Things and Places - How the mind connects with the world.

THINGS AND PLACES:

How the mind connects with the world

by

Zenon W. PYLYSHYN

The empirical case for a nonconceptual link between things and representations:   Indexing and Tracking .   Background to the problem to be discussed in these lectures: The distinction between causal, demonstrative and conceptual relations,   and an informal discussion of why some primitive nonconceptual relations are essential in perception.   An introduction to the Visual Index (FINST) theory, Object Files and experimental investigations using multiple object tracking.   Implications of this research program for the thesis of nonconceptual representation and for the nature of the initial causal connection between objects and symbolic representations.

 

The basic ingredients of the mind-world relation: Individuation, selection, reference and predication.  The nature of attentional selection.   Why do we need selection and what do we select in the first instance?   FINST Indexes as the mechanism for binding predicate-arguments and motor-command arguments to the objects of predication.   Conceptual and nonconceptual content and Object Files .   Causes and codes.   Austen Clark and Feature Placing as the basis of sentience .   The binding problem .   What do FINSTs index; objects or spatiotemporal regions?   More empirical findings concerning FINST Indexes and the role of Object Files and why it matters to philosophy of mind.

 

Representing Space : Nonconceptual content and the experience of space .   The role of conscious experience in the study of perception.   A survey of some approaches to the problem of how the mind assimilates and represents space and spatial relations.   The strategy of internalizing external spatial properties: Natural constraints, psychophysical complementarity and "functional" space.   The genesis of our sense of space: Poincaré's insights and the role of FINSTs.   Is there a uniform spatial frame of reference? The case for multiple perceptual frames of reference and coordinate transformation as the origin of our "sense of space."

 

Representing Space :   Shortcomings of "inner space" proposals and an alternative view .   A short summary of the arguments about the spatial nature of mental images and the thesis that perception and imaginal reasoning make use of a spatial medium or internalized spatial constraints.   A proposal for turning the problem of spatial cognition around and viewing it as involving the projection of mental contents onto spatial arrangements of objects in the world.    FINST indexes (and their extension to other modalities, called Anchors) provide the needed mechanism for anchoring mental representations to perceived objects and their spatial properties, and thus for explaining the apparent spatial character of mental representations.   The unsolved problems of representing space in the brain.

 

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CONFERENCES JEAN NICOD

 

The Jean-Nicod Lectures are delivered annually in Paris by a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. The 1993 inaugural lectures marked the centenary of the birth of the French philosopher and logician Jean Nicod (1893-1931). The lectures are organized by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) as part of its effort to develop the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science in France.

The Jean-Nicod lecturer is expected to spend several weeks in Paris, to deliver at least four lectures on a topic of his
or her choice, and subsequently to publish the set of lectures, or a monograph based on them, in the Jean-Nicod Lectures series (MIT Press/Bradford Books; F. Recanati editor).

Since 1996 the annual lecturer is awarded the Jean-Nicod Prize during a ceremony which follows the deliverance of the first lecture. Besides CNRS, the sponsors include two French institutions: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), and Ecole Normale Supérieure.

The annual lecturer is selected by the Jean-Nicod Committee, which includes (as of 2003) the following:

President
Jacques Bouveresse, Professor at College de France (Paris)

Secretary
François Recanati, Research director, CNRS (Paris)

Other members
Mario Borillo, Research director, CNRS (Toulouse)
Jean-Pierre Changeux, Professor at College de France (Paris)
Jean-Gabriel Ganascia, Professor at the University of Paris-VI
André Holley, Director, Institut des sciences du goût et de l'olfaction (Dijon)
Michel Imbert, Professor at the University of Toulouse
Pierre Jacob, Research director, CNRS (Paris)
Jacques Mehler, Research director, CNRS (Paris)
Elisabeth Pacherie, Research associate, CNRS (Paris)
Philippe de Rouilhan, Research director, CNRS (Paris)
Dan Sperber, Research director, CNRS (Paris)

 

In 2004 the Jean-Nicod lecturer will be Zenon Pylyshyn (Rutgers University)

The previous Jean-Nicod lecturers were, in chronological order (click to see the published lectures references):

