Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2018 Heft: 225 Seiten: 77-102.

The paper develops a new holistic theory of the word by integrating semiotic, linguistic, and psychological perspectives and introduces the Cogitative-Sensory Word Model, the CogSens Model, that unites the human mind and body. Saussure’s two-sided sign is replaced by a Peirce-inspired three-sided conception in which the expression unit mediates two content units, namely, an idea content connected to the human mind and an image content linked to the human body. It is argued that it is the word that makes human (...) language a unique tool of communication. Moreover, it is demonstrated how words interact with grammar to create an utterance. Finally, it is suggested that speech perception, i.e., fission of idea and image content, is the mirror image of speech production, i.e., fusion of idea and image content. (shrink)

We use recent developments within philosophy of science and within certain strands of linguistic research to throw light on each other. According to Ronald Giere's perspectivist philosophy of science, the scientific understanding of reality must proceed along different, mutually irreducible lines of approach. Giere's proposal, however, leaves unresolved the problem of how to integrate the ever‐growing multitude of highly diverse scientific accounts of what is, after all, one and the same world. We propose a technique for the alignment of different (...) perspectives that will permit cross‐perspectival explanation, and thus allow for a more holistic picture of reality to emerge. With respect to modern linguistics, however, Giere's perspectivism merely legalises a de facto state of affairs, as this discipline displays the peaceful coexistence of a multitude of different theoretical perspectives. Still, this makes it all the more important to show how the different aspects of language picked out by these different perspectives combine to form one single complex reality. During our investigation, a largely overlooked type of reduction within linguistics comes to light, prevalent in classical as well as current work within speech act theory and politeness theory. We suggest how a more holistic understanding of language can be attained through our technique for integrating different perspectives. (shrink)

The reduction of grounding to causation, or each to a more general relation of which they are species, has sometimes been justified by the impressive inferential capacity of structural equation modelling, causal Bayes nets, and interventionist causal modelling. Many criticisms of this assimilation focus on how causation is inadequate for grounding. Here, I examine the other direction: how treating grounding in the image of causation makes the resulting view worse for causation. The distinctive features of causal modelling that make this (...) connection appealing are distorted beyond use by forcing them to fit onto grounding. The very inferential strength that makes causation attractive is only possible because of a narrow construal of what counts as a causal relation; as soon as that broadens, the inferential capacity markedly diminishes. Making causation suitable for application to grounding spoils what was appealing about causation for this task in the first place. However, grounding need not appeal to causation: causal modelling does not have exclusive claim to structural equation modeling or other formal techniques of modelling structure. I offer a case in favour of a different kind of metaphysical frugality, which tend towards narrow, more restrictive construals of relations like causation or grounding, because then each relation behaves more homogenously. This more homogenous behavior delivers stronger inferential power per relation even though there may be more relations to which one is committed. (shrink)

The paper reviews the current state of play around anti-representationalist attempts at countering Clark and Toribio’s representation-hunger thesis. It introduces a distinction between different approaches to Chemero’s Radical embodied cognition thesis in the form of, on the one hand, those pushing a hard line and, on the other, those who are more relaxed about their anti-representationalist commitments. In terms of overcoming Clark and Toribio’s thesis, hardliners seek to avoid any mentioning of mental content in the activity they purport to explain. (...) Yet, the paper argues, adopting a hard line complicates this endeavor considerably and unnecessarily. Those promoting a relaxed REC, however, are better off in that they have no problem in recognizing that some types of cognition are hybrid. By turning to Hutto and Myin’s Radical Enactivism as a prime example of a relaxed approach to the REC thesis, the paper points towards the lack of continuity between covariant information and informational content as the gap that would necessarily have to be closed in order for RECers to, once and for all, be able to dismiss Clark and Toribio’s hypothesis that certain kinds of cognition are per definition off-limits to anti-representationalism. (shrink)

Obesity continues to be a global issue. In recent years, researchers have started to question the role of our novel yet ubiquitous use of digital media in the development of obesity. With the recent COVID-19 outbreak affecting almost all aspects of society, many people have moved their social eating activities into the digital space, making the question as relevant as ever. The bombardment of appetizing food images and photography – colloquially referred to as “food porn” – has become a significant (...) aspect of the digital food experience. This review presents an overview of whether and how the viewing, creating, and online sharing of digital food photography can influence consumer eating behavior. Moreover, this review provides an outlook of future research opportunities, both to close the gaps in our scientific understanding of the physiological and psychological interaction between digital food photography and actual eating behavior, and, from a practical viewpoint, to optimize our digital food media habits to support an obesity-preventive lifestyle. We do not want to rest on the idea that food imagery’s current prevalence is a core negative influence per se. Instead, we offer the view that active participation in food photography, in conjunction with a selective use of food-related digital media, might contribute to healthy body weight management and enhanced meal pleasure. (shrink)

