We provide a new link between deductive and probabilistic reasoning fallacies. Illusory inferences from disjunction are a broad class of deductive fallacies traditionally explained by recourse to a matching procedure that looks for content overlap between premises. In two behavioral experiments, we show that this phenomenon is instead sensitive to real-world causal dependencies and not to exact content overlap. A group of participants rated the strength of the causal dependence between pairs of sentences. This measure is a near perfect predictor (...) of fallacious reasoning by an independent group of participants in illusory inference tasks with the same materials. In light of these results, we argue that all extant accounts of these deductive fallacies require non-trivial adjustments. Crucially, these novel _indirect_ illusory inferences from disjunction bear a structural similarity to seemingly unrelated _probabilistic reasoning_ problems, in particular the conjunction fallacy from the heuristics and biases literature. This structural connection was entirely obscure in previous work on these deductive problems, due to the theoretical and empirical focus on content overlap. We argue that this structural parallelism provides arguments against the need for rich descriptions and individuating information in the conjunction fallacy, and we outline a unified theory of deductive illusory inferences from disjunction and the conjunction fallacy, in terms of Bayesian confirmation theory. (shrink)

People of low socioeconomic status (SES) are often underrepresented in biomedical research. The importance of demographically diverse research samples is widely recognized, especially given socioeconomic disparities in health, but have been challenging to achieve. One barrier to research participation by low SES individuals is their distance from research centers and the difficulty of traveling. This article examines the promise of portable magnetic resonance imaging (pMRI) for enrolling participants of diverse SES in structural neuroimaging studies, and anticipates some of the challenges, (...) practical and ethical, that may arise in the course of such research. (shrink)

Positing representations and operations on them as a way of explaining behavior was one of the major innovations of the cognitive revolution. Neuroscience and biology more generally also employ representations in explaining how organisms function and coordinate their behavior with the world around them. In discussions of the nature of representation, theorists commonly differentiate between the vehicles of representation and their content—what they denote. Many contentious debates in cognitive science, such as those pitting neural network models against symbol processing accounts, (...) have focused on the types of vehicles proposed for mental representation and whether they have the appropriate structure to succeed in bearing their contents. Philosophers, in contrast, have focused their debates on content and the particular way in which vehicles might bear content—that is, the process of representing rather than the format of representations. I will offer a novel answer to the question of how it is that a representation has content by focusing on the architecture of representation. My proposal is that representations occur in a particular type of mechanism—one in which a control system regulates a plant—and that we can gain traction on cognitive systems of representation by considering how this works in physical systems more generally. (shrink)

With the development of new procedures in the production of synthetic human gametes it has become important to re-examine the manner in which reproductive cells, taking part in the generation of children, can be understood. Though this can be attempted from many different perspectives, the present study will examine the possibility of considering gametes as representing the persons from whom they originated. From this perspective, it is possible to suggest that, in procreation, the entirety of each human sperm cell may (...) represent and reveal the man from whom it was produced and the entirety of each human egg cell may represent and reveal the woman from whom it was produced.The possible ethical consequences of using synthetic gametes for those who hold this perspective together with their understanding of relational identity will also be examined. (shrink)

The topic of temporal meaning in texts has received considerable attention in recent years from scholars in linguistics, logical semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Representing Time in Natural Language offers a systematic and detailed account of how we use temporal information contained in a text or in discourse to reason about the flow of time, inferring the order in which events happened when this is not explicitly stated. A new representational system is designed to formalize an appropriately context-dependent notion (...) of situated inference. The Dynamic Aspect Tree, representing temporal dependencies, constitutes a novel and important dynamic temporal logic, one that makes it easy to see "what follows when" from the information given in an ordinary English text. (shrink)

