"Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions presents an anthology of the essays of Robert Sokolowski, a thinker who excels in questions of conceptual analysis. The essays constitute Sokolowski's sustained project of critical phenomenological analysis of many different forms of presentation as well as many different forms of human experience. Aimed at the specialist in phenomenology and the generalist in the philosophical tradition, Sokolowski's work describes various ways in which things appear: as pictured, quoted, measured, distinguished, explained, meant, and referred to. Through the analysis of appearances, he probes the question of being and clarifies the human condition. The fourteen essays are grouped into pairs or triplets. "Picturing" and "Quotation" describe representation in image and speech. "Making Distinctions" clarifies how we can isolate something as an issue for thought, and "Explaining" discusses what we do after we have isolated it. "Timing" and "Measurement" describe two ways in which wholes are articulated into parts, and "Exact Science and the World in Which We Live" further develops the theme of measurement. "Exorcising Concepts" and "Referring" are a phenomenological attempt to treat sense and reference. "Grammar and Thinking" and "Tarskian Harmonies in Words and Pictures" discuss the formal composition of sentences and images and their relationship to the way things are disclosed. The final three essays are studies in the phenomenology of ethical performance. By providing concrete analysis of human themes familiar to everything, such as picturing and quotation, these examples of applied phenomenology take appearances seriously, while making philosophical distinctions among them."--
This book marks an exciting convergence towards the idea that human culture and cognition are rooted in the character of human social interaction, which is unique in the animal kingdom. Roots of Human Sociality attempts for the first time to explore the underlying properties of social interaction viewed from across many disciplines, and examines their origins in infant development and in human evolution. Are interaction patterns in adulthood affected by cultural differences in childhood upbringing? Apes, unlike human infants of only 12 months, fail to understand pointing and the intention behind it. Nevertheless apes can imitate and analyze complex behavior - how do they do it? Deaf children brought up by speaking parents invent their own languages. How might adults deprived of a fully organized language communicate?This book makes the case that the study of these sorts of phenomenon holds the key to understanding the foundations of human social life. The conclusion: our unique brand of social interaction is at the root of what makes us human.
This book constitutes refereed proceedings of the COST 2102 International Training School on Cognitive Behavioural Systems held in Dresden, Germany, in February 2011. The 39 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The volume presents new and original research results in the field of human-machine interaction inspired by cognitive behavioural human-human interaction features. The themes covered are on cognitive and computational social information processing, emotional and social believable Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) systems, behavioural and contextual analysis of interaction, embodiment, perception, linguistics, semantics and sentiment analysis in dialogues and interactions, algorithmic and computational issues for the automatic recognition and synthesis of emotional states.
This book's main goal is to show readers how to use the linguistic theory of Noam Chomsky, called Universal Grammar, to represent English, French, and German on a computer using the Prolog computer language. In so doing, it presents a follow-the-dots approach to natural language processing, linguistic theory, artificial intelligence, and expert systems. The basic idea is to introduce meaningful answers to significant problems involved in representing human language data on a computer.