Although the role of morphology in evolutionary theory remains a subject of debate, assessing the contributions of morphological investigation to evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-devo) is a more circumscribed issue of direct relevance to ongoing research. Historical studies of morphologically oriented researchers and the formation of the Modern Synthesis in the Anglo-American context identify a recurring theme: the synthetic theory of evolution did not capture multiple levels of biological organization. When this feature is incorporated into a philosophical framework for explaining (...) the origin of evolutionary innovations and novelties (a core domain of inquiry in Evo-devo) two specific roles for morphology can be described: (1) the conceptualization and operational identification of the targets of explanation; and (2) the elucidation of causal interactions at higher levels of organization during ontogeny and through evolutionary time. These roles are critical components of any adequate explanation of innovation and novelty though not exhaustive of the parts played by morphology in evolutionary investigation. They also invite reflection on what counts as an evolutionary cause in contemporary evolutionary biology. (shrink)

ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate the morphometric alterations in the cortical and subcortical structures in multiple system atrophy patients with mild cognitive impairment, and to explore the association with cognitive deficits.MethodsA total of 45 MSA patients and 29 healthy controls were recruited. FreeSurfer software was used to analyze cortical thickness, and voxel-based morphometry was used to analyze the gray matter volumes. Cortical thickness and gray matter volume changes were correlated with cognitive scores.ResultsCompared to healthy controls, both MSA subgroups exhibited widespread (...) morphology alterations of brain structures in the fronto-temporal regions. Direct comparison of MSA-MCI and MSA-only patients showed volume reduction in the left superior and middle temporal gyrus, while cortical thinning was found in the left middle and inferior temporal gyrus in MSA-MCI patients. Cortical thinning in the left middle temporal gyrus correlated with cognitive assessment and disease duration.ConclusionStructural changes in the brain occur in MSA-MCI patients. The alteration of brain structure in the left temporal regions might be a biomarker of cognitive decline in MSA-MCI patients. (shrink)

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advances in understanding of learning in the sciences of the artificial, natural sciences, and philosophy. The question is, what at this stage of the development the inspiration from nature, specifically its computational models such as (...) info-computation through morphological computing, can contribute to machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how much on the other hand models and experiments in machine learning and robotics can motivate, justify, and inform research in computational cognitive science, neurosciences, and computing nature. We propose that one contribution can be understanding of the mechanisms of ‘learning to learn’, as a step towards deep learning with symbolic layer of computation/information processing in a framework linking connectionism with symbolism. As all natural systems possessing intelligence are cognitive systems, we describe the evolutionary arguments for the necessity of learning to learn for a system to reach humanlevel intelligence through evolution and development. The paper thus presents a contribution to the epistemology of the contemporary philosophy of nature. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to argue against the claim that morphological computation is substantially different from other kinds of physical computation. I show that some (but not all) purported cases of morphological computation do not count as specifically computational, and that those that do are solely physical computational systems. These latter cases are not, however, specific enough: all computational systems, not only morphological ones, may (and sometimes should) be studied in various ways, including their energy efficiency, cost, reliability, (...) and durability. Second, I critically analyze the notion of “offloading” computation to the morphology of an agent or robot, by showing that, literally, computation is sometimes not offloaded but simply avoided. Third, I point out that while the morphology of any agent is indicative of the environment that it is adapted to, or informative about that environment, it does not follow that every agent has access to its morphology as the model of its environment. (shrink)

One foundational question in contemporarybiology is how to `rejoin evolution anddevelopment. The emerging research program(evolutionary developmental biology or`evo-devo) requires a meshing of disciplines,concepts, and explanations that have beendeveloped largely in independence over the pastcentury. In the attempt to comprehend thepresent separation between evolution anddevelopment much attention has been paid to thesplit between genetics and embryology in theearly part of the 20th century with itscodification in the exclusion of embryologyfrom the Modern Synthesis. This encourages acharacterization of evolutionary developmentalbiology as the marriage (...) of evolutionary theoryand embryology via developmental genetics. Butthere remains a largely untold story about thesignificance of morphology and comparativeanatomy (also minimized in the ModernSynthesis). Functional and evolutionarymorphology are critical for understanding thedevelopment of a concept central toevolutionary developmental biology,evolutionary innovation. Highlighting thediscipline of morphology and the concepts ofinnovation and novelty provides an alternativeway of conceptualizing the `evo and the `devoto be synthesized. (shrink)