In Denmark, teaching the famous fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen poses a challenge in primary education because cultural heritage status and oversimplified readings make it difficult to engage students in authentic readings. A strategy could be to use philosophical dialogues from the tradition of philosophy with children because this is a student-centred approach to teaching where students explore questions and ideas together, and where the teacher assumes the role not as authority, but as facilitator of the dialogue. This (...) kind of dialogic teaching has been encouraged as especially suitable for literary education where teachers aim to engage students in reading the literature with an open mind. However, this article presents a case study that gives reason for caution. It analyses materials for philosophical dialogues on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and concludes that despite the dialogic ideals, the teaching design caves in to the weight of the cultural and historical impact of Hans Christian Andersen and his work. (shrink)

English summary: The focus of the contributions in this volume is on the relationships of the young Kierkegaard with the philosophy in Berlin and also with Pietism whose influence expresses itself mainly in his later edifying writings. Berlin and Halle are important reference points for Kierkegaard's roots of thinking which can be characterized as passion and inwardness. Texts about love from all periods of his work together with musical and visual reflections on Kierkegaard combine both aspects and provide an aesthetic (...) comment to the scholarly contributions in this volume. These contributions are the results of two German-Danish conferences in the Kierkegaard Year 2013 in Berlin and Halle, which were funded by the Danish Carlsberg Fond and the Centre for Theology and Theological Education of the Church of Denmark and were organized by the theological faculties in Berlin and Halle. German description: Zentral fur diesen spannenden Aufsatzband sind Beziehungen des jungen Kierkegaard zur Berliner Philosophie sowie sein Verhaltnis zum Pietismus in den erbaulichen Schriften vor allem des spaten Kierkegaard. Berlin und Halle sind wichtige Bezugspunkte fur die Wurzeln des Kierkegaardschen Denkens, die man gut mit den begriffen 'Leidenschaft' und 'Innerlichkeit' charakterisieren kann. Texte uber die Liebe aus allen Phasen des Kierkegaardschen Werkes mit musikalischen und visuellen Reflexionen zu Kierkegaard verbinden die beiden Aspekte miteinander und fungieren als ein asthetischer Kommentar zu den wissenschaftlichen Beitragen. Die Beitrage des Bandes gehen auf zwei deutsch-danische Tagungen im Kierkegaardjahr 2013 in Berlin und Halle zuruck, die vom danischen Carlsbergfond und dem Theologisch-Padagogischen Zentrum der danischen Volkskirche finanziert wurden und in Zusammenarbeit mit den theologischen Fakultaten in Berlin und Halle stattfanden. Mit Beitrager von Svend Andersen, Philipp David, Tim Hagemann, Albrecht Haizmann, Eberhard Harbsmeier, Anders Kingo, Per Ohrgaard, Markus Pohlmeyer, Joachim Ringleben, Christian Senkel und Traugott Vogel. (shrink)

We study the logical and computational properties of basic theorems of uncountable mathematics, including the Cousin and Lindelöf lemma published in 1895 and 1903. Historically, these lemmas were among the first formulations of open-cover compactness and the Lindelöf property, respectively. These notions are of great conceptual importance: the former is commonly viewed as a way of treating uncountable sets like e.g. [Formula: see text] as “almost finite”, while the latter allows one to treat uncountable sets like e.g. [Formula: see text] (...) as “almost countable”. This reduction of the uncountable to the finite/countable turns out to have a considerable logical and computational cost: we show that the aforementioned lemmas, and many related theorems, are extremely hard to prove, while the associated sub-covers are extremely hard to compute. Indeed, in terms of the standard scale (based on comprehension axioms), a proof of these lemmas requires at least the full extent of second-order arithmetic, a system originating from Hilbert–Bernays’ Grundlagen der Mathematik. This observation has far-reaching implications for the Grundlagen’s spiritual successor, the program of Reverse Mathematics, and the associated Gödel hierarchy. We also show that the Cousin lemma is essential for the development of the gauge integral, a generalization of the Lebesgue and improper Riemann integrals that also uniquely provides a direct formalization of Feynman’s path integral. (shrink)

We study the logical and computational properties of basic theorems of uncountable mathematics, in particular Pincherle's theorem, published in 1882. This theorem states that a locally bounded function is bounded on certain domains, i.e. one of the first ‘local-to-global’ principles. It is well-known that such principles in analysis are intimately connected to (open-cover) compactness, but we nonetheless exhibit fundamental differences between compactness and Pincherle's theorem. For instance, the main question of Reverse Mathematics, namely which set existence axioms are necessary to (...) prove Pincherle's theorem, does not have an unique or unambiguous answer, in contrast to compactness. We establish similar differences for the computational properties of compactness and Pincherle's theorem. We establish the same differences for other local-to-global principles, even going back to Weierstrass. We also greatly sharpen the known computational power of compactness, for the most shared with Pincherle's theorem however. Finally, countable choice plays an important role in the previous, we therefore study this axiom together with the intimately related Lindelöf lemma. (shrink)

