the activity of inner speech, while offering a way of explaining thought-content determinacy in terms of linguistic structures and representation

NETMET: A Program for Generating and Interpreting Metaphors

Metaphors have computable semantics. A program called NETMET both generates metaphors and produces partial literal interpretations of metaphors. NETMET is based on Kittay's semantic field theory of metaphor and Black's interaction theory of metaphor. Input to NETMET consists of a list of literal propositions. NETMET creates metaphors by finding topic and source semantic fields, producing an analogical map from source to topic, then generating utterances in which terms in the source are identified with or predicated of terms in the topic. Given a metaphor, NETMET utilizes if-then rules to generate the implication complex of that metaphor. The literal leaves of the implication complex comprise a partial literal interpretation

The ‘nouniness’ of attributive adjectives and ‘verbiness’ of predicative adjectives:Evidence from phonology

This article investigates prototypically attributive versus predicative adjectives in English in terms of the phonological properties that have been associated especially with nouns versus verbs in a substantial body of psycholinguistic research (e.g. Kelly 1992) - often ignored in theoretical linguistic work on word classes. Inspired by Berg's (2000, 2009) 'cross-level harmony constraint', the hypothesis I test is that prototypically attributive adjectives not only align more with nouns than with verbs syntactically, semantically and pragmatically, but also phonologically - and likewise for prototypically predicative adjectives and verbs. I analyse the phonological structure of frequent adjectives from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and show that the data do indeed support the hypothesis. Berg's 'cross-level harmony constraint' may thus apply not only to the entire word classes noun, verb and adjective, but also to these two adjectival subclasses. I discuss several theoretical issues that emerge. The facts are most readily accommodated in a usage-based model, such as Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001), where these adjectives are seen as forming two distinct but overlapping classes. Drawing also on recent research by Boyd & Goldberg (2011) and Hao (2015), I explore the possible nature and emergence of these classes in some detail

Thought about Properties: Why the Perceptual Case is Basic

This paper defends a version of the old empiricist claim that to think about unobservable physical properties a subject must be able to think perception-based thoughts about observable properties. The central argument builds upon foundations laid down by G. E. M. Anscombe and P. F. Strawson. It bridges the gap separating these foundations and the target claim by exploiting a neglected connection between thought about properties and our grasp of causation. This way of bridging the gap promises to introduce substantive constraints on right accounts of perception and perception-based thought