Past Events

Serate Mitteleuropa Abende

Conferences and Seminars

The Depictive Space of Perception.
A Conference on Visual Thought

June, 7-9 2004


Perceptual space and depictive space show strong similarities. Both are characterized by a sort of extendedness which unfolds dynamically, and which shows the close analogy between the performance of an act of perception and an act of design. Neither art nor vision are, in fact, veridical copies of the world, rather both seem to be operating on the representational structures of vision. On these premises, a scientific phenomenology, experimentally oriented, seems to be a more appropriate paradigm in vision science, especially in order to understand the dynamics of the ongoing perceiving. The conference has a starting point draws on the results of the artistic and cognitive theories of Klee and Arnheim and Gestalt theory, and explores their application to contemporary research in vision science.


Monday 7, Morning

8.30-9.15 Registration

9.15-9.30 Opening

Chair: Alfred Zimmer

9.30-10.30 Liliana Albertazzi (Trento University), The Depictive Space of the Mind

10.30-11.00 Coffee break

11.00-12.00 Jan J. Koenderink (Utrecht University), The Geometry of Pictorial Space

12.00-13.00 John Willats (Loughborough University), Some Structural Equivalents Shared by Paul Klee's Paintings and Children's Drawings

Afternoon

Chair: Jan J. Koenderink

15.30-16.30 Barbara Tversky (Stanford University), Visions of Thought

16.30-17.00 Coffee break

17.00-18.00 Alfred Zimmer (Regensburg University), Visual Art and Visual Perception: An Uneasy Complementarity

18.00-19.00 Gert van Tonder (Kyoto Institute of Technology), Order and Complexity in Naturalistic Landscapes

Tuesday 8, Morning

Chair: Barbara Tversky

8.30-9.30 Steve Zucker (Yale University), Visual Computations and Visual Cortex

9.30-10.30 Mario Zanforlin (Padua University), Trajectories and Surfaces of Stereokinetic Objects

10.30-11.00 Coffee break

11.00-12.00 Irving Biederman (University of Southern California), Where in the Brain do we First Become Aware of a Visual Experience? How is that Experience Coded? What is its Aesthetic Basis?

12.00-13.00 Charles E. Connor (John Hopkins University), Shapes Representation in Neural Populations

Afternoon

Chair: Irving Biederman

15.30-16.30 Frederic Fol Leymarie (Brown University), The Computation of Visual Fields in Arts

16.30-17.00 Coffee break

17.00-18.00 Thanos Economou (Georgia Tech), Studies in Complexity, Ambiguity and Emergence in Design

18.00-19.00 Dhanraj Viswanath (UC Berkeley), Perceptual Representation of Surfaces and Objects and the Implications for Design

Wednesday 9, Morning

Chair: Steve Zucker

09.00-09.30 Timothy Hubbard, Jon R. Courtney (Texas Christian University), Evidence Suggestive of Spatial Visual Dynamics in Perception and Memory

09.30-10.00 Marco Bertamini, Luke Jones (Sheffield University), The Perception of Space in Bounded Scenes

10.00-10.30 Coffee break

10.30-11.00 Jana Holsanova (Lund University), Picture Viewing and Picture Description: Two Windows on the Mind

11.00 11.30 Klaus Rehkämper (Oldenburg University), Pictures, Perception and Mental Models

11.30-12.00 Heinrich Herre (Leipzig University), Levels of Reality and the Ontology of Space and Time

12.00-12.30 Jacek Turski (Houston University), The Initial Stage in the Brain's Visual Processing: An Efficient Representation of Cortical Images

Afternoon

Chair: Roberto Poli

15.00-15.30 Markus Graf (Max Planck Institut Tűbingen), Form and Space in Perception and Art

15.30-16.00 Mark Wrathall (Brigham Young University), Paul Klee and the Role of the Body in Motivating Perception

16.00-16.30 Marek Maciejczak (Warrsaw University of Technology), Perceptive Normalization

16.30-17.00 Coffee break

17.00-17.30 David Grandy (Brigham Young University), Merleau-Ponty's View from Everywhere in Light of the Double-Slit Experiment

17.30-18.00 Sergio Dansilio (Montevideo University), Figure Coping and Perspective in Illiterates

18.00-18.30 Natalya A. Burdina (Ural State Academy of Architecture), The Effect of the Characteristics of an Architectural Space on Subconscious Choice of its Functional Directionality by Man

18.30-19.00 Kazuhiro Tamura (Brain Science Institute of Riken), Alignment Effect and the Role of Landmarks in Spatial Navigation

