Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Framing Visual Perception In Terms Of Sensorimotor Mapping, Silvano Zipoli Caiani

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Two contrasting theories, or variants of them, are predominant in the current debate on visual cognition. The standard inferential theory sees perception as a process involving the role of memory, past experiences and semantic abilities, whereas the direct theory sees perception as a connection between the perceiver and the environment that does not recruit internal information processing. In particular, the direct theory has recently been invoked because it would be able to explain the sensorimotor coupling of perception and action in humans and animals without relying on controversial notions such as those of conceptualization and propositional information. This paper aims …

How Do Ideas Become General In Their Signification?, Alexandros Tillas

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Abstraction is one of the central notions in philosophy and cognitive science. Though its origins are often traced to Locke, various senses of abstraction have been developed in fields as diverse as philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and computer science (e.g. Barsalou 2005). The notion of abstraction on which I am focusing here is as that of a process of similarities recognition across instances of a given kind involving progressive exclusion of instance details. As such, abstraction plays a major role in concept-formation and learning. Traditionally, abstraction models have been deemed circular (e.g. Berkeley 1710/1957), while in recent years …

Nonconceptual Content, Causal Theory, And Realism, Błażej Skrzypulec

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

In this paper the connections between the nonconceptual content of perceptual states and realism are considered. In particular, I investigate the argument for realism that uses the notion of nonconceptual content, specifically the version proposed by Raftopoulos in Cognition and Perception. To evaluate the argument two forms of realism are identified: (1) correlation realism (CR), according to which distinctions in perceptual content correlate with distinctions in the environment, and (2) ontological realism (OR), according to which perceptual content and perceived reality are both organized according to the same set of ontological categories. First, it is argued that the distinction …

Concept Acquisition And Experiential Change, William S. Robinson

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Many have held the Acquisition of Concepts Thesis (ACT) that concept acquisition can change perceptual experience. This paper explains the close relation of ACT to ADT, the thesis that acquisition of dispositions to quickly and reliably recognize a kind of thing can change perceptual experience. It then states a highly developed argument given by Siegel (2010) which, if successful, would offer strong support for ADT and indirect support for ACT. Examination of this argument, however, reveals difficulties that undermine its promise. Distinctions made in this examination help to clarify an alternative view that denies ADT and ACT while accepting that …

An Empirical Analysis Of Perceptual Judgments, Nicholas Ray

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

This paper is a defense of Reformed Empiricism, especially against those critics who take Reformed Empiricism to be a viable account of empirical rationality only if it avails itself of certain rationalist assumptions that are inconsistent with empiricism. I argue against three broad types of criticism that are found in the current literature, and propose a way of characterising Gupta’s constraints for any model of experience as analytic of empiricism itself, avoiding the charge by some (e.g. McDowell, Berker, and Schafer) who think that the constraints are substantive.

Concepts, Perception And The Dual Process Theories Of Mind, Marcello Frixione, Antonio Lieto

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

In this article we argue that the problem of the relationships between concepts and perception in cognitive science is blurred by the fact that the very notion of concept is rather confused. Since it is not always clear exactly what concepts are, it is not easy to say, for example, whether and in what measure concept possession involves entertaining and manipulating perceptual representations, whether concepts are entirely different from perceptual representations, and so on. As a paradigmatic example of this state of affairs, we will start by taking into consideration the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content. The analysis of …

Linguistic Intuitions And Cognitive Penetrability, Michael Devitt

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Metalinguistic intuitions play a very large evidential role in both linguistics and philosophy. Linguists think that these intuitions are products of underlying linguistic competence. I call this view “the voice of competence” (“VoC”). Although many philosophers seem to think that metalinguistic intuitions are a priori many may implicitly hold the more scientifically respectable VoC. According to VoC, I argue, these intuitions can be cognitively penetrated by the central processor. But, I have argued elsewhere, VoC is false. Instead, we should hold “the modest explanation” (“ME”) according to which these intuitions are fairly unreflective empirical theory-laden central-processor responses to phenomena. On …

Is Low-Level Visual Experience Cognitively Penetrable?, Dávid Bitter

Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication

Philosophers and psychologists alike have argued recently that relatively abstract beliefs or cognitive categories like those regarding race can influence the perceptual experience of relatively low-level visual features like color or lightness. Some of the proposed best empirical evidence for this claim comes from a series of experiments in which White faces were consistently judged as lighter than equiluminant Black faces, even for racially ambiguous faces that were labeled ‘White’ as opposed to ‘Black’ (Levin and Banaji 2006). The latter result is considered especially indicative of cognitive penetration, based on the reasoning that the relevant distortions were a function of …

New Illnesses—Old Problems, Old Illnesses—New Problems, Sander L. Gilman

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This present collection of essays concerns the representation of illness in literature…

The Postmodernist As Academic Leftist; Or, How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love Being Politically Correct, Eugene W. Holland

