Alfredo Paternoster

Understanding language through vision

We discuss briefly (from a philosophical point of view) why interfacing a linguistic analyzer with an artificial vision system is an important issue. In particular we claim that a linguistic analyzer supported by perception can actually understand, and not just process symbols. This is a possible objection against John Searles well-known Chinese room argument.Secondly we present REF-MACHINE, a verification system architecture integrating a linguistic analyzer and a vision system. The global system can establish whether a sentence is true or flase in a situation given through a symbolic description of a scence or directly in a real scene (given full perception equipment, a camera, and so on).This is a recognition system, partially implemented in LISP, incorporating an algorithm to interpret some locative expressions.

Functions, levels, and mechanisms: Explanation in cognitive science and its problems:

In the first part of the paper we describe the philosophical debate on the expansions of cognitive science into the brain and into the environment, take sides against the “revolutionary” positions on them and in favor of a “reformist” approach, and conclude that the most appropriate model for cognitive sciences is pluralistic. This is meant in a twofold sense. On the one hand, mental phenomena require a variety of explanatory levels, whose inter-relations are of two kinds: decomposition and contextualization. On the other hand, the arguably quasi-holistic character of some cognitive tasks suggests that the mechanistic style of explanation has to be integrated in these cases with a dynamical explanatory style. This theoretical picture, however, raises two classes of problems: (a) the compatibility between the mechanistic-computationalist explanation and the dynamical one and (b) the nature of theoretical entities and relations postulated at the different levels of a pluralistic model involving computational explanations. Each point will be discussed in the second part of the paper.

Reconstructing (Phenomenal) Consciousness

In this chapter, I shall discuss Block’s distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. I will argue that although Block’s proposal has the merit of accounting for some important distinctive phenomena, it should nonetheless be given up, in favor of a single, graded notion of consciousness. There is only one consciousness, which one can possess in different degrees.

Vision Science and the Problem of Perception

“Vision science—as Palmer puts it in his introduction to a recent, impressive work on the subject—is not just one branch of cognitive science, but the single most coherent, integrated and successful”.TPPT However chauvinist this judgment may seem, vision has undoubtedly been and still is a very important area in cognitive science, stimulating a particularly rich discussion between philosophers and scientists. There are two opposing, radical attitudes with regard to the relation between philosophy and cognitive science. On the one hand are those (including most, but by no means all philosophers) who think that conclusions following from a priori arguments are more substantial than the empirical results provided by current sciences of mind. These people are inclined to regard such or such psychological theory as confirmation of their philosophical bents. On the other hand, there are scholars who accord priority at least to the most well-established experimental results. Building on empirical evidence, they try to outline a philosophical picture coherent with (current) scientific findings. Although I am in general more sympathetic with the latter strategy, I believe there are problems in the field which are still so hard to assess that we ought to assume a more pliant and cautious attitude, as will be shown in this chapter. Based upon the analysis of a case study— the controversy between direct and indirect realism—I will argue that some results from cognitive science can cast light on philosophical problems about visual perception. At the same time, however, it will become clear how the empirical research is also still constrained by philosophical hypotheses and prejudices.

Models and Mechanisms in Cognitive Science

In this chapter, we present and discuss models in the context of cognitive sciences, that is, the sciences of the mind. We will focus on computational models, which are the most popular models used in the disciplines of the mind.

Chomsky sotto attacco: il caso della ricorsione.

According to some critics of the generativist program, recursion is not a linguistic universal, thus it cannot be regarded as the distinctive property of natural language. The criticism is based on a counterexample: Piraha language, which seems to be devoid of any nestled structure. Moreover, there are other languages, such as Bininj Gun-wok, Kathlamet and Kayardild, in which nestled structures are very rare or limited to only one level of nestling. In this paper I propose to address this issue not from the point of view of the (stricto sensu) universality of recursion, but, instead, from the point of view of its explanatory role. In other words, the real question is to what extent we need recursion to explain how language works. More specifically, I will argue that: i) recursion is the best explanation of the discrete infinity –which is a constitutive property of language; and ii) syntax must have a recursive structure, because it must express conceptual structures that are in turn recursive.

The Self and its Defenses. From Psychodynamics to Cognitive Science.

This book presents a theory of the self whose core principle is that the consciousness of the self is a process of self-representing that runs throughout our life. This process aims primarily at defending the self-conscious subject against the threat of its metaphysical inconsistence. In other words, the self is essentially a repertoire of psychological manoeuvres whose outcome is self-representation aimed at coping with the fundamental fragility of the human subject. This picture of the self differs from both the idealist and the eliminative approaches widely represented in contemporary discussion. Against the idealist approach, this book contends that rather than the self being primitive and logically prior, it is the result of a process of construction that originates in subpersonal unconscious processes. On the other hand, it also rejects the anti-realistic, eliminative argument that, from the non-primary, derivative nature of the self, infers its status as an illusory by-product of real neurobiological events, devoid of any explanatory role.

Making the Self, II: Psychological Self-Consciousness

The construction of the virtual inner space of the mind is the topic of this chapter, which works back and forth between theoretical psychology and the findings of empirical research. Within the framework of attachment theory, the authors draw on developmental, social and personality psychology to reconstruct the process through which, starting from bodily self-awareness, we become aware of the existence of the mind as a virtual inner dimension. This awareness is a psychological form of self-consciousness that will evolve into the most cognitively demanding form of self: a narrative self. They thus part company with all those accounts of narrative identity that pay little or no attention to the role of the body in the development of the narrative self-concept: without an affective and bodily self-description, narrative selfhood would not arise.

The Self as a Causal Center of Gravity

The authors reject the antirealist argument that infers, from the non-primary, derivative nature of the self, a view of it as an epiphenomenal by-product of neurobiological events or, alternatively, of social (or sociolinguistic) practices. The antirealists disregard the inherently defensive nature of identity self-construction. The need to construct and protect the most valid identity possible is rooted in the subject’s primary need to solidly exist as a describable ego, as a unitary subject. The incessant construction and reconstruction of an acceptable and adaptively functioning identity is the process that produces our intra- and interpersonal balances, and thus must be regarded as the foundation of psychological well-being and mental health. The process of self-identity construction, therefore, imposes a teleology of self-defense on the human psychobiological system.

The Unconscious Mind

The authors provide a critical discussion of the notion of unconscious, both in the cognitive-science sense and in the Freudian sense. The outcome of this discussion is that self-consciousness should be studied by integrating the subpersonal, bottom-up approach characteristic of cognitive sciences with recent developments in the psychodynamic framework, focusing (in particular) on the theories of cognitive-affectional relationality of the very young child: as is showed by the theories of object relations and attachment, physical contact and the construction of protective and communicative interpersonal structures constitute the infant’s primordial psychological needs, around which her mental life gradually takes form.