The first section introduces a distinction between 2 families of cognitive operations, called System 1 and System 2. The second section presents an attribute-substitution model of heuristic judgment, which elaborates and extends earlier treatments of the topic. The third section introduces a research design for studying attribute substitution. The fourth section discusses the controversy over the representativeness heuristic. The last section situates representativeness within a broad family of prototype heuristics, in which properties of a prototypical exemplar dominate global (...) judgments concerning an entire set. (shrink)

This 1983 book is a lively and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism. It has two parts. 'Representing' deals with the different philosophical accounts of scientific objectivity and the reality of scientific entities. The views of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Putnam, van Fraassen, and others, are all considered. 'Intervening' presents the first sustained treatment of experimental science for many years and uses it to give a new direction to debates about (...) realism. Hacking illustrates how experimentation often has a life independent of theory. He argues that although the philosophical problems of scientific realism can not be resolved when put in terms of theory alone, a sound philosophy of experiment provides compelling grounds for a realistic attitude. A great many scientific examples are described in both parts of the book, which also includes lucid expositions of recent high energy physics and a remarkable chapter on the microscope in cell biology. (shrink)

We represent shape in both sight and touch, but how do these abilities relate to one another? This issue has been discussed in the context of Molyneux's question of whether someone born blind could, upon being granted sight, identify shapes visually. Some have suggested that we might look to real‐world cases of sight restoration to illuminate the relation between visual and tactual shape representations. Here, I argue that newly sighted perceivers should not be relied on in this way because they (...) are unlikely to form the kinds of shape representations responsible for cross‐modal recognition in normally sighted perceivers. I then argue that the available evidence makes a compelling case for the type identity view, on which the visual and tactual representations responsible for cross‐modal recognition are type‐identical. (shrink)

Recent work on the idea of political representation has challenged effectively orthodox accounts of constituency and interests. However, discussions of representation need to focus more on its dynamics prior to further work on its forms. To that end, the idea of the representative claim is advanced and defended. Focusing on the representative claim helps us to: link aesthetic and cultural representation with political representation; grasp the importance of performance to representation; take non-electoral representation seriously; and to underline the contingency and (...) contestability of all forms of representation. The article draws upon a range of sources and ideas to sketch a new, broader and more complex picture of the representative claim which — despite the complexity — helps us to reconnect representation theory to pressing real-world challenges. (shrink)

One of the claims of Type Theory with Records is that it can be used to model types learned by agents in order to classify objects and events in the world, including speech events. That is, the types can be represented by patterns of neural activation in the brain. This claim would be empty if it turns out that the types are in principle impossible to represent on a finite network of neurons. We will discuss how to represent types in (...) terms of neural events on a network and present a preliminary computational implementation that maps types to events on a network. The kind of networks we will use are closely related to the transparent neural networks discussed by Strannegård. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “A Computational Constructivist Model as an Anticipatory Learning Mechanism for Coupled Agent–Environment Systems” by Filipo Studzinski Perotto. Upshot: The aim of this commentary is to relate the target article to recent work about how to represent the knowledge acquired from experience by a constructivist agent.

How is reality really manufactured? The idea of social construction has become a commonplace part of much social research, yet precisely what is constructed, how it is constructed, and what constructionism means are often left unclear or taken for granted. In this major work, Jonathan Potter explores the central themes raised by these questions. Representing Reality explores the different traditions in constructivist thought--including sociology of scientific knowledge; conversation analysis and ethnomethodology; and semiotics, poststructuralism, and postmodernism--to provide a lucid introduction to (...) several key strands of work that have overturned the way we think about facts and descriptions. Potter illustrates his points throughout with varied and engaging examples taken from newspaper stories, relationship counseling sessions, accounts of paranormal events, social workers' assessments of violent parents, informal talk between program organizers, political arguments, and everyday conversations. Representing Reality offers the student and scholar in social psychology, rhetoric and discourse, and related fields a critical introduction to constructivism. (shrink)