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The Postmodernist as Academic Leftist; or, How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love Being Politically Correct

Reviews

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Michael Issacharoff. Discourse as Performance. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. vii + 161 pp. Reviewed by Gerald Prince, University of Pennsylvania

Thomas M. Kavanagh, ed. The Limits of Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. 254 pp. Reviewed by André J.M. Prévos, Pennsylvania State University, Worthington Scranton Campus

Wendy B. Faris. Labyrinths of Language: Symbolic Landscape and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1988. 242 pp. Reviewed by Carol Rigolot, Princeton University

Eve Tavor Bannet. Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois …

Beckett's Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation, And Tradition, Dina Sherzer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Beckett's Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation, and Tradition, by Sylvie Debevec Henning

Joshua Lund. The Mestizo State: Reading Race In Modern Mexico. Minneapolis: U Of Minnesota P, 2012. Xx + 217 Pp., Miguel Ángel González-Abellás

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Joshua Lund. The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. xx + 217 pp.

Cynthia Tompkins. Experimental Latin American Cinema. Austin: U Of Texas P, 2013. X+ 294 Pp., Carolina Rocha

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Cynthia Tompkins. Experimental Latin American Cinema. Austin: U of Texas P, 2013. x+ 294 pp.

Editor's Note, Laura Kanost

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Editor's Note

Josephine Donovan. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions. Fourth Edition. New York: Continuum, 2012. Xvi + 287 Pp., Alexandra K. Wettlaufer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Josephine Donovan. Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions. Fourth edition. New York: Continuum, 2012. xvi + 287 pp.

A Significant Source For The Madeleine And Other Major Episodes In Combray: Proust's Intertextual Use Of Pierre Loti's My Brother Yves, Richard M. Berrong

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The most famous passage in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and one of the most famous passages in Western literature, is the moment when the narrator sips tea while eating a shell-shaped pastry called a madeleine and suddenly recalls very vividly an apparently long-forgotten scene from his childhood. From this episode Proust developed his theories about involuntary memory and its important role in our emotional welfare.

Proust was an avid reader of the French novelist Pierre Loti when he was young. Contemporary accounts show that he was able to recite whole passages from Loti’s work in public …

Accumulation And Archives: Sophie Calle’S Prenez Soin De Vous, Natalie Edwards

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

French project artist Sophie Calle has become well-known for her iconoclastic performance art that blends visual and textual elements. Beginning with Les Dormeurs in 1979, in which she invited 24 strangers to sleep in her empty bed and photographed them hourly, through her project of following people around Paris and photographing them like a private detective in Suite vénitienne, Calle has blurred the boundaries between private and public, between photographer and photographed, and between viewer and participant. In this article, I focus on her recent exhibition, Prenez soin de vous. The title comes from the last line of …

Complicating Eroticism And The Male Gaze: Feminism And Georges Bataille’S Story Of The Eye, Chris Vanderwees

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article explores the relationship between feminist criticism and Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye. Much of the critical work on Bataille assimilates his psychosocial theories in Erotism with the manifestation of those theories in his fiction without acknowledging potential contradictions between the two bodies of work. The conflation of important distinctions between representations of sex and death in Story of the Eye and the writings of Erotism forecloses the possibility of reading Bataille’s novel as a critique of gender relations. This article unravels some of the distinctions between Erotism and Story of the Eye in order to complicate …

Aspiration, Consumer Culture, And Individualism In Les Belles-Sœurs, Julie Robert

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

The premise of Michel Tremblay’s revolutionary 1968 play, Les Belles-Sœurs, is a working bee. A group of working-class women gather to paste a million trading stamps, won in a sweepstakes, into booklets that once full can be redeemed for household goods. As the guests surreptitiously pilfer what they see as their hostess’s underserved windfall, their actions problematize the links between the individualistic aspects of consumer and material culture and the communal values they share as members of Quebec’s working class.

Taking consumer culture and material desire as a starting point, this essay considers the relationship between the individual and …

Migration And Metamorphosis In Marie Ndiaye's Trois Femmes Puissantes, Deborah B. Gaensbauer

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In her 2009 Goncourt-Prize-winning novel, Trois femmes puissantes (Three Strong Women), Marie Ndiaye experiments with a polyphonic, semi-fantastical rendering of identity-threatening displacements experienced by three women from different socio-geographic backgrounds. In a brief "Counterpoint" at the end of each of the novel's three sections--a narrative take on the musical technique employed by Ndiaye to introduce new focalizations and unexpected turns of events that complicate interpretations of the characters' behavior--each of the women is perceived as metamorphosed into a bird or a birdlike persona. This essay examines the innovative embedding of the shape-shifts in Trois femmes puissantes in both harrowing …