We investigate the connections between computability theory and Nonstandard Analysis. In particular, we investigate the two following topics and show that they are intimately related. A basic property of Cantor space$2^ $ is Heine–Borel compactness: for any open covering of $2^ $, there is a finite subcovering. A natural question is: How hard is it to compute such a finite subcovering? We make this precise by analysing the complexity of so-called fan functionals that given any $G:2^ \to $, output a (...) finite sequence $\langle f_0, \ldots,f_n \rangle $ in $2^ $ such that the neighbourhoods defined from $\overline {f_i } G\left$ for $i \le n$ form a covering of $2^ $. A basic property of Cantor space in Nonstandard Analysis is Abraham Robinson’s nonstandard compactness, i.e., that every binary sequence is “infinitely close” to a standard binary sequence. We analyse the strength of this nonstandard compactness property of Cantor space, compared to the other axioms of Nonstandard Analysis and usual mathematics.Our study of yields exotic objects in computability theory, while leads to surprising results in Reverse Mathematics. We stress that and are highly intertwined, i.e., our study is holistic in nature in that results in computability theory yield results in Nonstandard Analysis and vice versa. (shrink)

Cantor’s first set theory paper (1874) establishes the uncountability of ${\mathbb R}$. We study this most basic mathematical fact formulated in the language of higher-order arithmetic. In particular, we investigate the logical and computational properties of ${\mathsf {NIN}}$ (resp. ${\mathsf {NBI}}$ ), i.e., the third-order statement there is no injection resp. bijection from $[0,1]$ to ${\mathbb N}$. Working in Kohlenbach’s higher-order Reverse Mathematics, we show that ${\mathsf {NIN}}$ and ${\mathsf {NBI}}$ are hard to prove in terms of (conventional) comprehension axioms, (...) while many basic theorems, like Arzelà’s convergence theorem for the Riemann integral (1885), are shown to imply ${\mathsf {NIN}}$ and/or ${\mathsf {NBI}}$. Working in Kleene’s higher-order computability theory based on S1–S9, we show that the following fourth-order process based on ${\mathsf {NIN}}$ is similarly hard to compute: for a given $[0,1]\rightarrow {\mathbb N}$ -function, find reals in the unit interval that map to the same natural number. (shrink)

The aim of Reverse Mathematics (RM for short) is to find the minimal axioms needed to prove a given theorem of ordinary mathematics. These minimal axioms are almost always equivalent to the theorem, working over the base theory of RM, a weak system of computable mathematics. The Big Five phenomenon of RM is the observation that a large number of theorems from ordinary mathematics are either provable in the base theory or equivalent to one of only four systems; these five (...) systems together are called the ‘Big Five’. The aim of this paper is to greatly extend the Big Five phenomenon as follows: there are two supposedly fundamentally different approaches to RM where the main difference is whether the language is restricted to second-order objects or if one allows third-order objects. In this paper, we unite these two strands of RM by establishing numerous equivalences involving the second-order Big Five systems on one hand, and well-known third-order theorems from analysis about (possibly) discontinuous functions on the other hand. We both study relatively tame notions, like cadlag or Baire 1, and potentially wild ones, like quasi-continuity. We also show that slight generalizations and variations of the aforementioned third-order theorems fall far outside of the Big Five. (shrink)

Reverse Mathematics (RM hereafter) is a program in the foundations of mathematics where the aim is to identify the minimal axioms needed to prove a given theorem from ordinary, i.e., non-set theoretic, mathematics. This program has unveiled surprising regularities: the minimal axioms are very often equivalent to the theorem over the base theory, a weak system of ‘computable mathematics’, while most theorems are either provable in this base theory, or equivalent to one of only four logical systems. The latter plus (...) the base theory are called the ‘Big Five’ and the associated equivalences are robust following Montalbán, i.e., stable under small variations of the theorems at hand. Working in Kohlenbach’s higher-order RM, we obtain two new and long series of equivalences based on theorems due to Bolzano, Weierstrass, Jordan, and Cantor; these equivalences are extremely robust and have no counterpart among the Big Five systems. Thus, higher-order RM is much richer than its second-order cousin, boasting at least two extra ‘Big’ systems. (shrink)

We review some of the history of the computability theory of functionals of higher types, and we will demonstrate how contributions from logic and theoretical computer science have shaped this still active subject.

We show that to every recursive total continuous functional $\Phi$ there is a PCF-definable representative $\Psi$ of $\Phi$ in the hierarchy of partial continuous functionals, where PCF is Plotkin's programming language for computable functionals. PCF-definable is equivalent to Kleene's S1-S9-computable over the partial continuous functionals.

We use the theory of domains with totality to construct some logics generalizing ω-logic and β-logic and we prove a completenes theorem for these logics. The key application is E-logic, the logic related to the functional 3E. We prove a compactness theorem for sets of sentences semicomputable in 3E.

The article locates work on regional development, and in particular action research, within the context of debates on neo-liberalism and democracy. The “learning regions” approach is explored, but the scale of the challenges to overcome is emphasised.

We prove that the hierarchy of hereditarily effective typestreams, that are effective models of inductivly defined types, has the length of the first recursivly inaccessible ordinal.

We give a characterisation of an extension of the Kleene-Kreisel continuous functionals to objects of transfinite types using limit spaces of transfinite types.