Both the sound and the sea are characterized by a constant fluidity and transformation, which has been considered as a creative foundation for expanded sonic practices that identify, capture and experiment with natural elements. The text aims to explore how the idea of sonification as a process of translating qualities and data into sound constitutes the departure point towards contemporary sound practices that encourage deeper listening and immersive experiences. Taking the sea-responsive sound installations of French artist Félix Blume, Rumors (...) from the Sea and Suspiros as a foundation, the article presents a reflective conversation between Félix Blume and Bill Psarras on aspects of such artworks that highlight ideas of sea and limens, listening experience, sound ecology and sonic instruments through performative, inventive and participatory lenses. (shrink)

The book suggests a new perspective on the essence of human language. This enormous achievement of our species is best characterized as a communication technology - not unlike the social media on the Net today - that was collectively invented by ancient humans for a very particular communicative function: the instruction of imagination. All other systems of communication in the biological world target the interlocutors' senses; language allows speakers to systematically instruct their interlocutors in the process of imagining the intended (...) meaning - instead of directly experiencing it. This revolutionary function has changed human life forever, and in the book it operates as a unifying concept around which a new general theory of language gradually emerges. Dor identifies a set of fundamental problems in the linguistic sciences - the nature of words, the complexities of syntax, the interface between semantics and pragmatics, the causal relationship between language and thought, language processing, the dialectics of universality and variability, the intricacies of language and power, knowledge of language and its acquisition, the fragility of linguistic communication and the origins and evolution of language - and shows with respect to all of them how the theory provides fresh answers to the problems, resolves persistent difficulties in existing accounts, enhances the significance of empirical and theoretical achievements in the field, and identifies new directions for empirical research. The theory thus opens a new way towards the unification of the linguistic sciences, on both sides of the cognitive-social divide. (shrink)

This paper analyzes communication with a language that is vague in the sense that identical messages do not always result in identical interpretations. It is shown that strategic agents frequently add to this vagueness by being intentionally vague, i.e. they deliberately choose less precise messages than they have to among the ones available to them in equilibrium. Having to communicate with a vague language can be welfare enhancing because it mitigates conflict. In equilibria that satisfy a dynamic stability condition intentional (...) vagueness increases with the degree of conflict between sender and receiver. (shrink)

Development of the cochlear implant, discussed in this article, depended vitally on deaf people being persuaded to undergo implantation. Media "reconstruction" of the device as the "bionic ear" was typically encouraged by implant pioneers. Unexpectedly, however, a "counter-rhetoric" based on a very different understanding of deafness emerged. With it, deaf people are slowly succeeding in gaining influence over the further deployment of the technology. The analysis suggests modifications to existing theoretical models of technological change in medicine.

The central intuition that guides the argument of this book is that both the technical and reductionist methodology associated with utilitarianism do not do ...

We introduce a discrete probabilistic model of motion in special and general relativity that is shown to be compatible with the standard model in the statistical limit.

Using the lenses of both biblical and process theology, this essay explores the ways in which sacrament and church are inextricably bound with one another. By paying special attention to the seriousness with which Whiteheadian thought takes events in space and time, the essay develops a sacramentally focused ecclesiology that is radically embodied in the realm of occasions.

Older adults process emotional speech differently than young adults, relying less on prosody (tone) relative to semantics (words). This study aimed to elucidate the mechanisms underlying these age-related differences via an emotional speech-in-noise test. A sample of 51 young and 47 older adults rated spoken sentences with emotional content on both prosody and semantics, presented on the background of wideband speech-spectrum noise (sensory interference) or on the background of multi-talker babble (sensory/cognitive interference). The presence of wideband noise eliminated age-related differences (...) in semantics but not in prosody when processing emotional speech. Conversely, the presence of babble resulted in the elimination of age-related differences across all measures. The results suggest that both sensory and cognitive-linguistic factors contribute to age-related changes in emotional speech processing. Because real world conditions typically involve noisy background, our results highlight the importance of testing under such conditions. (shrink)

Heyes argues that human metacognitive strategies (“cognitive gadgets” or “mills”) are the products of cultural evolution based on domain‐general cognition with few simple biases. Although like Heyes, we believe that the evolution of domain‐general cognitive processes played a crucial role in the evolution of human cognition, we argue that Heyes' distinction between mills and grist is too sharp, that associative learning evolved gradually to become more complex and hierarchical, something that is not captured by the system 1/system 2 distinction, and (...) that human cognitive plasticity required the genetic accommodation of gadget‐specific processes that led to more plasticity‐enhancing human‐specific biases. (shrink)