Falling Into Salvation In Cioran, Joseph Acquisto

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

While, at first glance, there seems to be very little room in the thought of E.M. Cioran for the notion of salvation, a closer look reveals that Cioran returns constantly to the vocabulary and the concept of redemption. This article teases out Cioran’s complex use of the topos of salvation throughout his works, with special emphasis on his middle period. I begin by tracing Cioran’s notion of humanity’s fall into time and language, from which he claims there can be no salvation in the traditional Christian sense. Nonetheless, he retains the concept, claiming at various points that there is a …

Névine El Nossery And Anna Rocca, Eds. Frictions Et Devenirs Dans Les Écritures Migrantes Au Féminin: Enracinements Et Renégociations. Sarrebruck: Editions Universitaires Européens, 2011. 258 Pp., Natalie Edwards

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Névine El Nossery and Anna Rocca, eds. Frictions et devenirs dans les écritures migrantes au féminin: enracinements et renégociations. Sarrebruck: Editions Universitaires Européens, 2011. 258 pp.

A Beautiful Grave: Innocent Objects, Museums, And The Modern Self In Driss Chraïbi's La Civilisation, Ma Mère!... And The Ben M'Sik Community Museum, Katarzyna Pieprzak

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Two-thirds through Driss Chraïbi’s 1972 novel La Civilisation, ma Mère!... ‘Mother Comes of Age’ about an un-named Moroccan woman and her path to modernity, the Mother makes a powerful statement that innocent objects from her past deserve a beautiful tomb and preservation from ridicule. In this article, I discuss the idea of innocent objects – innocent in terms of unknowing, and innocent in juridical terms as absolved from guilt in a crime and undeserving of punishment – in relationship to the Mother’s tomb and the 2006 Casablanca Ben M’Sik Community Museum (BMCM). Both the novel and the museum …

Yasco Horsman. Theaters Of Justice: Judging, Staging, And Working Through In Arendt, Brecht, And Delbo. Stanford Up, 2010. 232 Pp., Peter Yang

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Review of Yasco Horsman. Theaters of Justice: Judging, Staging, and Working Through in Arendt, Brecht, and Delbo. Stanford UP, 2010. 232 pp.

Taking Stock: Marie Nimier’S Textual Cabinet Of Curiosities, Adrienne Angelo

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In many life-writing projects, the seemingly innocuous description of heteroclite objects and how those objects are stored and recalled in fact plays an important role in demonstrating their importance to the process of memory work. At once the lingering traces of one’s past and also an aggregation of stories evoked by an examination of them, these curios focus attention on the relationship between the individual and the storage of memories. This article will focus on certain collectibles, collections and collectors that appear throughout the fictional, autobiographical and autofictional world that Marie Nimier has scripted to date. This textual cabinet of …

Nasty Nazis And Extreme Americans: Cloning, Eugenics, And The Exchange Of National Signifiers In Contemporary Science Fiction, Elizabeth Bridges

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article addresses German science fiction novels from the last ten to fifteen years, specifically those that thematize cloning and/or eugenics. The main novels under discussion include Die verbesserte Frau by Barbara Kirchner, Duplik Jonas 7 by Birgit Rabisch, and Blueprint/Blaupause by Charlotte Kerner, (which was released as a film adaptation starring Franka Potente in 2004). This discussion shows how these and similar novels do or do not contend with the legacy of Nazi eugenics and reproductive experimentation, and second, how the existent historical awareness in the novels relates to the content of debates on current issues of biotechnology, …

What Will The New Generation Generate? Gendering Accumulation In Fatou Diome’S Celles Qui Attendent, Christopher Hogarth

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

In this paper I focus on the penultimate installment of the oeuvre of the much-celebrated Franco-Senegalese writer Fatou Diome, whose largely autobiographical work has garnered a wide following and a lucrative contract with the Flammarion publishing house. I propose that Diome’s 2010 novel Celles qui attendent strongly contributes to a discourse surrounding the roles of males and females in an African economy increasingly dominated by migration. Diome started as a writer who portrayed the empowered role of the female migrant, who is able to accumulate financial capital in Europe and send it back to Africa in order for males to …

Nina Bouraoui’S Nos Baisers Sont Des Adieux: Ekphrasis And The Accumulation Of Memories, Anna Rocca

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

This article aims to explore the function of the image and the purpose of the works of art in Franco-Algerian author Nina Bouraoui’s Nos baisers sont des adieux (2010). Similar to a scrapbook with short descriptions of people, places, and objects, the book itself does not contain any visual representations. In spite of this lack, the image—the latter intended as mental or physical picture that reproduces reality—is a central theme throughout the work. Because visual art is described and interpreted but not shown, I argue that, by means of ékphrasis, the word-image dialogue further enables the narrator to express …

Nil Santiáñez. Topographies Of Fascism. Habitus, Space, And Writing In Twentieth Century Spain. Toronto: U Of Toronto P, 2013. Xiii + 411 Pp., Salvador Oropesa

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Nil Santiáñez. Topographies of Fascism. Habitus, Space, and Writing in Twentieth Century Spain. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2013. xiii + 411 pp.