Representative democracy is often assessed from the standpoint of direct democracy. Recently, however, many theorists have come to argue that representation forms a democratic model in its own right. The most powerful claim in this direction is to be found within two quite different strands of thinking: the aesthetic theory of Frank Ankersmit and the savage theory of Claude Lefort. In this article, I show that while Ankersmit and Lefort converge in their critique of direct rule, they provide us with (...) two distinct models of democracy. Aesthetic democracy, I argue, in the end falls short as a democratic recuperation of representation. It reduces representation to delegation. Savage democracy proves more fruitful in this respect. It offers a representative view of politics without committing itself to the premises associated with political delegation. (shrink)

I consider whether the content of a speech act is best represented by a set of possible worlds or by an ordered set containing the individual and properties the speech act is about. I argue that there is nothing in such contents that an ordered set can represent that a set of worlds cannot. In particular, both can be used to capture what is distinctive about singular propositions. But a set of worlds better represents content in cases where the content (...) concerns individuals that no longer exist. It is also better at representing how content can be expressed in different ways, and how assertion relates to the pursuit of truth. Finally, representing content by a set of worlds allows for a clearer view of the puzzle about logical omniscience, even though it is often taken to founder on that puzzle. (shrink)

Some recent views of action have claimed that a correct conceptual account of action must include second-order motivational states. This follows from the fact that first-order motivational states such as desires account for action or mere behavior in which the agent's participation is lacking; thus, first-order motivational states cannot by themselves account for action in which the agent participates, so-called full-blooded action. I argue that representing the agent's participation by means of second-order states is bound to fail because it misrepresents (...) what an agent is doing when acting in the full-blooded sense. I begin by characterizing full-blooded action and explaining the failure of first-order accounts to explain it. I next show that while second-order accounts have some success in explaining full-blooded action, they fail to distinguish it from action which exhibits motivational alienation. I then argue that even if this problem were resolved, the second-order accounts more fundamentally misrepresent full-blooded action by depicting such action in an introverted manner. I conclude by considering a sketch of agency and full-blooded action that does not rely on second-order states and by addressing a primary concern thought to favor the second-order accounts, the concern of agent causation. (shrink)

Latin America has often been represented by images of pre-Columbian artifacts and artwork on book covers and in other printed materials produced by Latin American studies. This article tries to show that there are strong connections between this type of representation and the semantics of Latin America both in everyday English language and in the discourses of the social sciences. First, the author reviews the history of the concept of Latin America in everyday English language, showing how it has been (...) defined as the opposite of a glorified collective self-image of America, in cultural, temporal, and racial terms. Next, chief approaches of Latin American studies (modernization theory, studies of corporatism, and the present-day textbook literature) are examined, focusing on how social scientific discourses have defined Latin America. Before returning to the topic of pre-Columbian representation, the covers of the best-selling present-day textbooks are surveyed to show how these pictorial representations reproduce the cultural and temporal perceptions of otherness already present in the texts, plus a racial perception that is mostly absent in them. The author argues that the pre-Columbian representation reproduces the three aspects of Latin America’s othering in a powerful and synthetic way. Last, the results of the present analysis are evaluated in the light of some contributions to postcolonial theory, visual culture studies and picture theory. (shrink)

Representation and models have been the focus of considerable interest in philosophy of science for several decades. But the publication in 2008 of Bas van Fraassen’s important book Scientific representation: Paradoxes of perspective gave a novel and strong impetus to the study of their role in the dynamic of scientific knowledge, as attested by the growing quantity of papers and conferences related to representation. In science, knowing necessarily involves representing—phenomena at least and perhaps more for the scientific realist—by means of (...) mathematical structures. Even if these structures are not, as van Fraassen aptly insists, mental ideas, scientific activity is still evolving within the modern Cartesian “épistèmè de la representation” as Michel Foucault famously put it.This book is a welcome collection of exciting papers which grew out of a Workshop on representation and models organized on 11–12 March in Ferrol, at the University of A Coruña . Most papers are devoted to .. (shrink)