The emerging contemporary natural philosophy provides a common ground for the integrative view of the natural, the artificial, and the human-social knowledge and practices. Learning process is central for acquiring, maintaining, and managing knowledge, both theoretical and practical. This paper explores the relationships between the present advances in understanding of learning in the sciences of the artificial (deep learning, robotics), natural sciences (neuroscience, cognitive science, biology), and philosophy (philosophy of computing, philosophy of mind, natural philosophy). The question is, what at (...) this stage of the development the inspiration from nature, specifically its computational models such as info-computation through morphological computing, can contribute to machine learning and artificial intelligence, and how much on the other hand models and experiments in machine learning and robotics can motivate, justify, and inform research in computational cognitive science, neurosciences, and computing nature. We propose that one contribution can be understanding of the mechanisms of ‘learning to learn’, as a step towards deep learning with symbolic layer of computation/information processing in a framework linking connectionism with symbolism. As all natural systems possessing intelligence are cognitive systems, we describe the evolutionary arguments for the necessity of learning to learn for a system to reach humanlevel intelligence through evolution and development. The paper thus presents a contribution to the epistemology of the contemporary philosophy of nature. (shrink)

Morphology is the study of word forms and the ways in which words are varied and related to other words in a language. It has been regarded as an essential discipline that is indispensable in language acquisition. It helps learners to figure out the word structure and meaning, particularly the meaning changing of morphemes, which is pivotal for defining words. The present study focuses on developing morphological knowledge with online corpora which are the useful tools for teaching and learning (...) the changes happened in English. Given this light, this research reports an ESL vocabulary classroom in which the instructor designs vocabulary classroom activities with COCA, BNC, TIME MAGAZINE corpus to enrich students' English vocabulary knowledge, help them master word usage, and foster their corpus literacy. This study is oriented by the framework of Classroom Action Research (CAR). Students' classroom performances were recorded and their self-reflections of learning experiences were collected for thematic analysis. The results indicate that, firstly, students' morphological knowledge has been developed as well as their vocabulary knowledge; secondly, their vocabulary self-regulated learning motivation has been incentivised that they are able to answer their own queries about words; thirdly, students' corpus literacy has been fostered, which facilitates their ongoing vocabulary learning; last but not least, a community of inquiry has been established in which students collaborate to construct vocabulary knowledge. The study has wider implications for constructing the student-centered vocabulary classroom and implementing corpus-based instruction in other second language vocabulary classrooms. (shrink)

Elucidating distinct morphological atrophy patterns of Alzheimer’s disease and its prodromal stage, namely, mild cognitive impairment helps to improve early diagnosis and medical intervention of AD. On that account, we aimed to obtain distinct patterns of voxel-wise morphological atrophy and its further perturbation on structural covariance network in AD and MCI compared with healthy controls. T1-weighted anatomical images of matched AD, MCI, and HCs were included in this study. Gray matter volume was obtained using voxel-based morphometry and compared among three (...) groups. In addition, structural covariance network of identified brain regions exhibiting morphological difference was constructed and compared between pairs of three groups. Thus, patients with AD have a reduced hippocampal volume and an increased rate of atrophy compared with MCI and HCs. MCI exhibited a decreased trend in bilateral hippocampal volume compared with HCs and the accelerated right hippocampal atrophy rate than HCs. In AD, the hippocampus further exhibited increased structural covariance connected to reward related brain regions, including the anterior cingulate cortex, the putamen, the caudate, and the insula compared with HCs. In addition, the patients with AD exhibited increased structural covariance of left hippocampus with the bilateral insula, the inferior frontal gyrus, the superior temporal gyrus, and the cerebellum than MCI. These results reveal distinct patterns of morphological atrophy in AD and MCI, providing new insights into pathology of AD. (shrink)

In historical literature, Edouard van Beneden is mostly remembered for his cytological discoveries. Less well known, however, is that he also introduced evolutionary morphology – and indeed evolutionary theory as such – in the Belgian academic world. The introduction of this research programme cannot be understood without taking both the international and the national context into account. It was clearly the German example of the Jena University that inspired van Beneden in his research interests. The actual launch of evolutionary (...) morphology at his University of Liège was, however, also connected with the dynamic of Belgian university reforms and the local rationale of creating a research “school.” Thanks to his networks, his mastering of the rhetoric of the “new” biology, his low ideological profile and his capitalising on the new academic élan in late-19th century Belgium, van Beneden managed to turn his programme into a local success from the 1870s onwards. Two decades later, however, the conceptual underpinnings of evolutionary morphology came under attack and the “Van Beneden School” lost much of its vitality. Despite this, van Beneden’s evolutionary morphology was prototypical for the research that was to come. He was one of the first scientific heavyweights in Belgium to turn the university laboratory into a centre of scientific practice and the hub of a research school. (shrink)