19.00-19.30 John Webber (Sheffield University), Hallucination as 'Seeing in'



General Information
Getting to Bolzano

Creativity and Conceptual Change:
A Cognitive-historical Approach

Nancy J. Nersessian

Program in Cognitive Science
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Chair of the Cognitive Science Society

October, 27-28, 2003

Sessions:

  1. Model-based Reasoning Practices in Conceptual Change
  2. The Cognitive Basis of Model-based Reasoning
  3. Conceptual Change in Doing and Learning Physics
  4. Interpreting Practice: The Challenge of Integrating the Cognitive, Social, and Cultural Dimensions

Each session comprises a two-hour lecture. Ample time will be allocated to discussion.
Registration:  Monday, 27 October, 9-9.30 a.m.

(General Information)(Getting to Bolzano)


1. Model-based Reasoning Practices in Conceptual Change

Conceptual innovation - the formation of new representational systems for understanding nature -  is one of the most creative and extraordinary dimensions of scientific activity.  A fundamental problem in attempting to understanding this form of creativity is: How is it possible to create radically new conceptual systems given that the process must start from existing representations?

In this session I will introduce the “cognitive-historical” method.  The method stems from the belief that the combined resources of philosophy, history of science, and cognitive science are needed to address this fundamental problem of creativity in conceptual change.  Cognitive-historical analysis creates a working synthesis between historical and contemporary studies of scientific practices and cognitive science investigations of human cognition.  The method is reflexive in that it draws upon current cognitive theories and methods insofar as they help to interpret the scientific practices while also evaluating the cognitive theories as to the extent to which they can be applied to scientific practices.  I will examine the practices employed by Faraday and Maxwell in constructing the concept of electromagnetic field.  The predominant practices employed in constructing the field concept are: analogical modeling, visual modeling, and thought experimenting.  The customary modes of analysis of conceptual change have viewed conceptual structures from the perspective of languages.  Clearly concepts and conceptual structures can be represented linguistically.  However, understanding how the modeling practices employed by scientists are generative of  new representational structures leads to the view of conceptual structures as models and conceptual change, as a process of constructing and communicating new models.

2. The Cognitive Basis of Model-based Reasoning

My concern in this session is to explain how specific modeling practices employed by Faraday and Maxwell - and also by scientists across the sciences - are productive of conceptual change. 

Within philosophy, where the identification of reasoning with argument and logic is deeply ingrained, these practices have not traditionally been considered significant forms of scientific reasoning.  Traditional accounts of scientific reasoning restrict the notion of reasoning primarily to deductive and inductive arguments.  Embracing these modeling practices as “methods” of conceptual change in science requires expanding philosophical notions of scientific reasoning to encompass forms of creative reasoning, most of which cannot be reduced to an algorithm in application, are not always productive of solutions, and can lead to incorrect solutions. Although my research focuses on practices employed in physics, other investigations establish that these practices are employed across the sciences. In this session I will develop an explanation for how and why these practices are productive of conceptual change.

3. Conceptual Change in Doing and Learning Physics

Research in the learning sciences focusing on physics education shows that traditional instructional techniques and textbooks are not successful at assisting students in learning the conceptual structure of Newtonian mechanics and other areas of physics. The result is that the majority of students leave their physics classes with their “intuitive” or “naive” conceptualizations of physical phenomena largely intact and without the ability to provide scientific explanations of these phenomena. Further, this research shows that learning a scientific conceptual structure requires more than rearranging concepts students possess and assimilating new facts to an existing conceptual framework.  Rather, it requires constructing fundamentally new concepts and building them into a new framework.  Based on the similarities between the historical and naive concepts and beliefs, many researchers have proposed that the kinds of changes in conceptual structure and those that have taken place in ‘scientific revolutions.’  In this session I will review the literature that forms the basis of this analogy and develop a proposal to extend the analogy to the so-called ‘mechanisms’ of conceptual change.  I that, I argue that the cognitive practices scientists employ in creating new conceptual structures are directly relevant to the learning situation. 