Sequential von Neumann–Morgernstern (VM) games are a very general formalism for representing multi-agent interactions and planning problems in a variety of types of environments. We show that sequential VM games with countably many actions and continuous utility functions have a sound and complete axiomatization in the situation calculus. This axiomatization allows us to represent game-theoretic reasoning and solution concepts such as Nash equilibrium. We discuss the application of various concepts from VM game theory to the theory of planning and multi-agent (...) interactions, such as representing concurrent actions and using the Baire topology to define continuous payoff functions. (shrink)

The article examines the political challenge and significance of forgiveness as an indispensable response to the inherently imperfect and tragic nature of political life through the lens of the existential, narrative-inspired judging sensibility. While the political significance of forgiveness has been broadly recognized in transitional justice and reconciliation contexts, the question of its importance and appropriateness in the wake of grave injustice and suffering has commonly been approached through constructing a self-centred, rule-based framework, defining forgiveness in terms of a moral (...) duty or virtue. Reliant on a set of prefabricated moral standards, however, this approach risks abstracting from the historical, situated condition of human political existence and thus arguably stands at a remove from the very quandaries and imperfections of the political world, which it purports to address. Against this background, this article draws on Albert Camus’s and Hannah Arendt’s aesthetic, worldly judging sensibility and its ability to kindle the process of coming to terms with the absurd, and perhaps unforgivable character of reality after evil. As an aptitude to engage the world in its particularity, plurality and contingency rather than seeking to subdue and tame it under prefabricated standards of thought, namely, worldly judgement is able to reveal how past tragedies have arisen from the ambiguity of human engagement in the world and thereby also elicit the distinctly human capacities of beginning anew and resisting such actions in the future. As such, I suggest, it is well-suited to bring into clearer focus and confront the main political challenge and significance of forgiveness: how to acknowledge the seriousness of the wrongs committed, yet also enable the possibility of a new beginning and restore among former enemies the sense of responsibility for the shared world. (shrink)

At this point I should say something about one of the frequent criticisms addressed to me, and to which I have always wanted to respond, that in the process of characterizing the production of Europe’s inferior Others, my work is only negative polemic which does not advance a new epistemological approach or method, and expresses only desperation at the possibility of ever dealing seriously with other cultures. These criticisms are related to the matters I’ve been discussing so far, and while (...) I have no desire to unleash a point-by-point refutation of my critics, I do want to respond in a way that is intellectually pertinent to the topic at hand.What I took myself to be undertaking in Orientalism was an adversarial critique not only of the field’s perspective and political economy, but also of the sociocultural situation that makes its discourse both so possible and so sustainable. Epistemologies, discourses, and methods like Orientalism are scarcely worth the name if they are reductively characterized as objects like shoes, patched when worn out, discarded and replaced with new objects when old and unfixable. The archival dignity, institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits function as a worldview with considerable political force not easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give epochs their peculiar individuality. Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to Critical Inquiry is “An Ideology of Difference”. (shrink)

The “Idea of Intrinsic Equality” is central to democracy, but in what respects are persons intrinsically equal, and what requirements, if any, does their equality impose on a process for making collective decisions? This paper seeks to answer that question with respect to our own representative democracy. It examines three theories of collective decision-making that arguably characterize the democratic process under the United States Constitution. It concludes that, while all preserve the Idea of Intrinsic Equality in the election of representatives (...) and legislative voting, only the third theory, Democratic Egalitarianism, which treats all like interests alike in promulgating laws and preserves the fundamental liberties of all, both preserves the Idea of Intrinsic Equality throughout the legislative process and fulfills the fiduciary mandate that legislators legislate in the interests of the people. (shrink)