The diachronic change of word-formation patterns is currently gaining increasing interest in cognitive-linguistic and constructionist approaches. This paper contributes to this line of research with a corpus-based investigation of nominalization with the suffix -ung in German. In doing so, it puts forward both theoretical and methodological considerations on morphology and morphological change from a usage-based perspective. Regarding methodology, the long-standing topic of how to measure the productivity of a morphological pattern is discussed, and it is shown how statistical association (...) measures can be applied to quantify the relationship between word-formation patterns and their bases. These findings are linked up with theoretical considerations on the interplay between constructional schemas and their respective instances. (shrink)

Several tasks in artificial intelligence require the ability to find models about knowledge dynamics. They include belief revision, fusion and belief merging, and abduction. In this paper, we exploit the algebraic framework of mathematical morphology in the context of propositional logic and define operations such as dilation or erosion of a set of formulas. We derive concrete operators, based on a semantic approach, that have an intuitive interpretation and that are formally well behaved, to perform revision, fusion and abduction. (...) Computation and tractability are addressed, and simple examples illustrate the main results. (shrink)

Morphological engineering is an emerging research area in synthetic biology. In 2008 “synthetic morphology” was proposed as a prospective approach to engineering self-constructing anatomies by Jamie A. Davies of the University of Edinburgh. Synthetic morphology can establish a new paradigm, according to Davies, insofar as “cells can be programmed to organize themselves into specific, designed arrangements, structures and tissues.” It is obvious that this new approach will extrapolate morphology into a new realm beyond the traditional logic of (...) morphological research. However, synthetic morphology is a highly idealized vision of morphology which derives its visionary ideas from morphological engineering and mathematical idealizations in order to understand the principles of molecular morphology. Thus, the question is, if this approach will help to understand morphogenesis better or if it will just enable biologists to engineer morphogenesis. The paper investigates the development of synthetic morphology and its relation to synthetic biology as well as its epistemic gains. (shrink)

The paper aims to understand whether morphology can be framed as a language for aesthetics. In particular, whether Olaf Breidbach’s contribution can determine its fundamental terms. These are related to the notion of forms and images. Hence, the paper is structured into three parts: i) framing of research on morphology in Ger-many; ii) analysis of Goethe’s method and vocabulary from an aesthetic standpoint; iii) presentation of Breidbach’s proposal in relation to Goethe.

Morphological content is information that is implicitly embodied in the standing structure of a cognitive system and is automatically accommodated during cognitive processing without first becoming explicit in consciousness. We maintain that much belief-formation in human cognition is essentially morphological : i.e., it draws heavily on large amounts of morphological content, and must do so in order to tractably accommodate the holistic evidential relevance of background information possessed by the cognitive agent. We also advocate a form of experiential evidentialism concerning (...) epistemic justification—roughly, the view that the justification-status of an agent’s beliefs is fully determined by the character of the agent’s conscious experience. We have previously defended both the thesis that much belief-formation is essentially morphological, and also a version of evidentialism. Here we explain how experiential evidentialism can be smoothly and plausibly combined with the thesis that much of the cognitive processing that generates justified beliefs is essentially morphological. The leading idea is this: even though epistemically relevant morphological content does not become explicit in consciousness during the process of belief-generation, nevertheless such content does affect the overall character of conscious experience in an epistemically significant way: it is implicit in conscious experience, and is implicitly appreciated by the experiencing agent. (shrink)

I have several comments and I will try to present the essence of the problem. The papers that we read on the computer give an idea of a certain structure of the future dictionary of culturology, or of culture- I don't know which is intended. It seems to me, that, according their approach, the papers are strictly scientific and attempt to apply the methods and concepts of scientific knowledge to culturology. Indeed, there is a scientific approach to cultural phenomena, for (...) example, the morphology of culture. It proceeds from the ideas of general validity, objectivity, and conceptuality. All this is legitimate and was sufficiently justified. I have some comments on Orlova's text regarding the identification of formal and eidetic logic. It is not exactly so. Eidetic logic has no bearing on contemporary logic, which does not coincide with formal logic. (shrink)

