Abstract:As new digital technologies, consumer demand, and social issues such as COVID-19 render workplaces increasingly data-centric, employers will require culturally and technologically adept workers who can utilize creativity in every stage of the production process. To prepare students for this demand, institutions of higher education must establish flexible programs that provide professional or technical curricula combined with a liberal arts education that fosters students’ abilities to build imaginations beyond conventionally accepted norms. The capacity for creative fantasy intersects with cognitive maturity (...) and higher-order thinking and thus can be measured using models of adult development. Schools should develop knowledge platforms that can first assess a student’s maturity stage and then design a personalized liberal and professional education plan that maximizes their creative abilities. This article therefore engages adult development theory to map possible trajectories toward students’ constructive use of innovative fantasy and to address ways educational institutions can reorient their approaches. (shrink)

A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, esthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialized journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain constructs the world (...) in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott and Jacobs, 2011 ). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives. (shrink)

I address the commentators' calls for clarification of theoretical terms, discussion of similarities to other proposals, and extension of the ideas. In doing so, I keep the focus on the purpose of memory: enabling the organism to make sense of its environment so that it can take action appropriate to constraints resulting from the physical, personal, social, and cultural situations.

Reading is not only “cold” information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such “hot” reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies (...) demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence ) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness ), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies. (shrink)

Modern socio?cultural studies of medicine demonstrate the symbolic character of much of medical reality. This symbolic reality can be appreciated as mediating the traditional division of medicine into biophysical and human sciences. Comparative studies of medical systems offer a general model for medicine as a human science. These studies document that medicine, from an historical and cross?cultural perspective, is constituted as a cultural system in which symbolic meanings take an active part in disease formation, the classification and cognitive management of (...) illness, and in therapy. Medicine's symbolic reality also forms a bridge between cultural and psychophysiological phenomena; the basis for psychosomatic and socioso?matic pathology and therapy. This in turn becomes a central problem for medical theory and for a philosophical reinvestigation of medicine. (shrink)

The true key to all the perplexities of the human condition, Rousseau boldly claims, is the “natural goodness of man.” It is also the key to his own notoriously contradictory writings, which, he insists, are actually the disassembled parts of a rigorous philosophical system rooted in that fundamental principle. What if this problematic claim—so often repeated, but as often dismissed—were resolutely followed and explored? Arthur M. Melzer adopts this approach in The Natural Goodness of Man. The first two parts (...) of the book restore the original, revolutionary significance of this now time-worn principle and examine the arguments Rousseau offers in proof of it. The final section unfolds and explains Rousseau’s programmatic thought, especially the Social Contract, as a precise solution to the human problem as redefined by the principle of natural goodness. The result is a systematic reconstruction of Rousseau’s philosophy that discloses with unparalleled clarity both the complex weave of his argument and the majestic unity of his vision. Melzer persuasively resolves one after another of the famous Rousseauian paradoxes–enlarging, in the process, our understanding of modern philosophy and politics. Engagingly and lucidly written, The Natural Goodness of Man will be of interest to general as well as scholarly readers. (shrink)

Two main goals of the emerging field of neurocognitive poetics are the use of more natural and ecologically valid stimuli, tasks and contexts and providing methods and models allowing to quantify distinctive features of verbal materials used in such tasks and contexts and their effects on readers responses. A natural key element of poetic language, metaphor, still is understudied insofar as relatively little empirical research looked at literary or poetic metaphors. An exception is Katz et al.’s corpus of 204 literary (...) metaphors by authors such as Shakespeare or Dylan Thomas, for which various rating data are available. We reanalyzed their corpus using a combination of quantitative narrative analysis, latent semantic analysis, and machine learning in order to identify relevant features of the metaphors that influenced the ratings. The combined application of computational tools sheds light on surface and affective-semantic features that co-determine the reception of poetic metaphors and successfully predicted the period of origin, authorship and goodness ratings of the metaphors. The present results can be used for generating quantitative hypotheses or selecting and matching verbal stimuli in empirical studies of literature and neurocognitive poetics. (shrink)