Today most philosophers of science believe that models play a central role in science and that one of the main functions of scientific models is to represent systems in the world. Despite much talk of models and representation, however, it is not yet clear what representation in this context amounts to nor what conditions a certain model needs to meet in order to be a representation of a certain system. In this thesis, I address these two questions. First, I will (...) distinguish three senses in which something, a vehicle, can be said to be a representation of something else, a target—which I will call respectively denotation, epistemic representation, and faithful epistemic representation—and I will argue that the last two senses are the most important in this context. I will then outline a general account of what makes a vehicle an epistemic representation of a certain target for a certain user—which, according to the account I defend, is the fact that a user adopts what I call an interpretation of the vehicle in terms of the target—and of what makes an epistemic representation of a certain target a faithful epistemic representation of it—which, according to the account I defend, is a specific sort of structural similarity between the vehicle and the target. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the study of the etymology and semantic connotations of Sanskrit terms: sat, bhāva, sambhava, bhavitṛ, bhavya, bhavat, bhūti, bhūta, sarvabhūta, bhavaka, sattva, sattā, saṃvṛtti, jāstāmātā sampatti, vartamāna, āvitta, āvinna as lexical representatives of the conceptosphere of being in the Sanskrit-English dictionary of Monier-Williams. The method of conceptual analysis is implemented based on the assumption of the determining influence of language culture on the content and nature of philosophical creativity. This study is only the first stage (...) of the project to reveal the way of interpreting "being" in the history of Indian philosophy. The key semantic connotations of this concept in the Monier-Williams English-Sanskrit dictionary are revealed. The semantic connection of the concept of "being" with the concepts: "life" and "time" is defined. In this context, "to live" is to be "someone" in order to embrace "one's place" and play "one's role" that can provide "possession" for "subsistence", and the relationship between "being" and "time" is the concreteness of the existing event that is happening or has happened and belonging to the future that is about to happen. Although we do not trace a transparent connection between the concepts of "being" and "space" in Sanskrit, there are reasons to believe that the first of all, the etymology of the terms of our chosen conceptosphere clearly presents the interpretation of being as a long and a spatially defined location. Noticeable is the fact that the connection between the interpretation of the concept of "being" in Sanskrit and the ethical concept of "good" and aesthetic "beauty" we trace only in terms derived from as and bhū, and at the same time only the terms sat and bhava can be translated as "truth", and the meaning of "essence" we find only in the translation of the terms sat and sattva. This explains the fact why the term sat is considered as close as possible to the "Western" interpretation of the concept of "being". It has been suggested that the polysemy of lexical representatives of the concept of being in Sanskrit and the complexity and variability of the grammar compliance of this language can be interpreted as an obstacle to the extreme problematization of this concept. (shrink)

The Representative Claim is set to transform our core assumptions about what representation is and can be. At a time when political representation is widely believed to be in crisis, the book provides a timely and critical corrective to conventional wisdom on the present and potential future of representative democracy.

ArgumentMoreau (2019) has raised concerns about the use of DNA data obtained from vulnerable populations, such as the Uighurs in China. We discuss another case, situated in Europe and with a research history dating back 100 years: genetic investigations of Roma. In our article, we focus on problems surrounding representativity in these studies. We claim that many of the circa 440 publications in our sample neglect the methodological and conceptual challenges of representativity. Moreover, authors do not account for problematic misrepresentations (...) of Roma resulting from the conceptual frameworks and sampling schemes they use. We question the representation of Roma as a “genetic isolate” and the underlying rationales, with a strong focus on sampling strategies. We discuss our results against the optimistic prognosis that the “new genetics” could help to overcome essentialist understandings of groups. (shrink)