Registration of a series of the two-dimensional electron microscope images of the brain tissue into volumetric form is an important technique that can be used for neuronal circuit reconstruction. However, complex appearance changes of neuronal morphology in adjacent sections bring difficulty in finding correct correspondences, making serial section neural image registration challenging. To solve this problem, we consider whether there are such stable "markers" in the neural images to alleviate registration difficulty. In this paper, we employ the spherical deformation (...) model to simulate the local neuron structure and analyze the relationship between registration accuracy and neuronal structure shapes in two adjacent sections. The relevant analysis proves that regular circular structures in the section images are instrumental in seeking robust corresponding relationships. Then, we design a new serial section image registration framework driven by this neuronal morphological model, fully utilizing the characteristics of the anatomical structure of nerve tissue and obtaining more reasonable corresponding relationships. Specifically, we leverage a deep membrane segmentation network and neural morphological physical selection model to select the stable rounded regions in neural images. Then, we combine feature extraction and global optimization of correspondence position to obtain the deformation field of multiple images. Experiments on real and synthetic serial EM section neural image datasets have demonstrated that our proposed method could achieve more reasonable and reliable registration results, outperforming the state-of-the-art approaches in qualitative and quantitative analysis. (shrink)

I will assess earlier approaches to the morphology of the G-stem imperative in Semitic and mount a reconstruction that supports a specific set of disyllabic patterns for the imperative of the basic stem in Proto-Semitic, i.e., qutul, qitil, and qital. The most common process envisioned for the formation of the imperative is clipping from the prefix conjugation, but the most recent full treatment of the topic is Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal’s revision and expansion of a century-old proposal that qatul, qatil, (...) and qital are the patterns of the imperative in Proto-Semitic. I refute both the clipping approach and Bar-Asher’s patterns in favor of qutul, qitil, and qital, which are the most economical and precise reconstruction in accounting for the realizations of the imperative in the various branches of Semitic. (shrink)

In the paper authors present, examine, and test elements of the vital idea of the philosophical morphology as a method and a technique of philosophical investigation. The paper consists of some applications mostly concerning the method applied by L. Wittgenstein in PI and related later works, and of a series of examples concerning daily phenomena. In the first part the philosophical morphology is explicated as a method, and in the second and in the third part basic “commandments” of (...) morphological technique are described and examined, namely the first one – which says that one should “look-at exhaustively”, and the second one – which says that one should “see-as and describe synoptically”. In these parts some objections and replies to crucial morphological ideas are provided and accompanied with examples. (shrink)

According to rationalism regarding the psychology of moral judgment, people’s moral judgments are generally the result of a process of reasoning that relies on moral principles or rules. By contrast, intuitionist models of moral judgment hold that people generally come to have moral judgments about particular cases on the basis of gut-level, emotion-driven intuition, and do so without reliance on reasoning and hence without reliance on moral principles. In recent years the intuitionist model has been forcefully defended by Jonathan Haidt. (...) One important implication of Haidt’s model is that in giving reasons for their moral judgments people tend to confabulate – the reasons they give in attempting to explain their moral judgments are not really operative in producing those judgments. Moral reason-giving on Haidt’s view is generally a matter of post hoc confabulation. Against Haidt, we argue for a version of rationalism that we call ‘morphological rationalism.’ We label our version ‘morphological’ because according to it, the information contained in moral principles is embodied in the standing structure of a typical individual’s cognitive system, and this morphologically embodied information plays a causal role in the generation of particular moral judgments. The manner in which the principles play this role is via ‘proceduralization’ – such principles operate automatically. In contrast to Haidt’s intuitionism, then, our view does not imply that people’s moral reason-giving practices are matters of confabulation. In defense of our view, we appeal to what we call the ‘nonjarring’ character of the phenomenology of making moral judgments and of giving reasons for those judgments. (shrink)

This article presents a systematic exposition of how the basic ideas of Construction Grammar and the Parallel Architecture of grammar provide the framework for a proper account of morphological phenomena, in particular word formation. This framework is referred to as Construction Morphology. As to the implications of CxM for the architecture of grammar, the article provides evidence against a split between lexicon and grammar, in line with CxG. In addition, it shows that the PA approach makes it possible to (...) be explicit about what happens on which level of the grammar, and thus to give an insightful account of interface phenomena. These interface phenomena appear to require that various types of information are accessible simultaneously, and it is argued that constructional schemas have the right format for expressing these mutual dependencies between different types of information. (shrink)

