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- Kaipainen, Mauri, et al.
(författare)
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Conceptualization for intended action : A dynamic model
- 2023
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Ingår i: Philosophical Psychology. - : Taylor & Francis Group. - 0951-5089 .- 1465-394X. ; , s. 1-36
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Concepts are the building blocks of higher-order cognition and consciousness. Building on Conceptual Spaces Theory (CST) and proceeding from the assumption that concepts are inherently dynamic, this paper provides historical context to and significantly elaborates the previously offered Iterative Subdivision Model (ISDM) with the goal of pushing it toward empirical testability. The paper describes how agents in continuous interaction with their environment adopt an intentional orientation, estimate the utility of the concept(s) applicable to action in the current context, engage in practical action, and adopt any new concepts that emerge: a largely pre-intellectual cycle that repeats essentially without interruption over the conceptual agent’s lifetime. This paper elaborates utility optimization by establishing three constraints on concept formation/evaluation – non-redundancy, distinctiveness, and proportionality – embedding them in a quasi-mathematical model intended for development into a formal logic. The notion of a distinctor – a quality dimension of the conceptual space in focus at any given time, used for making what we call a difference distinction – is key. The primary contribution of the revised ISDM is the way it relates concepts to action via utility optimization/actualization and the way it describes the emergence of quality dimensions through trial-by-action (trial and error), something previous presentations of CST have failed to address.
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| 4. |
- Lind, Per, et al.
(författare)
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Pyrrhonean Aporiagogics and the Challenge of Astrocognition
- 2013
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Ingår i: The History and Philosophy of Astrobiology : Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life and the Human Mind - Perspectives on Extraterrestrial Life and the Human Mind. - 9781443850353 ; , s. 93-127
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)
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- Parthemore, Joel, 1964-
(författare)
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A cognitive semiotic perspective on the nature and limitations of concepts and conceptual frameworks
- 2016
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Ingår i: Meaning, Mind and Communication. - Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang Publishing Group. - 9783631657041 - 9783653049480 - 9783631701300 - 9783631701317 ; , s. 47-68
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Known under the potentially misleading rubric of “knowledge representation” in cognitive science, theories of concepts represent both a subfield within philosophy of mind and an application area for cognitive semiotics. They describe the properties of conceptual thought, typically through a listing of those properties: minimally taken to include systematicity, productivity, compositionality, intentionality, and endogenous control. Beyond that point, most things are up for grabs. Debate rages over such questions as whether concepts are representations or abilities; likewise unclear is whether they are essentially public or largely private, discrete or continuous, stable or dynamic, transparent or translucent or opaque. Cognitive semiotics helps clarify discussion over an inevitably abstract area in a number of key ways: through its grounding in semiotics, showing how concepts both are entwined with language (intrinsically public) and pull apart from it; through its roots in phenomenology, showing how concepts both are and are not representations; through its focus on meaning as a dynamic process, showing how concepts’ relative stability belies an underlying dynamics; through its deep resonance with enactive philosophy, showing how concepts impose seemingly sharp boundaries onto underlying continuities; through its bold refusal to shy away from apparent contradictions and paradox, revealing how concepts both reveal the world and simultaneously hide it from us. As a concrete example, I discuss the conceptual nature of metaphor from a cognitive semiotic perspective. I show how – given the problematic nature of so-called literal meaning – the crucial distinction is not between literal and metaphorical meanings, but between tertiary/novel meanings and primary/secondary ones: between meanings that call attention to themselves and those that do not, where only the former are appropriately termed “metaphors”. The lesson is not that all meaning is metaphorical but rather that the line between metaphor and non-metaphor is pragmatic rather than absolute, conceptual rather than ontological.