The operational definition of a weak value for a quantum mechanical system involves the limit of the weak measurement strength tending to zero. I study how this limit compares to the situation for the undisturbed system. Under certain conditions, which I investigate, this limit is discontinuous in the sense that it does not merge smoothly to the Hilbert space description of the undisturbed system. Hence, in these discontinuous cases, the weak value does not represent the undisturbed system. As a result, (...) conclusions drawn from such weak values regarding the properties of the studied system cannot be upheld. Examples are given. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of modality resources (e.g., “may”, “often”) in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) in representing behavioral pathology focusing, in particular, on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). ADHD diagnosis requires reports of non-practitioners (e.g., carers and teachers); an effective understanding of behavioral descriptors by the lay community is thus of paramount importance. The study combines qualitative linguistic discourse analysis and a corpus approach to study the presence and functions of modality, adopting a Systemic (...) Functional perspective towards language. The study argues that in the DSM-5 modality is an important linguistic resource for conveying clinical significance, inferred from graduations of recurrence and probability. However, adopting features of professional discourse in representing behavioral pathology for non-experts, especially when those resources are inherently evaluative, stresses the need of health literacy among the lay social community and accessibility in health communication materials, particularly when non-practitioners are involved in the diagnosis practice. (shrink)

Simulations are used in very different contexts and for very different purposes. An emerging development is the possibility of using simulations to obtain a more or less representative reproduction of organs or even entire persons. Such simulations are framed and discussed using the term ‘digital twin’. This paper unpacks and scrutinises the current use of such digital twins in medicine and the ideas embedded in this practice. First, the paper maps the different types of digital twins. A special focus is (...) put on the concrete challenges inherent in the interactions between persons and their digital twin. Second, the paper addresses the questions of how far a digital twin can represent a person and what the consequences of this may be. Against the background of these two analytical steps, the paper defines first conditions for digital twins to take on an ethically justifiable form of representation. (shrink)

Why do we represent the world around us using causal generalizations, rather than, say, purely statistical generalizations? Do causal representations contain useful additional information, or are they merely more efficient for inferential purposes? This paper considers the second kind of answer: it investigates some ways in which causal cognition might aid us not because of its expressive power, but because of its organizational power. Three styles of explanation are considered. The first, building on the work of Reichenbach in "The Direction (...) of Time", points to causal representation as especially efficient for predictive purposes in a world containing certain pervasive patterns of conditional independence. The second, inspired by work of Woodward and others, finds causal representation to be an excellent vehicle for representing all-important relations of manipulability. The third, based in part on my own work, locates the importance of causal cognition in the special role it reserves for information about underlying mechanisms. All three varieties of explanation show promise, but particular emphasis is placed on the third. (shrink)

Idealized mo dels of receptive elds (RFs) can be used as building blocks for the creation of p owerful distributed computation systems. The present rep ort concentrates on inv estigating the utility of collections of RFs in representing 3D objects under changing viewing conditions. The main requirement in this task is that the pattern of activity of RFs vary as little as p ossible when the object and the camera move relative to each other. I propose a method for representing (...) objects by RF activities, based on the observation that, in the case of rotation around a xed axis, dierences of activities of RFs that are prop erly situated with resp ect to that axis remain inv ariant. Results of computational exp eriments suggest that a representation scheme based on this algorithm for the choice of stable pairs of RFs would p erform consistently b etter than a scheme inv olving random sets of RFs. The proposed scheme may be useful under object or camera rotation, b oth for ideal Lam b ertian objects, and for real-world objects such as human faces. (shrink)

High-level theory is the view that high-level properties---the property of being a dog, being a tiger, being an apple, being a pair of lips, etc.---can be represented in perceptual experience. Low-level theory denies this and claims that high-level properties are only represented at the level of perceptual judgment and are products of cognitive interpretation of low-level sensory information (color, shape, illumination). This paper discusses previous attempts to establish high-level theory, their weaknesses, and an argument for high-level theory that does not (...) have these weaknesses. (shrink)

Models such as the simple pendulum, isolated populations, and perfectly rational agents, play a central role in theorising. It is now widely acknowledged that a study of scientific representation should focus on the role of such imaginary entities in scientists’ reasoning. However, the question is most of the time cast as follows: How can fictional or abstract entities represent the phenomena? In this paper, I show that this question is not well posed. First, I clarify the notion of representation, and (...) I emphasise the importance of what I call the “format” of a representation for the inferences agents can draw from it. Then, I show that the very same model can be presented under different formats, which do not enable scientists to perform the same inferences. Assuming that the main function of a representation is to allow one to draw predictions and explanations of the phenomena by reasoning with it, I conclude that imaginary models in abstracto are not used as representations: scientists always reason with formatted representations. Therefore, the problem of scientific representation does not lie in the relationship of imaginary entities with real systems. One should rather focus on the variety of the formats that are used in scientific practice. (shrink)

