Program of the conference "Engaging margins: Framing imagery as embodiment of cognitive processes" (original) (raw)
Related papers
More Thinking About Thinking with Images
Contemporary Aesthetics, 2022
I want to start by thanking my critics for reading my book and coming to so many insightful comments and challenging observations about it. I especially want to thank Deborah Knight for suggesting a panel to discuss the book and for doing so much to realize it. There is so much to say about the intelligent and generous commentary offered by Ivan Gaskell, Deborah Knight, and Sonia Sedivy. Put briefly, in the short space below, I say my book thinks mostly about how and that artworks mean rather than what they mean, as Gaskell recommends. Knight's remarks prompt me to clarify how, in a world of cinema set on the Mediterranean Sea populated by Fritz Lang and Brigitte Bardot, Le Mépris is the enactment of Jean-Luc Godard's moviemaking skills refined in the course of making that motion picture. Responding to Sedivy's criticism, I give a fuller account of the enactivism guiding the treatment of artworks in my book. Overall, my critics have urged me to draw a more complete picture of what was, for them, only sketched in Thinking with Images.
Contributions are welcome from disciplines as diverse as literature, image studies (art, design, film, etc.), cultural studies and cultural anthropology, philosophy, developmental psychology, and neuroscience, among others. Theoretical, methodological and content-oriented contributions are equally welcome. Consideration of examples and case in point analyses is desirable, but not mandatory. Please direct questions to Natalia Igl (literature) and Martina Sauer (image). Please send submissions of abstracts with no more than 800 words to Natalia Igl (natalia.igl@hiof.no) and Martina Sauer (msauer@bildphilosophie.de) until March 3, 2024. A publication is scheduled for 2025 or 2026 as a special issue of the German magazine "Zeitschrift für Semiotik" (language of papers: English).
Enacting Visualization. Mental Imagery and the Role of Pictures
Recasting Aesthetic Experience: Emotions and the “Continuity Principle”, 2018
It's a quite widespread idea that the devices surrounding us shape the way we relate to the environment. In this contribution, I will discuss the hypothesis that pictures are responsible for both extension and constitution of some of our visualization abilities and skills. Visualization refers here to the ability of human beings to figure out the world during both imaginative and perceptive practices. This hypothesis is based on the assumption that pictures are devices which are able to constitute cognitive processes: pictures are not simply the outcome of a representational act generated into the mind, but constitutive elements of a media feedback. This definition indicates the process by which a device creates the conditions of possibility for a specific cognitive act: if human beings enact pictures, then the pictures themselves must be conceived as physical constitutive extensions of some aspects of our cognition.
Arguing with Images as Extended Cognition
Informal Logic, 2018
This paper proposes that images used within argumentative settings are examples of specific forms of extended and distributed cognition. Some insights are provided into the idea that the argumentative competence and activity is a manifestation of a more general human cognitive architecture. The paper first combines different perspectives in order to understand how the mind goes from accommodating its internal cognitive patterns to some regularities (envi-ronmental and cultural), to the ways in which the mind extends and distributes its cognitive resources. Then, this discussion is applied to the argumentative use of images by exemplifying both the internal accommodation and the extended and distributed cognitive functioning. In order to illustrate the former case (internal accommodation), the Toulminian argumentative diagram is proposed as an example of the tendency to organize events following a more basic cognitive pattern; and in order to illustrate the latter, a commercial campaign where image is used for argumentative purposes is analysed.
CfP (Deadline: March 3, 2024) for a special issue on Frames and Framing: Dynamic Nature and Material-Cognitive Interplays, edited by Natalia Igl & Martina Sauer. Contributions are welcome from disciplines as diverse as literature, image studies (art, design, film, etc.), cultural studies and cultural anthropology, philosophy, developmental psychology, and neuroscience, among others. Theoretical, methodological and content-oriented contributions are equally welcome. Consideration of examples and case in point analyses is desirable, but not mandatory. Please direct questions to Natalia Igl (literature) and Martina Sauer (image). Please send submissions of abstracts with no more than 800 words to Natalia Igl (natalia.igl@hiof.no) and Martina Sauer (msauer@bildphilosophie.de) until March 3, 2024. A publication is scheduled for 2025 or 2026 as a special issue of the German magazine "Zeitschrift für Semiotik".
Reflections on Imagery, Visualization, and Thinking
Is there a relationship between the human ability of 'visualizing' and forming mental images, and that of 'thinking'? Our current analysis builds on the results of multiple psychological experiments to determine the existence as well as the nature of this relationship. Our learnings primarily draw on the work of Professor Philip N. Johnson-Laird, who works on human cognition and the psychology of reasoning at Princeton University. We wish to point out that throughout our analysis, the term 'thinking' does not refer to a cursory definition of common thought processes, such as the gestures of a painter, or the improvisations of a musician. Rather, 'thinking' in our analysis always comes packed within a propositional context. In other words, thinking refers to the evaluation of logic of propositions, without referring to real-world circumstances, such as deriving conclusions based on a given set of premises alone.