The self-domestication hypothesis suggests that, like mammalian domesticates, humans have gone through a process of selection against aggression – a process that in the case of humans was self-induced. Here, we extend previous proposals and suggest that what underlies human social evolution is selection for socially mediated emotional control and plasticity. In the first part of the paper we highlight general features of human social evolution, which, we argue, is more similar to that of other social mammals than to that (...) of mammalian domesticates and is therefore incompatible with the notion of human self-domestication. In the second part, we discuss the unique aspects of human evolution and propose that emotional control and social motivation in humans evolved during two major, partially overlapping stages. The first stage, which followed the emergence of mimetic communication, the beginnings of musical engagement, and mimesis-related cognition, required socially mediated emotional plasticity and was accompanied by new social emotions. The second stage followed the emergence of language, when individuals began to instruct the imagination of their interlocutors, and to rely even more extensively on emotional plasticity and culturally learned emotional control. This account further illustrates the significant differences between humans and domesticates, thus challenging the notion of human self-domestication. (shrink)

As quantum information science approaches the goal of constructing quantum computers, understanding loss of information through decoherence becomes increasingly important. The information about a system that can be obtained from its environment can facilitate quantum control and error correction. Moreover, observers gain most of their information indirectly, by monitoring (primarily photon) environments of the “objects of interest.” Exactly how this information is inscribed in the environment is essential for the emergence of “the classical” from the quantum substrate. In this paper, (...) we examine how many-qubit (or many-spin) environments can store information about a single system. The information lost to the environment can be stored redundantly, or it can be encoded in entangled modes of the environment. We go on to show that randomly chosen states of the environment almost always encode the information so that an observer must capture a majority of the environment to deduce the system’s state. Conversely, in the states produced by a typical decoherence process, information about a particular observable of the system is stored redundantly. This selective proliferation of “the fittest information” (known as Quantum Darwinism) plays a key role in choosing the preferred, effectively classical observables of macroscopic systems. The developing appreciation that the environment functions not just as a garbage dump, but as a communication channel, is extending our understanding of the environment’s role in the quantum-classical transition beyond the traditional paradigm of decoherence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Looking to Learn: Museum Educators and Aesthetic EducationNancy Blume (bio), Jean Henning (bio), Amy Herman (bio), and Nancy Richner (bio)IntroductionMuseum education. Aesthetic education. How are they similar? How do they differ? How do they relate to each other? What are their goals? As museum educators working with classroom and art teachers, we are often asked these questions, and we ask them ourselves. “What do you DO?” is probably (...) the most frequently asked question of all, and the answer is complex. Even more complex is how these questions relate to the Rembrandt Project. Given that looking at original works of art is such a priority for museums and museum educators, how do we address the project’s reliance on technology? And how do these questions relate to the social studies and visual arts standards, [End Page 83] another major component of the project? How does the project relate to the work we do in our own museums? Writing collaboratively implies that we have certain areas of commonality; but we also have differences, which will be apparent in individual sections of this article: Jean Henning and Nancy Richner discuss the Nassau County Museum of Art, Nancy Blume writes about Asia Society, and Amy Herman explores the Frick Collection. Our focus will be the domain of museum education as that is what we know best, but there are inevitably areas where it overlaps and complements the domains of art education, aesthetic education, and social studies.Art Museum Education HistoryThe history of art museum education begins with the founding of museums in the United States during the commercial and industrial expansion that took place after the Civil War, between 1870 and 1929. The principles guiding American museums have always mirrored the values of American society. From the beginning of this country’s history, the fine arts have been viewed as elitist and thus of no value to the larger society. “To America,” Ben Franklin wrote in the late 1700s, “one school master is worth a dozen poets, and the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael.”1 Given such longstanding and deep-seated suspicion of art among Americans, it is not surprising that both the champions and the staff of art museums insisted on the practical educational benefits museums provided to the public.By the late nineteenth century, at the height of immigration and the emergence of a strong working class and labor movement, a social dimension was added to the mission of museum education. Art museums, like public libraries, were seen as venues for achieving social balance. By the early twentieth century an aesthetic agenda was finally joined to these social and pragmatic ones.2While museums have responded to the needs created by cyclical changes in social, economic, political, and intellectual life, today’s art museum educators still deal with the tension among the museum’s aesthetic, educational, and social missions; only the context and delivery modes of museum education have changed. Yet despite the shifting directions and priorities in museum education, there are certain basic and commonly accepted premises that museum educators have shared since the late nineteenth century. The 1984 Museums Commission on Museums for a New Century stated what has been the continuing premise of museum education since the late nineteenth century: learning in museums is based on objects and involves not only developing the ability to synthesize ideas and form opinions but also shaping an aesthetic and cultural sensibility.3 Another fundamental [End Page 84] assumption is that museums are institutions of visual instruction. Although each of the museum educators writing here represents a unique institution with unique approaches to looking at and finding meaning in art, we all agree on the importance of the original work of art as the basis for our work. It is the complexity of original artworks that enables them to play a dual role. One role is pragmatic, which requires meeting standards set by state and national governments for teaching critical thinking skills and improving literacy. The second role is aesthetic—namely, ways of helping students develop habits for aesthetic encounters that are an integral part... (shrink)