In this paper I wish to propose and defend a form of the Representative Theory of Perception. According to this version of the theory, when a subject perceives some object x to be in a state P1 he does so by being aware of some modfication M1 of some object E. The subject's way of perceiving any one of a range of objects x,y,z, … is that of being aware of some modification of E. It will be a necessary condition (...) of someone's perceiving x to have property P1 that E be modified in some way. And in order for the modifications of E to be representations, a given property P1 will need to be causally related, characteristically, to one or more specific modifications, M1,M2, … Mn, of E. symbolized by ‘X'.). (shrink)

We show how voting rules like the simple and the absolute majority rules, unanimity, consensus, etc. can be represented as logical operators in Łukasiewicz’s three-valued logic. First, we prove tha...

This paper concerns how motor actions are neurally represented and coded. Action planning and motor preparation can be studied using a specific type of representational activity, motor imagery. A close functional equivalence between motor imagery and motor preparation is suggested by the positive effects of imagining movements on motor learning, the similarity between the neural structures involved, and the similar physiological correlates observed in both imaging and preparing. The content of motor representations can be inferred from motor images at a (...) macroscopic level, based on global aspects of the action and the motor rules and constraints which predict the spatial path and kinematics of movements. A more microscopic neural account calls for a representation of object-oriented action. Object attributes are processed in different neural pathways depending on the kind of task the subject is performing. During object-oriented action, a pragmatic representation is activated in which object affordances are transformed into specific motor schemas. Animal as well as human clinical data implicate the posterior parietal and premotor cortical areas in schema instantiation. A mechanism is proposed that is able to encode the desired goal of the action and is applicable to different levels of representational organization. (shrink)

How does a sign manage to represent an object? This is one of the central questions of philosophy. I want to ask a related question. How is it that several signs can represent the very same object? It is tempting to think there is little to this question beyond what can be said about the first. But things are not so simple. A pair of representations can denote the same object in a special way. For some anaphora-antecedent pairs or for (...) some occurrences of the same word, the signs corefer in a way that makes that very fact evident. In this sense, we may say that sometimes the relation of coreference is “de jure”. I begin the paper by outlining what I think are the three core properties of de jure coreference. This reveals that the phenomenon is genuine, ubiquitous and requires explanation. Next, I argue that the relation is not transitive. What this means is that just about every possible explanation is ruled out. For example, we can’t say that two signs are de jure coreferential because they mean the same thing, they are expressions of the same symbol or they correspond to the same variable, index or discourse referent. I do not pursue a solution here. (shrink)

This paper draws on nearly two decades of research on health consumer and patients’ organizations in the United Kingdom. In particular, it addresses questions of representation and legitimacy in the health policy process. HCPOs claim to represent the collective interests of patients and others such as relatives and carers. At times they also make claims to represent the wider public interest. Employing Pitkin’s classic typology of formalistic, descriptive, symbolic, and substantive representation, the paper explores how and in what sense HCPOs (...) represent their constituencies. We found that policymakers themselves are less concerned with formal mechanisms adopted by groups and are more concerned with credibility, in particular whether HCPOs carry the confidence of their constituents. While some concerns about legitimacy remain, particularly in relation to funding from commercial interests, we argue that HCPOs bring a unique perspective to the policy process and to focus purely on formalistic representation provides only a partial understanding of their representative role and a constrained view of their collective moral claims. (shrink)

The National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Thesaurus is a biomedical reference ontology. The NCI Thesaurus is represented using description logic, more specifically Ontylog, a description logic implemen...

