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Abstract not found

Abstract. A designer looking at a drawing sometimes notices things

To be published in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (in press)

Our brains make up a series of signs and are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds ” and so in thinking intelligently. An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of “externalization of the mind ” that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechanisms underling the semiotic emergence of abductive processes of meaning formation. To illustrate this process I will take advantage of the analysis of some aspects of the cognitive interplay between internal and external representations. I consider this interplay critical in analyzing the relation between meaningful semiotic internal resources and devices and their dynamical interactions with the externalized semiotic materiality suitably stocked in the environment. Hence, minds are material, “extended ” and artificial in themselves. A considerable part of human abductive thinking is occurring through an activity consisting in a kind of reification in the external environment (that originates what I call semiotic anchors) and a subsequent re–projection and reinterpretation through new configurations of neural networks and chemical processes. I also illustrate how this activity takes advantage of hybrid representations and how it can nicely account for various processes of creative and selective abduction, bringing up the question of how multimodal aspects involving a full range of sensory modalities are important in hypothetical reasoning.

representational neglect

It is generally accepted that there is something special about reasoning that uses mental images. The question of how it is special, however, has never been satisfactorily spelled out, despite over thirty years of research in the post-behaviorist tradition. This article considers some of the general motivation for the assumption that entertaining mental images involves inspecting a picture-like object. It sets out a distinction between phenomena attributable to the nature of mind, to what is called the cognitive architecture, and ones that are attributable to tacit knowledge used to simulate what would happen in a visual situation. With this distinction in mind the paper then considers in detail the widely held assumption that in some important sense images are spatially displayed or are depictive, and that examining images uses the same mechanisms that are deployed in visual perception. I argue that the assumption of the spatial or depictive nature of images is only explanatory if tak...

Contents 6. Seeing with the mind's eye 1: The puzzle of mental Imagery..6-2 6.1 What is the puzzle about mental imagery?.............................................................................................................6-2 6.2 Content, form and substance of representations ....................................................................................................6-6 6.3 What is responsible for the pattern of results obtained in imagery studies? ..............................................................6-7 6.3.1 Cognitive architecture or tacit knowledge ....................................................................................................6-7 6.3.2 Problem-solving by "mental simulation": Some additional examples ............................................................. 6-11 6.3.3 A Note concerning tacit knowledge and the criterion of cognitive penetrability.......................................... 6-20 6.3.4 Summary of so

Voir un objet, c’est ou bien l’avoir en marge du champ visuel et pouvoir le fixer, ou bien répondre effectivement à cette sollicitation en le fixant. Quand je le fixe, je m’ancre en lui, mais cet ‘arrêt ’ du regard n’est qu’une modalité de son mouvement: je continue à l’intérieur d’un objet l’exploration qui, tout à l’heure, les survolait tous. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1945 1.

Cognitivism, the traditional approach to understanding cognition, has argued for the essential role of symbolic computations over internal mental representations. But this view has been criticized on a number of grounds, one in particular being the assumption of amodality: that the symbols involved in processing are arbitrarily related to their referents. An opposing view—the framework of Perceptual Symbol Systems—holds that the elements of thought should be treated not as amodal symbols, but rather as modality specific, analog representations that simulate particular aspects of perceptual experience. Though this approach has been gaining in popularity from intuitively appealing theoretical accounts, and suggestive empirical support, it has suffered from a lack of specificity for key constructs. To address this problem, this paper presents a more detailed study of the foundational concept of perceptual symbol. The proposal builds from recent work on the skill-based nature of visual perception (the Sensorimotor Contingency Theory), and research that provides tools for representing the inseparable link between