In the formation of epistemically justified beliefs, what is the role of attention, and what is the role (if any) of non-attentional aspects of cognition? We will here argue that there is an essential role for certain nonattentional aspects. These involve epistemically relevant background information that is implicit in the standing structure of an epistemic agent’s cognitive architecture and that does not get explicitly represented during belief-forming cognitive processing. Since such “morphological content” (as we call it) does not become explicit (...) during belief formation, it cannot be information that is within the scope of attention. Nevertheless,it does exert a subtle influence on the character of conscious experience, rather than operating in a purely unconscious way. (shrink)

It may seem trivial to state that one of the major trends in biological investigation consists in an attempt to explain the structural and functional aspects of living matter in chemical terms, in an effort to obtain insight into the equivalent of macroscopic phenomena on the molecular level. I am sure you are aware of, and this meeting of the Association has brought ample additional evidence, in how many fields this tendency has become apparent. It can be recognized in genetics (...) with the molecular analysis of chromosomes and the enzymatic or metabolic interpretation of hereditary properties like the eyecolor of Drosophila. In a purely morphological branch like histology we do not ask merely for a differentiation of stained cell structure but we ask for the nature of the staining reaction; in nerve physiology we try to interpret conduction as alterations of protein lipoid layers; or in pathology where the age old syndrome of inflammation is explored with biochemical methods. I should mention molecular models of membranes and cell surfaces, the molecular interpretation of secretion and of the macroscopic phenomena of metabolism. Yet insofar as this yield of data could be designated as a trend, it would rather seem to be the natural outcome to be expected from the application of the analytic method of science. In one instance, however, this approach has been carried farther than in all the other fields, and it would seem to be worthwhile to pause for one moment to ask whether this case is important merely because of its technical implications or whether it is meaningful in a wider sense. (shrink)

This paper reports on the investigation of the effects of neuronal shape, at both individual cell and network level, on the behavior of neuronal systems. More specifically, two-dimensional biologically realistic neuronal networks are obtained that take explicity into account the position and morphology of neuronal cells, with the respective behavior for associative recall being simulated through a diluted version of Hopfield's model. While a specific probability density function is used for the placement of the cell bodies, images of real (...) neuronal cells (namely alpha and beta ganglion cells from the cat retina) are used to obtain biologically realistic models. Several morphological measures – including fractal dimension, the excluded volume, and integral geometry functionals–are estimated for the considered cells, and their values are correlated with the potential of the network for associative recall, which is quantified in terms of the overlap between distorted version of the trained patterns and their original version. Such an approach allows the quantitative and objective characterization of the relationship between neuronal shape and function, an important issue in neuroscience. The obtained results substantiate interesting relationships between the neural morphology and function as determined by the performance of the network. (shrink)

An important element of Natural Language Processing is parts of speech tagging. With fine-grained word-class annotations, the word forms in a text can be enhanced and can also be used in downstream processes, such as dependency parsing. The improved search options that tagged data offers also greatly benefit linguists and lexicographers. Natural language processing research is becoming increasingly popular and important as unsupervised learning methods are developed. There are some aspects of the Albanian language that make the creation of a (...) part-of-speech tag set challenging. This research provides a discussion of those issues linguistic phenomena and presents a proposal for a part-of-speech tag set that can adequately represent them. The corpus contains more than 250,000 tokens, each annotated with a medium-sized tag set. The Albanian language’s syntagmatic aspects are adequately represented. Additionally, in this paper are morphologically and part-of-speech tagged corpora for the Albanian language, as well as lemmatize and neural morphological tagger trained on these corpora. Based on the held-out evaluation set, the model achieves 93.65% accuracy on part-of-speech tagging, The morphological tagging rate was 85.31 % and the lemmatization rate was 88.95%. Furthermore, the TF-IDF technique weighs terms and with the scores are highlighted words that have additional information for the Albanian corpus. (shrink)