4. Interpreting Practice: The Challenge of Integrating the Cognitive, Social, and Cultural Dimensions

Within the science and technology studies fields (STS) there is a perceived divide between cognitive accounts and social and cultural accounts of knowledge construction, evaluation, and transmission.  Socio-cultural accounts are dominant, and have tended to claim that cognitive factors are inconsequential to interpreting these practices.  Scientists are seen as having interests and motivations and as being members of cultures, but cognition remains, in effect, “black boxed.”  Cognitive studies accounts, for their part, have payed deference to the importance of the social and cultural dimensions of practice, but have not, by and large, made these dimensions an integral part of their analysis.  The situation has fostered a perception of incompatibility between cognitive and socio-cultural accounts. Perceptions to the contrary, any such divide is artificial.  Producing scientific knowledge requires the kind of sophisticated cognition that only rich social, cultural, and material environments can enable. Thus, the major challenge for interpreting scientific and engineering knowledge-producing practices is to develop accounts that capture the fusion of the social - cognitive - cultural dimensions in these.  In this session I will discuss my analysis of model-based reasoning practices in biomedical engineering research laboratories - considered as ‘evolving distributed cognitive systems’, which aims at producing an integrated account.

The pictorial space of vision
Representation in perception


August 20-30, 2003
Bolzano, Italy
Mitteleuropa Foundation

First meeting of the research group on form:
Where Vision science, Computer science, Aesthetics and Theory of Representation meet


Participants:

The meeting will focus on the concept of representation in perception, its modelling and its relevance for aesthetics. Each participant has at his/her disposal two days to present and discuss his/her research

Titles and topics

Liliana Albertazzi, The space-time continua of vision

Frederic Fol Leymarie, Shape representation in 2D and 3D based on a directed graph substrate for the medial axis

Gert Van Tonder, On self-similarity in visual perception

Dhanraj Vishwanath, Epistemological issues in perceptual representation: relevance for aesthetics and design

A. Cruse, Lexical semantics without stable word meanings

7-8 April 2003


This seminar explores the consequences for lexical semantics of adopting the position that meanings are not inherent properties of linguistic expressions, but are ‘construed’ on-line on occasions of actual use in context. The linguistic elements comprising utterances, on this view, form one important component of the input to processes of construing meanings, but they are not the only component, and their contribution is not ‘meaning’ as such. The construal processes are subject to a wide range of constraints, of varying strengths and types, deriving, in the main, from convention, context and the nature of the human cognitive system. This approach, which is a variety of ‘usage-based’ approach, entails a re-examination of a number of topics in traditional lexical semantics, in particular, meanings and concepts, polysemy and sense boundaries, sense relations such as hyponymy, meronymy and antonymy, and semantic fields, and literal and non-literal meanings.

Sessions:

  1. A dynamic construal approach to lexical semantics: words, concepts and
  2. meanings
  3. Polysemy: the construal of sense boundaries
  4. Hyponymy and meronymy: the construal of whole-part and category-subcategory relations
  5. Antonymy: the construal of scalar properties

Each session comprises a two-hour lecture. Ample time will be allocated to discussion.

Registration: Monday, 7 April, 9-9.30 a.m.

Presentations by the seminar's attendees

Morning

Afternoon

The Legacy of Kanizsa in Cognitive Science

The legacy of the Austrian tradition of Gestalt Psychology can be best gauged by looking at the investigations on vision carried out by Gaetano Kanizsa, the most oustanding of Musatti’s pupils. Of Central Eduropean origin (his mother was Slovenian, his father Ungarian), Kanizsa taught mainly in Trieste, the city of his birth, where he inherited the chair vacated by Metelli after only two years. Thus established was the link between the centres of psychological research in Padua and Trieste that has persisted until the present day.

After his early studies on chromatic perception and apparent movement Kanizsa gave further and original development to the distinction between perceptive perception and mental presentation drawn experimentally by Benussi during his research into the phenomena of amodal perception. In other words, Kanizsa specified further aspects of the nature of the passage from perception to abstract knowledge (i.e. the phenomenal domain at the basis of mental presentations), a field of research which has interested all the members of Meinong’s school of Graz. Kanizsa’s results make a number of theoretical points that warrant the closest consideration: for example, his distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘thinking’ relative to the difference between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ process, and his concept of ‘amodal completion’ relative to the distinction between ‘encountered’ perceptive presence and ‘imagined’ or mental presence. From this point of view, Kanizsa’s work represents a sophisticated version of the Graz two-storey model, mediated by the influence of the Berlin school and also by opposition to contemporaray cognitivist views on theory of knowledge.