The process of technological change in obstetrics must be understood as contingent on the exigencies of the professional project, rather than in terms simply of improvement or dehumanization of care. Transformation in the procedures by which the female pelvis and the fetal head have been measured illustrate this point. The development of new measurement techniques was profoundly influenced by the shifting locus of obstetric care and by changing professional concerns, including the initial demarcation of a professional practice and subsequent debates (...) about preferred modes of intervention. (shrink)

This article deals with the author’s experiences in studying cochlear implantation over a period of some years. While no overt controversy surrounded the device or the practices associated with it in the Netherlands when this work started, studying its introduction became complex. Following others, the research strategy that was evolved might be termed one of mediation and intervention. It entailed treating the views and aspirations of research subjects, clinical and lay, with equal regard. It entailed promotion of dialogue. For reasons (...) that are discussed in the article, the attempt was made to translate this dialogue to the political level. The challenge confronting the author was simultaneously methodological and political. (shrink)

Theories of music evolution rely on our understanding of what music is. Here, I argue that music is best conceptualized as an interactive technology, and propose a coevolutionary framework for its emergence. I present two basic models of attachment formation through behavioral alignment applicable to all forms of affiliative interaction and argue that the most critical distinguishing feature of music is entrained temporal coordination. Music's unique interactive strategy invites active participation and allows interactions to last longer, include more participants, and (...) unify emotional states more effectively. Regarding its evolution, I propose that music, like language, evolved in a process of collective invention followed by genetic accommodation. I provide an outline of the initial evolutionary process which led to the emergence of music, centered on four key features: technology, shared intentionality, extended kinship, and multilevel society. Implications of this framework on music evolution, psychology, cross-species and cross-cultural research are discussed. (shrink)

‘In the beginning was the word And the word was aardvark’Oulipo, Aux origines du langage, Bibliothéque oulipienne no. 121First I think I should explain that call. It echoed in my ears for the first time a very long time ago and far, far away: on the Roof of the World, the Afghan Pamir, more than 30 years ago. It was uttered by a Kirghiz shepherd following a herd of sheep. Even if it is not in fact possible to transcribe that (...) call accurately - the combination of the phonetic parameters that determine it would necessitate a representation using a graph or numerical matrices - I will attempt to give it a written shape, HAY, while admitting that this transcription denotes an abstraction that subsumes many possible realizations. But be that as it may. A few years later, when I was living in the Haut-Livradois, in the deepest heart of rural France, I was surprised to hear that call again on the lips of an Auvergnat peasant who was taking his sheep to the meadow. This unlikely coincidence led me to take a closer interest in the problem of communication between humans and animals. It is the essence of that thinking that I would today like to pass on to the readers of Diogenes in an issue devoted to the East/West contrast. (shrink)

Welcoming their scholarly focus on metaphorizing, I critique Díaz-Rojas, Soto-Andrade and Videla-Reyes’s selection of the hypothetical constructs “conceptual metaphor” and “enactive ….