Exploring history pertinent to evolutionary developmental biology (hereafter, Evo-devo) is an exciting prospect given its current status as a cutting-edge field of research. The first and obvious question concerns where to begin searching for materials and sources. Since this new discipline adopts a moniker that intentionally juxtaposes ‘evolution’ and development’, individuals, disciplines, and institutional contexts relevant to the history of evolutionary studies and investigations of ontogeny prompt themselves. Each of these topics has received attention from historians and thus there is (...) both primary and secondary material from which to draw. For example, many historians have documented the historical trajectories of genetics and embryology, their split, and various relations (or lack thereof), especially in the first three decades of the 20th century. (shrink)

The concept that renders morphology a tool for phylogeny reconstruction is homology. The concept of homology is rooted in pre-evolutionary idealistic morphology. The claim that the goal of idealistic morphology was the seriability of form may sound paradoxical given that this discipline proceeded within a framework of strictly delimited types. But the types only demarcate where seriability starts and where it comes to an end. Carl Gegenbaur’s was recognized as a milestone in idealistic morphology. A comparison (...) with the second edition of 1870 illustrates Gegenbaur’s turn to evolutionary morphology. The methodology remained the same–seriability of form–but the series was no longer merely descriptive or conceptual but now a historical, evolutionary one. Gegenbaur emphasized that seriability of form was possible not only between species of the same type, but also between parts of organisms of the same type. Pursuing this project, he found that different parts of organisms evolve at different rates, resulting in an incongruence between the series of parts relative to the series of species under comparison. This incongrence was called chevauchement des spécialisations by Louis Dollo, Spezialisationskreuzungen by Othenio Abel, and heterobathmy of characters by Armen Takhtajan. Willi Hennig, the founder of modern methods in phylogenetic systematics, discovered that the heterobathmy of characters was a precondition for the establishment of the phylogenetic relationships based on shared derived characters. The result was a replacement of the search for ancestors by a search for relative degrees of phylogenetic relationships. (shrink)

The research is devoted to the morphology that V.N. Ilyin developed in the work Static and Dynamics of Pure Form and other archival texts. Morphology is central to the philosophy of V.N. Ilyin, but it remains an unexplored subject. The article’s author explores the morphology of the philosopher from a historical and philosophical point of view. In addition to apparent influences (G.W. Leibniz, E. Husserl, N. Lossky), the article’s author revealed the connection of V.N. Ilyin’s ideas with (...) the history of Western European philosophy and his attitude to medieval thinkers. The author considered how V.N. Ilyin understood and assessed his modern philosophy and its results by the middle of the twentieth century. V.N. Ilyin especially paid attention to phenomenology and its connection with morphology, analyzing phenomenology's influence on existential philosophy. In addition to phenomenology, V.N. Ilyin highly appreciated the intuitism of H. Bergson and N. Lossky. The third main philosophical direction in the twentieth century for V.N. Ilyin was religious philosophy (Neo-Thomists and followers of H. Bergson), which aimed at creating axiology, a new system of values. V.N. Ilyin sought to combine various philosophical ideas in the project of morphology based on logic and scientific methodology. He stated the need to reform formal logic and create “metalogic” that would be more consistent with the philosophical tasks of the twentieth century. The morphology of V.N. Ilyin is based on the idea of synthesis and focuses on creating universal science. The comparison of various philosophical ideas of the twentieth century with morphology makes it possible to understand better his philosophical worldview, the course of his reflections, and the meaning of the morphological project. (shrink)

Cognitive science is considered to be the study of mind (consciousness and thought) and intelligence in humans. Under such definition variety of unsolved/unsolvable problems appear. This article argues for a broad understanding of cognition based on empirical results from i.a. natural sciences, self-organization, artificial intelligence and artificial life, network science and neuroscience, that apart from the high level mental activities in humans, includes sub-symbolic and sub-conscious processes, such as emotions, recognizes cognition in other living beings as well as extended and (...) distributed/social cognition. The new idea of cognition as complex multiscale phenomenon evolved in living organisms based on bodily structures that process information, linking cognitivists and EEEE (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) cognition approaches with the idea of morphological computation (info-computational self-organisation) in cognizing agents, emerging in evolution through interactions of a (living/cognizing) agent with the environment. (shrink)