Confirmed Speakers and Titles of Their Talks:

(This conference follows the meeting held in Rome during June 2001, jointly organized with CREA-Paris and University of Tor Vergata in Rome) 
(If you are interested in receiving further information, send a mail to Liliana Albertazzi)

Abstracts

LA PERCEZIONE DEL COLORE Osvaldo da Pos (Università di Padova)

In collaborazione con Accademia del Design
Gennaio 18, 19, 25, 26 - Febbraio 1, 2

Ogni unità comprende una parte teorica (tenuta ogni venerdi pomeriggio presso la Fondazione Mitteleuropa) e una esercitazione di natura più pratica (tenuta ogni sabato mattina presso l'Accademia del Design).

Introduzione: che cosa si intende per colore e pseudocolore - a che cosa serve la visione a colori - oggettività, soggettività e intersoggettività del colore - "dal contrasto al contesto": colore come 'relazione' fra quanto entra nel campo visivo.

Fenomenologia, misurazione psicologica e sistematica del colore: i grigi, il cerchio delle tinte, i colori della stessa tinta. Il sistema naturale dei colori.

Prove di riproduzione su computer e su stampa di colori pre-determinati (preparazione del materiale da usarsi negli incontri successivi).

Modi di apparire dei colori. Colore: illuminazione, ombra e tridimensionalità. Costanza dei colori (quando si vedono cambiamenti nella luce e quando nei colori; la teoria Retinex e altre teorie principali).

Relazioni fra i colori: esercitazione col sistema NCS indirizzata alla padronanza degli aspetti cromatici che assimilano o discriminano i colori.

Combinazioni di colori: aspetti percettivi ("Interactions") ed estetici.

Vari effetti ed illusioni con colori (dai fenomeni più tradizionali come contrasto, assimilazione, diffusione cromatica, ai più moderni come neon, fluorescenza, trasparenza, colore dal movimento, ecc): analisi ed applicazioni.

DIDATTICA

Tre giorni di seminario sulla percezione del colore, suddivisi in sei mezze giornate: il venerdì pomeriggio dalle 15 alle 19, il sabato mattina dalle 9 alle 13.

La prima parte di ogni modulo, prevalentemente teorico con dimostrazioni, si terrà presso la sede della Fondazione Mitteleuropa. La seconda parte, prevalentemente sperimentale/pratica, con l'uso di carte colorate e computer, presso l'Accademia di Design.


Si suggeriscono testi di riferimento e, entro la fine del seminario, si fornirà una dispensa degli argomenti trattati.

Si propone una prova di accertamento finale per gli studenti in due fasi: innanzitutto la presentazione da parte di ogni studente di un lavoro personale in cui si realizzi un fenomeno cromatico scelto in accordo con il docente (su carta o al computer); dopo aver ricevuto il lavoro, il docente porrà due o tre quesiti relativi alla tematica svolta, per verificare il grado di consapevolezza con cui sono stati affrontati i vari problemi. La valutazione riguarderà il livello di esecuzione del lavoro e la competenza manifestata nella risposta ai quesiti.

2001 Jahr der Sprachen / 2001 Anno delle lingue

Dreitägige Studientagung über Sprachwissenschaften /Tre giornate di studio sul linguaggio

1. ASPEKTE DER ZEITGENÖSSISCHEN LINGUISTIK / ASPETTI DELLA LINGUISTICA CONTEMPORANEA (26.10.2001)

2. DIDAKTIK DER NATÜRLICHEN SPRACHEN / DIDATTICA DELLE LINGUE NATURALI (9.11.2001)

3. PSYCHOLINGUISTIK / PSICOLINGUISTICA (13.11.2001)

The Legacy of Nicolai Hartmann

21-22 June 2001 (An International Conference for the 50th anniversary of Hartmann's death)
21 June, Morning
Opening session. Chairman Jan Wolenski
9.00 Registration and Authorities's Address
9.30 ROBERTO POLI, Hartmann Today
9.45 WOLFGANG WILDGEN, Natural Morphologies and Ontological Levels
10.30-10.45 Coffee break
1st session. Hartmann's Contributions to Ontology. Part I
10.45 LILIANA ALBERTAZZI, At the Roots of Ontics: Emotional Acts
11.30 PREDRAG CICOVACKI, New Ways of Ontology - The Ways of Interaction

Afternoon. Chairman Liliana Albertazzi
2nd session. Hartmann's Contributions to Ontology. Part II
15.00 ALBERTO PERUZZI, The Stratified Reality of Nicolai Hartmann
15.45 INGVAR JOHANSSON, Hartmann and the Concept of Supervenience
16.30-16.45 Coffee break
16.45 ERWIN TEGTMEIER, Nicolai Hartmann's Ontology
17.30 ROBERTO POLI, Brooding over Hartmann's Theory of the Levels of Reality

