Mental content : consequences of the embodied mind paradigm

The central difference between objectivist cognitivist semantics and embodied cognition consists in the fact that the latter is, in contrast to the former, mindful of binding meaning to context-sensitive mental systems. According to Lakoff/Johnson's experientialism, conceptual structures arise from preconceptual kinesthetic image-schematic and basic-level structures. Gallese and Lakoff introduced the notion of exploiting sensorimotor structures for higherlevel cognition. Three different types of X-schemas realise three types of environmentally embedded simulation: Areas that control movements in peri-personal space; canonical neurons of the ventral premotor cortex that fire when a graspable object is represented; the firing of mirror neurons while perceiving certain movements of conspecifics. ..

Construction of personal work-theory in the young administrator

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Statistical predictive validity has regularly been demonstrated for the complex selection procedure by which young high-potential administrative entrants are recruited to the Civil Service. There is, however, a largely unexplored qualitative aspect to recruitment as well. For most successful candidates, taking up appointment as trainee administrators represents a major life-transition - from full-time education to full-time employment. What is that experience like? How do they go about making sense of their new circumstances? Six trainees took part in the enquiry, which centred on a series of interviews carried out over the course of their first year at work. The focus in this ideographic study is on the individual as learner In a natural setting. Analysis of the accounts produced is set in a social cognition framework, and something of the approach of the ethnographer is also brought to bear. Particular attention is paid to the status of narrative as knowledge. A simple model is outlined for narrative-based reflection as a means to development, with the prospect of the individual acting as his or her own mentor in the process

ARCHITECTURAL MODELS AS LEARNING TOOLS

This book shows a variety of educational experiments that explore the use and meaning of ‘Architectural models as learning tools in education’both practically and theoretically

Concepts for the Representation, Storage, and Retrieval of Spatio-Temporal Objects in 3D/4D Geo-Informations-Systems

The quickly increasing number of spatio-temporal applications in fields like environmental management or geology is a new challenge to the development of database systems. This thesis addresses three areas of the problem of integrating spatio-temporal objects into databases. First, a new representational model for continuously changing, spatial 3D objects is introduced and transferred into a small system of classes within an object-oriented database framework. The model extends simplicial cell complexes to the spatio-temporal setting. The problem of closure under certain operations is investigated. Second, internal data structures are introduced that represent instances of the (user-level) spatio-temporal classes. A new technique provides a compromise between compact storage and efficient retrieval of spatio-temporal objects. These structures correspond to temporal graphs and support updates as well as the maintainance of connected components over time. Third, it is shown how to realise further operations on the new type of objects. Among these operations are range queries, intersection tests, and the Euclidean distance function

A cut in attention: reimagining attentional capacities for painting

This practice based PhD reimagines attentional capacities for painting. It asks how a contemporary painting practice can activate and critically engage with the limits and oscillations of attentional capacity. The cut in attention of the title instigates an interruption to restrictive models of attention, moving beyond expectations of attention that are idealised or characterised as though in deficit. Testing art historical and philosophical framings of attention against current cognitive and neuropsychological research, and in the context of wider social and economic levers for attentional manipulation, the attentional conditions of contemporary painting's production and reception are innovatively reevaluated. Drawing on the exchange between attention and the processes of memory and imagination, a pictorially generated methodology allows the practice to work within an expanded space for painting that can both picture and prompt attentional response. In considering painting as a set of conventions and discourses already attuned to attentional capture and modification, alongside painting's potential to resist attentional compliance through attentiveness to material, spatial and durational possibilities, a more complex and socially embedded position for painting opens up. The multi modalities, fluctuations and temporality of attention and distraction are positioned as attentional resources for painting. Navigating between the externally reactive and internally reflective, between tactile and visual stimuli or the shifts between focus and dispersal, enable attention to operate here as both subject and method in a radical process of reimagining

Johanssonian Investigations

In the last decades, Ingvar Johansson has made a formidable contribution to the development of philosophy and particularly that of metaphysics. This volume consists of original papers written by 50 philosophers from all over the world to celebrate his 70th birthday. The papers cover traditional issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, applied ethics, applied metaphysics, the nature of human rights, the philosophy of economics and sports

Experience and Belief: An Inquiry Into the Doxastic Variability of Experience

If what we believe can directly modify our (visual) experience, our experience is doxastically variable. If so, the following seems possible: our false and irrational background beliefs can modify our experience such that in it, things look distorted, or that it conforms with and appears to confirm the false and irrational beliefs that helped bring it about in the first place. If experience is doxastically variable, it seems, its epistemic function can be undermined. However, in this dissertation, I argue that we can devise accounts of (visual) experience that meet two requirements: they are fully compatible with all kinds of doxastic variation and on them, even doxastically variable experience serves to rationally constrain our beliefs. I begin with a novel interpretation of Hanson’s account of theory-laden observation—a valiant, yet ultimately unsuccessful attempt to meet both these requirements. Next, I analyze and reject various contemporary relationalist accounts of experience and the most sophisticated recent representationalist attempt to accommodate phenomena of doxastic variation: Siegel’s (Rich) Content View. Then, based on the lessons learned and drawing on Hanson’s and Gupta’s work, I show what shape a successful account may take. Ultimately, I argue for the following theses: 1) Neither of the two dominant accounts of experience—relationalism and standard representationalism—currently succeeds in satisfactorily meeting both requirements. 2) To arrive at accounts that do meet them, we should drop both the restrictive relationalist conception of experience as a relation to mind-independent items and the standard representationalist conception of experience as justifying beliefs. 3) We make progress by adopting both the general conception of experience as making rational transitions to beliefs, judgments, and actions and a (slightly) modified version of Gupta’s presentationalist account of experiential phenomenology. Finally, 4) the possibility of devising successful accounts is independent of a major issue dividing relationalists and representationalists: whether experience has content. In the final chapters, I address various follow-up questions concerning the nature of views, conceptual capacities, conceptual content, and linkages between a subject’s experience and her responses. In concluding, I show that the account of experience I recommend is widely applicable in philosophy and beyond

Johanssonian Investigations

In the last decades, Ingvar Johansson has made a formidable contribution to the development of philosophy and particularly that of metaphysics. This volume consists of original papers written by 50 philosophers from all over the world to celebrate his 70th birthday. The papers cover traditional issues in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, applied ethics, applied metaphysics, the nature of human rights, the philosophy of economics and sports