The chapter examines the recent approach to ideology as an actual and ubiquitous combination of decontested political concepts, whose micro-morphological arrangements are the key to the specific meaning each ideological family contains. Shifting proximities and relative weights accorded to those concepts produce multiple ideological variants. Ideologies are pivotal to the discipline of political theory, discernible both in professional and vernacular thinking, and serve as discursive competitions over the control of public political language. Notions of essential contestability, theories of symbolic mapping, (...) and a focus on actual rather than normative political thinking shed light on their semantic significance. Ideologies are permanent phenomena ranging from the flexible to the rigid, and the boundaries that seem to separate one ideology from another may be loose and mutating, challenging the traditional association of ideologies with political parties. In parallel, the study of ideology involves decoding and interpretation, not its juxtaposition with truth. (shrink)

The morphological account of landscape aims to overcome the contrast between an objectivist/scientific account of space and the more qualitative/subjective account of place. It does so by actualizing the notion of landscape, which endows a materiality often overlooked in contemporary spatial theories. In this paper, I will discuss what has been called the ‘space-place conundrum’ by referring mostly to the human geography contemporary debate on space and place. In the following, I will retrieve Carl Sauer’s morphological conception of landscape as (...) an alternative framework aimed at rephrasing both the concepts of space and place. Landscape must be freed from the cage of the aesthetic gaze so that it can be understood as a lived and dynamic complex of interacting forms that encompass the embodied subject. In the end, I will outline the main characteristics of a morphological conception of landscape, paving the way for further inquiries. (shrink)

The contribution of the body to cognition and control in natural and artificial agents is increasingly described as “off-loading computation from the brain to the body”, where the body is said to perform “morphological computation”. Our investigation of four characteristic cases of morphological computation in animals and robots shows that the ‘off-loading’ perspective is misleading. Actually, the contribution of body morphology to cognition and control is rarely computational, in any useful sense of the word. We thus distinguish (1) (...) class='Hi'>morphology that facilitates control, (2) morphology that facilitates perception and the rare cases of (3) morphological computation proper, such as ‘reservoir computing.’ where the body is actually used for computation. This result contributes to the understanding of the relation between embodiment and computation: The question for robot design and cognitive science is not whether computation is offloaded to the body, but to what extent the body facilitates cognition and control – how it contributes to the overall ‘orchestration’ of intelligent behaviour. (shrink)

Over the years, I have lectured about various enhancements and modifications of the human body; now I am going to deal more with the whys than the hows. I am hoping to demonstrate why the freedom to modify one's body is essential not just to transhumanism, but also to any future democratic society.

Framed in psychological terms, the basic question of linguistic theory is what is stored in memory, and in what form. Traditionally, what is stored is divided into grammar and lexicon, where grammar contains the rules and the lexicon is an unstructured list of exceptions. We develop an alternative view in which rules of grammar are simply lexical items that contain variables, and in which rules have two functions. In their generative function, they are used to build novel structures, just as (...) in traditional generative linguistics. In their relational function, they capture generalizations over stored items in the lexicon, a role not seriously explored in traditional linguistic theory. The result is a highly structured lexicon with rich patterns among stored items. We further explore the possibility that this sort of structuring is not specific to language, but appears in other cognitive domains as well, such as the structure of physical objects, of music, and of geographical and social knowledge. The differences among cognitive domains do not lie in this overall texture, but in the materials over which stored relations are defined. The challenge is to develop theories of representation in these other domains comparable to that for language. (shrink)

This paper shows a full description of Spanish inflectional morphology. We have chosen a paradigmatic approach instead of one based on phonological/spelling changes, i.e., the typical two-level model. Such morphological description has been written in the DATR formalism. The result is a network of nodes that makes use of the information inheritance mechanisms – orthogonal node inheritance and default path inheritance – that DATR allows. Some lexical coverage and corpus occurrence figures that support our approach are also given.

Richard Owen has been condemned by Darwinians as an anti-evolutionist and an essentialist. In recent years he has been the object of a revisionist analysis intended to uncover evolutionary elements in his scientific enterprise. In this paper I will examine Owen's evolutionary hypothesis and its connections with von Baer's idea of divergent development. To give appropriate importance to Owen's evolutionism is the first condition to develop an up-to-date understanding of his scientific enterprise, that is to disentagle Owen's contribution to the (...) modernization of typology and morphology. I will argue that Owen's Platonic essentialism is rhetorical and incongruous. On the contrary, an interpretation of the archetype based on Aristotle's biological works makes possible a new conception of type, based on a homeostatic mechanism of stability. The renewal of morphology hinges on homological correspondences and a homeostatic process is also the origin of serial and special homology. I will argue that special homology shows an evolutionary orientation insofar as it is a typically inter-specific character while serial homology is determined through an elementary usage of the categories of developmental morphology. (shrink)