Jerry Fodor (Rutgers University) - 1993
Fred Dretske (Stanford University) - 1994
Donald Davidson (UC Berkeley) - 1995
Hans Kamp (University of Stuttgart) - 1996
Jon Elster (Columbia University) - 1997
Susan Carey (New York University) - 1998
John Perry (Stanford University) - 1999
John Searle (UC Berkeley) - 2000
Daniel Dennett (Tufts University) - 2001
Ruth Millikan (Connecticut University) - 2002
Ray Jackendoff (Brandeis University) - 2003

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Zenon Pylyshyn received a B.Eng. in Engineering-Physics from McGill University in 1959, an M.Sc. in Control Systems from the University of Saskatchewan in 1960, and a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Saskatchewan in 1963 for research involving the application of information theory to studies of human short-term memory.  Following his Ph.D. he spent two years as a Canada Council Senior fellow and then joined the faculty at the University of Western Ontario in London, where he remained until 1994 as Professor of Psychology and of Computer Science, as well as honorary professor in the departments of Philosophy and Electrical Engineering and Director of the UWO Center for Cognitive Science. In 1994 Pylyshyn joined the faculty of Rutgers University as Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science and Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science.

    Pylyshyn is recipient of numerous fellowships and awards.  He was awarded the Donald O. Hebb Award from the Canadian Psychological Association in June 1990, "for distinguished contributions to psychology as a science".  He is a fellow if the Canadian Psychological Association and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.  He has  been a Killam Fellow, a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a fellow at the MIT Center for Cognitive Science and a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIAR).  In 1998 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.  He is past president of two international societies: the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and the Cognitive Science Society.  For 9 years (1985-1994) he was national director of the Program in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.  He is on the editorial boards of eight scientific journals and has been on several industrial or academic scientific advisory boards.

    Pylyshyn has published well over 100 scientific articles and book chapters, including a paper designated as a Science Citation Classic ("What the Mind's Eye Tells the Mind's Brain", Psychological Bulletin, 1973) and has given over 200 talks and keynote addresses. He is author of Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 1984), as well as contributor/editor of five books, including: Perspectives on the Computer Revolution (1988); Computational Processes in Human Vision: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (1988), The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence (1987), Meaning and Cognitive Structure: Issues in the Computational Theory of Mind (1986), and The Robot's Dilemma Revisited (1996).  As chairman of an NSF-sponsored panel on artificial intelligence, Pylyshyn also helped to produce a major survey of the state-of-the-art in artificial intelligence which appeared as part of the book What Can be Automated? (1980).

    For the past fifteen years, Pylyshyn's personal research has dealt with two general areas. One is the theoretical analysis of the nature of the human cognitive system that enables humans to perceive the world, as well as to reason and imagine. This has led to a number of theoretical investigations of the "architecture of the mind".  On the experimental side Pylyshyn has been concerned with exploring his Visual Indexing Theory (sometimes called the FINST theory), dealing with how human visual attention is allocated and how humans cognize objects and space. This theory hypothesizes a preconceptual mechanism by which objects in a visual scene can be individuated, tracked, and directly (or demonstratively) referred to by cognitive processes prior to their properties being encoded.  Over a dozen papers have been published on this theory and its experimental investigation, as well as its implications for understanding how vision is connected with the world, making perceptual-motor coordination possible.  The theory has implications for philosophical issues concerning the semantics of visual perception as well as practical applications for the design of human-computer interfaces.

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Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1973). What the Mind's Eye Tells the Mind's Brain: A Critique of Mental Imagery. Psychological Bulletin, 80 , 1-24.

Pylyshyn, Zenon W. (1984). Computation and Cognition, Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Pylyshyn, Zenon, & Demopoulos, William (Eds.). (1986). Meaning and Cognitive Structure: Issues in the Computational Theory of Mind . Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

Pylyshyn, Zenon W. (Ed.). (1987). The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence . Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1996). The study of cognitive architecture. In D. Steier & T. Mitchell (Eds.), Mind Matters: Contributions to Cognitive Science in Honor of Allen Newell . Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Pylyshyn, Z. W. (2000). Situating vision in the world. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4 (5), 197-207.

Pylyshyn, Z. W. (2001). Visual indexes, preconceptual objects, and situated vision. Cognition, 80 (1/2), 127-158.

Pylyshyn, Z. W. (2002). Mental Imagery: In search of a theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 25 (2), 157-237.

Pylyshyn, Z. W. (2003). Return of the Mental Image: Are there really pictures in the brain? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7 (3), 113-118.

Pylyshyn, Zenon W. (2003). Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.