Incapacitated adult patients are commonly divided into two groups for purposes of decision making; those with a surrogate and those without. Respectively, these groups are often referred to as represented and unrepresented, and the relative ethics of decision making between them raises two particular issues. The first issue involves the differential application of the best interests standard between groups. Second is the prevailing notion that representedness and unrepresentedness are categorical phenomena, though it is more aptly understood as a multidimensional and (...) continuous variable based on relational moral authority. This paper examines the nature of representedness as it relates to ethical norms of surrogate decision making. (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between the critique of civilization, anti-imperialism, gender and representative government in the political thought of the neglected communist, environmentalist, and gay liberationist Edward Carpenter (1844–1929). In recent years, there has been a dramatic growth in the historical literatures on anti-imperialism and representative government, yet these two topics are rarely connected. Meanwhile, a voluminous literature on the concept of civilization and its role in British imperialism has largely ignored its role in justifying social and political domination (...) in Britain itself. Carpenter's writings on these topics are important because he offers a defense of the value of representative government that is grounded in his anti-imperialism. Furthermore, his critique of civilization led him to connect problems of social domination in India to the struggles of women, homosexuals, and the working class. These groups ought in turn to be enfranchised and given roles in the functioning of the state. (shrink)

Problems of representation lie at the centre of recent experiments in deliberative democracy. The problems are not primarily social scientific questions concerning the statistical representiveness of small-scale deliberative institutions but normative questions about their political and ethical legitimacy. Experiments in deliberative democracy often rely for their representative legitimacy on appeals to the presence of members of different groups. However, they often do so without clear sources of authorisation and accountability from those represented. The representation of nonhumans and future generations in (...) deliberative institutions is still more problematic. In the necessary absence of their authorisation, accountability, and presence, claims to speak on their behalf relies on epistemic claims, coupled with care. To highlight these problems is not to claim that small deliberative institutions are illegitimate but rather to point out the need for a clearer account of their role in democratic institutions and the proper sources of contestability of their outcomes. (shrink)

This article defends the normative relevance of the representation of non-citizens in democracies. I argue that representation within nation-states constitutes a realistic institutionalisation of the All-Affected Principle, allowing justificatory practices towards non-citizens and establishing political institutions that can realise the ideal of inclusion of all externally affected individuals. I defend electoral, non-electoral and surrogate forms of representation of affected interests that satisfy both the cosmopolitan concern for the equal consideration of interests and the statist defence of the importance of a (...) territorially and civically bounded demos. I assess piecemeal implementations of representation practices, namely reciprocal representation, ombudspersons, self-appointed representatives and deliberative and advocacy groups. Gradual and pluralised means of representation constitute necessary and feasible first steps to consider affected interests and offer an alternative route to an all-or-nothing defence of inclusion as national enfranchisement. (shrink)

This paper revisits the dynamic discussion about journalism’s role in representing and amplifying disability arts at the 2019 Cripping the Arts Symposium. Chronicling the dialogue of the “Representation” panel which included artists, arts and culture critics, journalists, and scholars, it reveals how arts and culture coverage contributes to the cultivation of disability, D/deaf, and mad art. Given that the relationship between journalism and disability communities continues to be fractured in Canada, speakers were invited to reflect on journalism and disability arts (...) in relation to their own engagement with media as subjects, authors, and critics of disability arts reviews. The methods for presentation were cripped in multiple ways to provide the fullest access possible. The panel concluded with examples of ableist fault lines in representation practices where the disabled figure is an absent “ghost” in journalistic representation, warnings against journalistic reliance on traditional and objective narratives, and a call for artists to claim and write their own stories. Ultimately, disabled, D/deaf, and mad artists need both control over artistic endeavours and output and influence over representation. This article reconnects journalism and disability communities, ultimately demonstrating that representation is a critical, co-constitutive process that can become more aesthetically and politically oriented toward social justice in its focus on disability, D/deaf, and mad arts. (shrink)