The frequently occurring photoreceptor patterns in fish are explained using functional and environmental demands in a geometric model. The shape of the double cone provides a number of constructional properties leading to a limited number of appropriate configurations. The probability of their occurrence is estimated from the degree to which the combination of properties of each configuration meets specific environmental light conditions. A row pattern of merely double cones is especially suitable for vision in a dim homochromatic environment; a triangular (...) pattern is quite appropriate for high resolution and accurate movement detection, whereas the known square pattern has a high adaptive capacity to varying spectral distributions. In this context the transforming capacities of both square and row patterns can be understood. (shrink)

From the early nineteenth century, the successful use of fossils in stratigraphy oriented paleontology towards geology. The consequent marginalising of biological objectives was countered in the twentieth century by the rise of ‘Paläobiologie’, first in the German cultural area and only later, as ‘paleobiology’, in the anglophone world. Several kinds of paleobiological research flourished internationally after the Second World War, among them the novel field of ‘paleoecology’. Within this field there were attempts to apply functional morphology to the problematical (...) cases of fossil organisms, for which functions cannot be observed directly. This article describes the origins of the kind of functional inference for fossils that I proposed in 1961 as the method of ‘paradigms’. Here I summarize some of my ‘worked exemplars’, which were intended to show the paradigm method in action. These case-studies were all taken from the paleontologically important phylum of the Brachiopoda, but the method was claimed to have much wider implications for the interpretation of the fossil record in terms of adaptive evolution. This article takes the history of the paradigm method as far as the late 1960s. I hope to trace, in a sequel, its ambivalent fate during the 1970s and beyond, when for example Gould’s critique of ‘the adaptationist programme’ and the rise of computer-based quantitative methods for the evolutionary interpretation of the fossil record led to the relative eclipse of functional morphology in paleontology. (shrink)

This study analyzes shells of marine gastropods of a zoological museum and the Latin epithets expressing perceptual and connotative attributes that they have received in the standard, Linnaean nomenclature. Making use of the Osgood semantic differential, we presented the subjects with digital 3-D reproductions of the shell specimens to be subjectively evaluated according to 17 pairs of attributes. The results show that, overall, the subjective evaluations given by the subjects are consistent, which suggests that an intersubjective characterization of the shells (...) as wholes according to their qualitative and morphological traits is possible and scientifically explicable. This may apply to other biological items as well. The results also show that the epithets given to the shells by taxonomists do not always reflect the perceptual evaluation of the general population, being a product of the well-known ambiguity in taxonomic categorization and naming. (shrink)

Evolutionary change is opportunistic, but its course is strongly constrained in several fundamental ways. These constraints (historical/phylogenetic, functional/adaptive, constructional/morphogenetic) and their dynamic relationships are discussed here and shown to constitute the conceptual framework of Constructional Morphology. Notwithstanding recent published opinions which claim that the discovery of constraints renders Neodarwinian selection theory obsolete, we regard the insights of Constructional Morphology as being entirely consistent with this theory. As is shown here in the case of the Hyracoidea, formal analysis of (...) the constraints which have framed the evolution of various characters extends our understanding of the evolution of a taxon. (shrink)

roots In the Lexicon of Malagasy we include an entry whose string part is vidy ('buy'). Its category is 'RT [AG, TH) ', indicating that it is a root and is associated with a two element set of theta roles, AGFNT and THEME. Semantically this entry is interpreted as a binary relation (= a two participant event), noted VIDY'.

The current study investigated the influence of morphological structure on the earliest stages of Arabic reading acquisition. More specifically, we aimed at examining the role of root and pattern units in beginners from Grade 1 to 3. A first set of reading tasks evaluated the presence of a morphology facilitation effect in word and pseudoword reading by manipulating independently the familiarity of roots and patterns. The second one pursued to examine the contribution of morphological awareness to reading performance. The (...) results suggest that reading ability is early influenced by the awareness of morphological composition. Children read faster and more accurately pseudowords composed of familiar morphemes. Furthermore, regression analyses revealed, for every reading measure, a significant contribution of one morphological test in addition to grapheme knowledge. Results are discussed taking into account the differences obtained depending on lexicality and morpheme type (root or pattern). (shrink)