The thesis concerns itself with the selection constraints governing the basic distributional patterns of five complement constructions in English--the bare clause, the that-clause, the interrogative, the concealed question construction and the exclamative complement--across a wide array of knowledge, belief and communication predicates. The relevant distributional phenomena--which predicates are capable of embedding which complement types--have traditionally been captured by stipulative grammatical markings such as subcategorization frames, semantic selection frames and case-theoretic lexical markings. These theoretical tools, even to the extent that they (...) successfully reduplicate the observed phenomena, are of no explanatory value, as they do not derive the different behavioral patterns from some independently established properties of the embedding predicates or their complements. In the thesis, I present an epistemically-based theory, which attempts to derive the relevant distributional phenomena, including those traditionally assumed to reflect hard-core syntactic idiosyncrasies, from a linguistic-epistemic theory of knowledge, belief and communication. ;The theory is based on a lexical-semantic analysis of the embedding predicates, according to which they denote ternary relations between agents, objects of attitude and objects of representation. Thus, to give an example, the predicate think denotes a ternary relation between a thinker, a thought mentally represented by the thinker, and a proposition expressed by the thought and believed by the thinker to be true. This analysis, developed on linguistic grounds for linguistic purposes, echoes some of the recent insights in the philosophy of mind, especially Crimmins . Coupled with a theory of the meanings of the different complement types--partially based on the formal semantic insights of Karttunen , Groenedijk and Stokhof and Ginzburg --this account derives the distributional patterns from simple considerations of semantic compatibility: those predicates which are capable of embedding a certain complement type are exactly those whose lexical semantics is compatible with the semantics of the complement. ;Some of the distributional patterns discussed in the thesis, especially the one involving concealed questions, have traditionally been taken to provide empirical support for the hypothesis of the autonomy of syntactic representations . The analysis presented in this thesis reveals the dramatic extent to which the semantics and the syntax of lexical selection are transparent to each other, and thus implies, at least with respect to the core domain of lexical selection, that the autonomy hypothesis is empirically unjustified. (shrink)

In his published lectures Civilizations: Nostalgia and Utopia, Daya Krishna criticizes postmodern thought and especially the writings of Jacques Derrida. By outlining similarities between the two, I would claim that, indeed, it was Daya Krishna’s unexpected proximity to Derrida’s ‘deconstruction’ project that triggered his scathing critique of the latter. Moreover, Daya Krishna’s response to Derrida reveals an ongoing inner conflict in his own thinking. On the one hand, he provides us with a harsh critique of Derrida the ‘postmodern’; on the (...) other hand, he concedes that the ‘modern’ notion of knowledge has been totally transformed, and the ‘deconstruction’ of its old formulations was the major catalyst that provoked and directed his own philosophical enterprise in the last years of his life, reformulating knowledges. Reconstructing in this way, the dialogue which never happened might prove beneficial, not only for understanding the distinctive works of its participants, but also for carrying their writings and us one step further towards a productive, ‘relevant’ philosophical discourse in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

This paper proposes a learning-efficiency explanation of modular structure in language. An optimal grammar arises as the solution to the problem of learning a language from a minimal number of observations of instances of the use of the language. Agents face symmetry constraints that limit their ability to make a priori distinctions among symbols used in the language and among objects (interpreted as facts, events, speaker’s intentions) that are to be represented by messages in the language. It is shown that (...) if it is commonly known that the object space is modular and messages are strings, then modularity of the language is sufficient and (essentially) necessary for learning efficiency. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: C72. (shrink)

Current research on the syntax-semantics interface demonstrates the dramatic extent to which syntactic structures constitute transparent reflections of well-defined semantic regularities. As this paper shows, the empirical results accumulated within this framework strongly suggest that a theoretical distinction should be made between two distinct levels of meaning representation: A level of conceptual meaning on the one hand, and a uniquely linguistic level of meaning — Linguistic Semantics — on the other. The semantic notions and regularities which turn out to determine (...) major syntactic phenomena are best interpreted as belonging to the level of Linguistic Semantics, rather than to the level of conceptual meaning. This view helps characterize language as a unique and functional system — a cognitive system whose function is defined at the level of Linguistic Semantics. It explains the fact, most recently highlighted by Levinson, that the expressive power of language, as a tool for the communication of meanings, is constrained in non-trivial ways. (shrink)

Dorfman et al.’s (2024) study on psychiatrists’ perceptions of treatment-refractory mental illness found that while most psychiatrists recognize there are cases where further treatment may no longe...