Building on an earlier argument that isolationism may well be America's natural state, Schlesinger explains how the apparent rejection of isolationism during the long standoff with the Soviet Union during the Cold War was nothing more than a reaction to what was perceived as a direct and urgent threat to the security of the United States. In the wake of the Cold War's end, the incompatibility between collective international action and conceptions of national interest has highlighted the difficulties of democracies (...) in sending their armies to war, especially those that do not directly threaten national security. While much more can and should be done to enhance the effectiveness of global organizations already in place, what is needed, Schlesinger argues, is both a reexamination of the Wilsonian doctrine of collective security and a greater concentration on preventive diplomacy. (shrink)

Rousseau meende dat hypocrisie de meest wezenlijke karaktertrek van zijn tijdgenoten was. Vandaar dat hij een niuew oprechtheidsideaal propageerde. Dit ideaal hangt nauw samen met zijn opvattingen over het fundament van de menselijke natuur, het zelfbewustzijn, dat in voortdurende strijd is met het collectief.

Twentieth-century developments in quantum physics, together with an emerging science of consciousness, have created the need for a new cosmology, or model of the universe. The theory of process contained in THE REFLEXIVE UNIVERSE places consciousness within the context of contemporary science. One of the central themes of this extraordinary work is that each successive organization of matter, from fundamental particles in physics to living organisms, expresses a particular stage in the evolution of mind. Starting with the photon, the basic (...) unit of light, and moving through atomic physics, molecular chemistry, the morphology of plants and animals and finally to levels of human evolution, Young develops his theory in vivid step-by-step detail. Consciousness, in his point of view, is not isolated from the material universe. It exists in a continuum, one in which physical and nonphysical realms can be linked and the teachings of mythology and religion can be integrated. To order: FAX: 415-883-9280; e-mail: [email protected]; or write: Anodos Foundation, c/o Publishers Services, P.O. Box 2510, Novato, CA 94948. Visa and MasterCard only. Trade STOP orders 40% plus postage. (shrink)

Cells express many proteins that bind to laminin, the major adhesive component of basement membranes. Some of these, specifically integrins, function as transmembrane receptors that ‘signal’ the presence of laminin on the cell surface to the cytoplasm. Lectins constitute a second class of laminin binding proteins that may augment integrin function by interacting with laminin carbohydrate. Caution must be used in ascribing functions to other laminin binding proteins, especially cytosolic proteins.

The article provides an overview of the symposium of the same name held at the University of Oregon on April 14, 2012. A summary of the presentations is included.

ABSTRACTIn this article we investigate structural differences between “literary” metaphors created by renowned poets and “nonliterary” ones imagined by non-professional authors from Katz et al.’s 1988 corpus. We provide data from quantitative narrative analyses of the altogether 464 metaphors on over 70 variables, including surface features like metaphor length, phonological features like sonority score, or syntactic-semantic features like sentence similarity. In a first computational study using machine learning tools we show that Katz et al.’s literary metaphors can be successfully discriminated (...) from their nonliterary ones on the basis of response measures, in particular the ratings for familiarity, ease of interpretation, semantic relatedness, and comprehensibility. A second computational study then shows that the classifier can reliably detect and predict between-group differences on the basis of five QNA features generalizing from a... (shrink)

Increasing the “truth per dollar” of money spent on science is one legitimate long-run goal of the economics of science. But before this goal can be achieved, we need to increase our knowledge of the successes and failures of past and current reward structures of science. This essay reviews what economists have learned about the behavior of scientists and the reward structure of science. One important use of such knowledge will be to help policy-makers create a reward structure that is (...) more efficient in the future. (shrink)

Philosophy Between the Lines is the first comprehensive, book-length study of the history and theoretical basis of philosophical esotericism, and it provides a crucial guide to how many major writings—philosophical, but also theological, ...