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- Parthemore, Joel, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
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Artefactual ethics as opportunity for rethinking “natural” ethics
- 2022
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 17th SweCog Conference. - Skövde : University of Skövde. - 9789198366792 ; , s. 28-31
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper serves as introduction to a significantly longer paper in progress. It argues that, within the ethics community, the wider philosophical establishment and society in general, people have been far too lax about what to accept as morally “right” behaviour – far too quick to let themselves and, all too often, each other off the hook. By drawing comparisons to artefactual behaviour and the objections people raise to calling that behaviour the morally acceptable behaviour of authentic moral agents, this paper lays out a framework by which human ethics and meta-ethics can more fruitfully be approached. An earlier paper of ours (Parthemore and Whitby, 2014) argued that, for an action to be morally right, one must have a convergence of the right motivations, the right means, and the right consequences. The underlying insight is that deontological, virtue-ethics-based, and consequentialist accounts all have their necessary role to play, but each tends to get too focused on itself and its merits to the loss of the bigger picture; while utilitarian accounts, as perhaps the most prominent division within consequentialism, face the further problem of failing to allow for those occasions where the needs of the few, or the one, outweigh the needs of the many, as Ursula K. LeGuin (1973) so devastatingly addressed. Although the requirement to align motivations, means, and consequences may seem impossibly onerous, it need not be, provided one is prepared to allow that moral behaviour is far more difficult to achieve, either for artefacts or human beings, than it might seem at first glance. Mistakes will be made. Perhaps it matters more to take responsibility for those mistakes than to assure oneself, despite reasonable argument to the contrary, that one has avoided them. It is time to hold artefactual and natural agent alike to a higher standard
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- Parthemore, Joel, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
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Artefactual ethics as opportunity to rethink “natural” ethics
- 2023
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the AISB Convention 2023. - : The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour. - 9781713879466 - 9781908187857 ; , s. 107-112
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper argues that, within the ethics community, the wider philosophical establishment and society in general, people have been far too quick to let themselves and, all too often, each other off the hook, at the same time as setting impossibly high standards for artefactual moral agents to meet, such that the artefactual agents should be guaranteed to make no mistakes. If artefacts are ever to be considered candidates for moral agency, then they should be held to no higher (and, at the same time, not significantly lower) a standard than what human beings can achieve. Meanwhile, the prospects of artefactual moral agency invite the opportunity for human moral agents to reconsider the standards they set for themselves and hold themselves to a higher standard.
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- Parthemore, Joel
(författare)
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Conceptual change and development on multiple time scales: From incremental evolution to origins
- 2014
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Ingår i: Sign Systems Studies. - 1406-4243. ; 42:2-3, s. 193-218
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the context of the relationship between signs and concepts, this paper tackles head on some of the ongoing controversies over conceptual development and change – including the claim by some that concepts are not open to revision at all – taking the position that concepts pull apart from language and that concepts can be discussed on at least four levels: that of individual agent, community, society, and language. More controversially, it claims that concepts are not just inherently open to revision but that they, and the frameworks of which they form part, are in a state of continuous if generally incremental change: a position that derives directly from the enactive tradition in philosophy. Concepts, to be effective as concepts, must strike a careful balance between being stable enough to apply across suitably many contexts and flexible enough to adapt to each new context. The paper’s distinctive contribution is a comparison and contrast of conceptual development and change on four time scales: that of the day-to-day life of an individual conceptual agent, the day-to-day life of society, the lifetime of an individual agent, and the lifetime of society and the human species itself. It concludes that the relationship between concepts and experience (individual or collective) is one of circular and not linear causality.
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| 10. |
- Parthemore, Joel, 1964-
(författare)
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Consciousness, semiosis, and the unbinding problem
- 2017
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Ingår i: Language & Communication. - : Elsevier. - 0271-5309 .- 1873-3395. ; 54, s. 36-46
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Any wider discussion of semiosis must address not only how semiosis came about, in terms of evolutionary pressures and requisite cognitive infrastructure, but also – as importantly, and too easily forgotten – how human beings experience and have experienced it, and how that experience reflects (at the same time shaping) its development. Much discussion has focused on resolving how inputs from external sensory modalities combine with internal brain processes to produce unified consciousness: the so-called binding problem. One might wish to distinguish between the coming together of conscious experience in terms of underlying mechanics and the seemingly unavoidable reality that human beings experience a consciousness that is, from the onset, phenomenally unified. The unbinding problem is shown to be potentially just as important to telling the story.
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