Joulia on Trees

Une image de l’Arbor scientiae

Joulia Smortchkova

Raisonnement Diagrammatique et Diagrammes à Arbre

Le but de la présentation de Joulia a été d’explorer la possibilité d’une théorie des diagrammes à arbres. Pour le faire, ella a d’abord essayé d’esquisser les caractéristiques principales des diagrammes à arbre, pour ensuit présenter des hypothèses sur le type de manipulations des données qui sont facilitées par l’usage des diagrammes à arbre. L’approche était centrée sur le sujet et ses habilités cognitifs qui trouvent une facilitation dans un certain type de représentation graphique plutôt qu’une autre.

Le  travail est la suite d’un mini stage fait au premier semestre sous la direction de Valeria Giardino et Roberto Casati.

Pour télécharger le power point, cliquez ici.

Peter Galison: Objectivity

“Objectivity: the Limits of Scientific Sight”

Peter Galison
Pellegrino University Professor
Harvard University

When scientific objectivity became a goal in the early 19th century it was by no means obviously something to be desired.  Natural philosophers had to invert the old epistemic virtues that involved finding ideal forms that lay behind the variations of this or that individual.  Where genius was, plain-sight observation came to dominate.  I will here track how the images and image-making technologies of scientific atlases helped define the modern scientific category of mechanical objectivity–and the new quieted and transparent scientific self that accompanied it.  The fate of objectivity kept turning: twentieth century scientists questioned image-based, mechanical objectivity; they demanded more interpretation and modification of images than mechanical objectivity ever allowed.  With that shift toward a “trained eye” came a new view of the right scientific self, one that explicitly made use of intuition, expertise, and the unconscious.  Now, in the early twenty-first century new kinds of scientific pictures (such as nanomanipulated images) are demanding quite unexpected ways of being– scientist-selves perched uneasily between scientific, engineering, and entrepreneurial forms of sight. Representation begins to cede its place to presentation.

Discussing Galison: regarder les sciences par les vertus épistémiques

Margherita introduced some of the issues that are discussed in Peter Galison’s book, Objectivity.

Wilson Bentley's snowflake (1902)

To download her slides (in French), click here.

Arancha on A visual Approach to Natural Language

Arancha San Ginés (IHPST)

“Une approche visuelle au langage naturel. ”

Une seule question articule l’ensemble des idées qui seront présentées :

Est-il possible de trouver un traitement uniforme aux pronoms anaphoriques ?

Alors que la réponse la plus répandue à cette question est négative, on essaiera de montrer qu’il existe, au moins, une réponse positive qui soit, aussi, envisageable. Notre approche sera fondée sur une idée clé selon laquelle les mécanismes sophistiqués de la construction visuelle jouent, de même, un rôle fondamental dans le langage naturel. C’est dans ce sens que l’on proposera un genre de représentation, diagrammatique, dont on en discutera quelques exemples caractéristiques en anglais et en français.

Martin on Style

Style: A new view on an old problem

Martin Siefkes, Technische Universität Berlin

Style is one of the few terms of cultural analysis which can be fruitfully used in completely different cultural areas: Style theories have been developed for texts (most often literary texts), for art, architecture, music, conversation, thinking and problem-solving. Less attention was rewarded on styles of athletes, of artisans, of playing a game, and of unremarkable daily activities such as walking or driving.

Up to now, the development of a general theory of style has not been attempted. In my doctoral thesis, I develop a general model of the stylistic sign process: It’s a process in which information is inscribed into and extracted out of realisations, which are based on schemata. The model is based on a semiotic framework in the structuralist tradition, supplemented by formal logics and an undogmatic formalism inspired by modern computer science.

The model has two main parts.

Roberto on musical notation

In his talk, Roberto first gave a ‘crash course’ in musical notation (notation for dummies!). Musical notation has some expressive limits, in relation to all the possible visual and sensory motor inputs it can represent. An important constraint is that it must be ‘readable’, and this constraint has its own costs and benefits.

The ‘big picture’ in the background is the following question about spatial syntactic features in different notations: are they denotative?

‘The Art Instinct’: Roberto’s (skeptical) review and Dutton’s reply

Maybe of interest for some of you.

Roberto (Casati) reviewed Denis Dutton’s book, The Art Instict, showing his perplexities about this project. Here the link to the review. The author of the book posted a long reply (and see also the interesting comments).

All this on the interesting blog edited by people from the LSE and the Institut Nicod on Cognition and Culture.

Thinking about thought experiments: are they different from real ones?

In her talk, Margherita discussed the cognitive interest in discussing thought experiments. Do we have a definition for them? Do we need such a definition?
Moreover, if thought experiments are really producing knowledge, which kind of knowledge do they produce? Do they represent an heuristics or a justification for some particular reasoning?

If our question is about what a subject is engaged in when she is performing a thought experiment, then the problem about mental experiments becomes a cognitive problem. Furthermore, the narrative aspect about mental experimentation (that is, when the subject describes what happened in her thought experiment) makes the mental experiment an intentional product.

One question is the role of recreative imagination in the creation of mental experiments: as Cohen (2005) suggests, “the clearer the picture, the stronger the image, the better the experiment”.

To see Margherita slides (in French!), you can download them here.

In the discussion, some problematic aspects emerged.

Lundi 27: Margherita on Thought Experiments

Monday 27 April we are going to start with the new sessions.

Margherita will talk about

“Gedankenexperimente and Imagination: sketching a cognitive approach to thought experimentation”

The talk will be in French.

Abstract:

Methodological speculations and debates on thought experiments (Gedankenexperimente, GEs) have focused primarily on the problem of informativeness (Kuhn’s paradox), and more precisely on the proper function of GEs from an epistemological rather than a cognitive perspective. I claim that by opening the “cognitive black-box” of GEs we could shed light on their epistemic function.

In this talk, I will begin by giving a brief overview of the debate over thought experimentation, by focusing on three key questions (What is a GE? What is its function? How does a GE fulfil its function?), and by stressing the points of agreement and disagreement that emerge.

My aim is to show that:
I. Differences aside, the literature is unanimous in indicating as the function of GEs;
II. The question of how a GE accomplishes its aim is the more controversial and less developed of the three. Nonetheless, closer inspection provides a lead, insofar as both the standard literature, and what I refer to as “Mach’s tradition”, indicate imagination as a notion of central importance relative to GEs.

In the second part, I will show how the work of cognitive scientists and philosophers on imagination is useful in order to sharpen some distinctions left vague in the traditional debate on GEs. Moreover, I will claim that imagination itself could be seen as the key to the GE’s “cognitive black-box”. This could take us a step closer to a cognitive account of GEation.

Coming soon: new sessions

27 April 2009
Margherita Arcangeli (Institut Jean Nicod)
“Imagination, supposition et expériences des pensée”

4 May
Roberto Casati (Institut Jean Nicod)
“Some Cognitive Aspects of Standard Music Notation”

18 May
Martin Siefkes (Technische Universität Berlin)
“Style: A new view on an old problem”

25 May
Arancha San Ginés (IHPST – Université de Granada)
“Une approche visuelle au langage naturel”

1 June – 8 June
Preparing the discussion for Peter Galison

12 June
Fourth invited speaker: Peter Galison (Harvard University)
“Objectivity: The Limits of Scientific Sight”

15 June
Joulia Smortchkova
“Raisonnement diagrammatique et diagrammes à arbre”