Language comprehension requires a simulation that uses neural systems involved in perception, action, and emotion. A review of recent literature as well as new experiments support five predictions derived from this framework. 1. Being in an emotional state congruent with sentence content facilitates sentence comprehension. 2. Because women are more reactive to sad events and men are more reactive to angry events, women understand sentences about sad events with greater facility than men, and men understand sentences about angry events with (...) greater facility than women. 3. Because it takes time to shift from one emotion to another, reading a sad sentence slows the reading of a happy sentence more for women than men, whereas reading an angry sentence slows the reading of a happy sentence more for men than for women. 4. Because sad states motivate affiliative actions and angry states motivate aggressive action, gender and emotional content of sentences interact with the response mode. 5. Because emotion simulation requires particular action systems, adapting those action systems will affect comprehension of sentences with emotional content congruent with the adapted action system. These results have implications for the study of language, emotion, and gender differences. (shrink)

In "moral philosophy" richard garner and bernard rosen give a counter-Example against w d ross. We have no prima facie duty to tell a neighbor our love life, Although he might gain knowledge and pleasure. I argue that for ross we could have such a prima facie, Though not an actual, Duty. The lover-Acquaintance relation makes unlikely such an action becoming an actual duty. Also we can conceive of cases in which it might be an actual duty; viz. A case (...) in which the divulger is a psychologist who needs to gain the neighbor's confidence in a group therapy situation. (shrink)

In his review, Walter (2012) links conceptual perspectives on empathy with crucial results of neurocognitive and genetic studies and presents a descriptive neurocognitive model that identifies neuronal key structures and links them with both cognitive and affective empathy via a high and a low road. After discussion of this model, the remainder of this comment deals more generally with the possibilities and limitations of current neurocognitive models, considering ways to develop process models allowing specific quantitative predictions.

Glenberg's conception of “meaning from and for action” is too narrow. For example, it provides no satisfactory account of the “logic of Elfland,” a metaphor used by Chesterton to refer to meaning acquired by being told something. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget. G. K. Chesterton.

If all differences in behavior are explainable in terms of universal values pursued under variable constraints, then much ethical theorizing is pointless. A strong presumption in favor of universal values can be established by showing that differences in behavior that were previously thought to be explainable only in terms of differences in values, can in fact be explained in terms of differences in constraints. Eleven such cases are briefly discussed, including cases of differences among racial, religious and other groups in (...) crime, culinary practices and the acceptance of innovation. (shrink)

A strong case can be made that the cognitive system is designed for guiding action, not, for example, symbol manipulation. I review empirical work demonstrating the link between action and cognition with special attention to the processes of language comprehension. Next, I sketch an embodied cognition framework for integrating work on language understanding with a more general approach to cognition and action. This general approach considers contributions to action of bodily states, emotions, social and cultural processes, and learning within a (...) framework that generates a dynamic system. This framework is used to consider the notion of distributed cognition and the prospects that technology might induce substantial changes in cognition. My assessment is that such changes are unlikely. (shrink)

Barsalou proposes (sect. 4.1.6) that perceptual symbols play a role in language processing. Data from our laboratory document this role and suggest the sorts of constraints used by simulators during language comprehension.

Levelt et al. attempt to “model their theory” with WEAVER ++. Modeling theories requires a model theory. The time is ripe for a methodology for building, testing, and evaluating computational models. We propose a tentative, five-step framework for tackling this problem, within which we discuss the potential strengths and weaknesses of Levelt et al.'s modeling approach.

Standard models of cognition are built from abstract, amodal, arbitrary symbols, and the meanings of those symbols are given solely by their interrelations. The target article (Glenberg 1997t) argues that these models must be inadequate because meaning cannot arise from relations among abstract symbols. For cognitive representations to be meaningful they must, at the least, be grounded; but abstract symbols are difficult, if not impossible, to ground. As an alternative, the target article developed a framework in which representations are grounded (...) in perception and action, and hence are embodied. Recent work (Glenberg & Robertson 1999; 2000; Glenberg & Kaschak 2002; Kaschak & Glenberg 2000) extends this framework to language. (shrink)

Ballard et al. claim that fixations bind variables to cognitive pointers. I comment on three aspects of this claim: (1) its contribution to the interpretation of indexical language; (2) empirical support for the use of very few deictic pointers; (3) nonetheless, abstract pointers cannot be taken as prototypical cognitive representations.