Joel Parthemore

University of Skövde · Department of Cognitive Neuroscience and Philosophy

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...

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...

The papers in this special issue focus on computational modeling of emotion recognition. Emotions play a pervasive role in personal, social, and professional life. As artificially intelligent systems become pervasive in our lives, it is important that these systems are able to understand emotion in humans and simulate the function of emotion to be...

This paper argues that a too-expansive view on creativity is unhelpful at best and deeply misleading at worst. As with "representation", the word "creativity" comes value-laden in ways that researchers cannot lightly get away from, if they can escape at all; simply claiming that one is using the word in a technical sense is not a solution. Neither...

Concepts are the means by which we structure our understanding of the world and consequently the primary means by which we encounter it. It is commonly assumed that one of the essential characteristics of concepts – regardless of referent – is their stability, tending toward stasis; and, indeed, it can be hard to see how concepts can otherwise be s...

Concepts are the means by which we structure our understanding of the world and consequently the primary means by which we encounter it. It is commonly assumed that one of the essential characteristics of concepts-regardless of referent-is their stability, tending toward sta-sis; and, indeed, it can be hard to see how concepts can otherwise be syst...

This paper has three main purposes: to set out the relationship between empathy and related phenomena, including emotional contagion; to explain how metaphysical starting assumptions regarding the nature of empathy pre-dispose one toward one or another account of these phenomena and toward different interpretations of the same empirical data-often...

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 discus...

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 sy...

Robots as sex toys are commercially available now. When – and how – will they stop being glorified dolls and become not our sexual playthings but our partners? And what effect will that have on our understanding of ourselves? 12 In this paper I suggest that sexual objectification is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of our physical nature tha...

Fodor is infamous for his radical conceptual nativism, McDowell likewise well-known for suggesting that concepts extend " all the way out " into the world and arguing against what he calls (per Sellars) The Myth of the Given: the idea that non-conceptual percepts justify conceptual frameworks. One need not go so far as either researcher, however, i...

Recent years have seen a number of competing theories of concepts within philosophy of mind, supplanting the classical definitionist and imagist accounts: among them, Jerry Fodor’s Informational Atomism Theory, Jesse Prinz’s Proxytypes Theory, and Peter Gärdenfors’ Conceptual Spaces Theory (CST). On the whole there has been little empirical investi...

In the context of the relationship between signs and concepts, this paper tackles 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: th...

This paper follows directly from an earlier paper where we discussed the requirements for an artifact to be a moral agent and concluded that the artifactual question is ultimately a red herring. As before, we take moral agency to be that condition in which an agent can appropriately be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. We set...

Since the publication of O’Regan and Noë’s original article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2001, which first set out the sensorimotor account by which sensory experience and motor engagement are inextricably intertwined, there have been not just one but many sensorimotor accounts. However, in many ways that original article remains the canonic...

The chapter suggests that any strictly biological definition of "human" will be inadequate, even within biology; but even more so when one talks about human in a more general, everyday sense. Our notion of "human" has shifted over time, from a subset of those who are biologically human to (essentially) the full membership of the species, with aspec...

In this paper, we take moral agency to be that context in which a particular agent can, appropriately, be held responsible for her actions and their consequences. In order to understand moral agency, we will discuss what it would take for an artifact to be a moral agent. For reasons that will become clear over the course of the paper, we take the a...

Theories of concepts address systematically and productively structured thought. Until the Unified Conceptual Space Theory (UCST), based on Peter Gärdenfors’ Conceptual Spaces Theory, no one had attempted to offer an explicitly enactive theory of concepts. UCST is set apart from its competitors in locating concepts not in the mind (or brain) of the...

An increasing trend in recent years has seen the pathol-ogizing of a wide range of mental phenomena under the headings of "disease", "disorder", "illness", or "disability". A recent school in philosophy of mind, enactivism, is inclined to oppose this trend as based upon philosophically dubious assumptions. In particular, en-activism rejects mind-br...

This thesis confronts a fundamental shortcoming in cognitive science research: a failure to be explicit about the theory of concepts underlying cognitive science research and a resulting failure to justify that theory philosophically or otherwise. It demonstrates how most contemporary debates over theories of concepts divide over whether concepts a...

RESUMEN El debate en torno a la mente extendida versa, en gran medida, sobre dónde y cómo situar la frontera entre la mente cognitiva y el mundo no-cognitivo. Los concep-tos de "interno" y "externo", tomados del ámbito de los objetos físicos, se aplican como mucho metafóricamente a entidades como la mente. Las intuiciones defendidas enérgicamente r...

Understanding the relationship between concepts and experience seems necessary to specifying the content of experience, yet current theories of concepts do not seem up to the job. With Peter Gärdenfors's conceptual spaces theory as a foundation and with enactivist philosophy as inspiration, we present a proposed extension to conceptual spaces theor...

While the recent special issue of JCS on machine consciousness (Volume 14, Issue 7) was in preparation, a collection of papers on the same topic, entitled Artificial Consciousness and edited by Antonio Chella and Riccardo Manzotti, was published. The editors of the JCS special issue, Ron Chrisley, Robert Clowes and Steve Torrance, thought it would...

Standard, linguistic means of specifying the content of mental states do so by expressing the content in question. Such means fail when it comes to capturing non-conceptual aspects of visual experience, since no linguistic expression can adequately express such content. One alternative is to use depictions: images that either evoke (reproduce in th...

Not all research in machine consciousness aims to instantiate phenomenal states in artefacts. For example, one can use artefacts that do not themselves have phenomenal states, merely to simulate or model organisms that do. Nevertheless, one might refer to all of these pursuits -- instantiating, simulating or modelling phenomenal states in an artefa...

A context-sensitive grammar of English is being developed into an object-oriented programming language, which will in turn be used to implement the goal of the Pharos project: an interactive writing environment for designing social research questionnaires. The paper consists of a series of questions and answers in three sections: introduction to th...

In Search of the Concept CONCEPT Joel Parthemore 4:30 p.m. 17 May 2007 I attended a workshop this past weekend in Copenhagen, titled CONCEPTS: Content and Constitution. Peter Gardenfors, Jose Luiz Bermudez, Greg Ashby, Ruth Millikan and Daniel Dennett all presented their overlapping ideas about just what a concept is. Bermudez described concepts b...