22 June, Morning. Chairman Jerzy Perzanowski
3rd session. Hartmann's Contributions to the Theories of Action and Values
9.15 GABOR CSEPREGI, The Relevance of Hartmann's Musical Aesthetics
10.00 ROBERT JORDAN, Hartmann, Schutz and the Hermeneutics of Action
10.45-11.00 Coffee break
11.00 ANTONIO DA RE, Objective Spirit and Personal Spirit in Hartmann's Philosophy
11.45 ANDREAS KINNEGING, Hartmann's Vindication of the Moral Order
4th session. Hartmann's Modal theories. Chairman Ingvar Johansson
15.00 RAFAEL HUENTELMANN, N. H. Modal Ontology of Real Beings and the Deterministic Concept of Being
15.45 JERZY PERZANOWSKI, Remarks on Hartmann's Ontological Modalities
16.30-16.45 Coffee break
16.45 JAN WOLENSKI, Intentio recta, intentio obliqua and the object of knowledge
17.00 Panel discussion and conclusions

Wholes and their Parts (W/P)

17-19 June 1998
9 Registration
10 Bill Lawvere, Categorical analyses of the whole/part relation
11,30 Coffee break
12 John Bell, Whole and part in mathematics
13-15 Lunch
15 Steve Vickers, W/P in semantics for programming languages
16 Coffee break
16,30 Colin McLarty, W/P in foundations of mathematics
17,30 Carlo Cellucci, W/P in logical analysis

June 18
9 Gonzalo Reyes, A category-theoretic approach to Aristotle's term logic, with special reference to mass nouns
10 Ettore Casari, On Husserl's theory of wholes and parts
11 Coffee break
11,30 John Mayberry, The classical notion of number and the modern notion of set
12,30-15 Lunch
15 Niles Eldredge, Hierarchical biological systems
16 Coffee break
16,30 Alberto Peruzzi, Wholes and their parts in semantics and epistemology: local/global and internal/external
17,30 Roberto Poli, Wholes and their parts: the ontological stance

June 19
9 Basil Hiley, W/P in mechanics and cosmology
10 Ron Langacker, Wholes and their parts in natural language
11 Coffee break
11,30 Alf Zimmer, W/P in Gestalt psychology
12,30-15 Lunch
15 Ellis D. Cooper, Wholes and parts in quale mechanics
15,20, Holger Schmid-Schönbein, In resonant physiological systems, the whole is less complicated than the sum of its parts
15,40 Irina Dobronravova, Parts and elements of the wholes in synergetics
16 Coffee break
16,30 Nili Mandelblit, The notion of dynamic unit: conceptual developments in cognitive science
16,50 Anthony Atkinson, Wholes and their parts in cognitive psychology
17,10 Lawrence D. Roberts, Sentential meaning and its parts
17,30 Frederik Stjernfeld, Mereology and semiotics
17,50 Ariel Meirav, Plato's Theaetetus and the notion of a Gestalt

The Origins of the Cognitive Sciences 1870-1930
Theories of Representation

December 12-13

December 12, Morning
Chairman: Elizabeth Valentine
9.00 Opening Address
9.30-10.30 Liliana Albertazzi (Trento), Presentational Primitives
10.30-11.30 Martin Kusch (München), The Politics of Representation: Social Variables of the Thought Psychology Controversy, 1900 to 1920
11.30-12.00 Coffee Break
12.00-13.00 Riccardo Luccio (Firenze), Representation in Psychophysics


December 12, Afternoon
Chairman: Ruggero Pierantoni
15.00-16.00 Jan Sebestik (Paris), Logical (Bolzano) and Phenomenological (Mach) Theories of Representation
16.00-17.00 Gianni Zanarini (Bologna), Helmholtz' and Mach's Theories on Consonance
17.00-17.30 Coffee Break
17.30-18.30 Salvatore D'Agostino (Roma), The Bild Conception of Physical Theory from Helmholtz to Schrödinger
18.30-19.30 Walter Gerbino (Trieste), Representation of Sensory Qualities: The Case of Colour

December 13, Morning
Chairman: Riccardo Luccio
9.00-10.00 Karl Schuhmann (Utrecht), The Concept of Bild in the Early Husserl
10.00-11.00 Elizabeth Valentine (London), Analytic Psychology in G.F. Stout
11.00-11.30 Coffee Break
11.30-12.30 Robin Rollinger (Freiburg), Sensorial Localization in Lotze

December 13, Afternoon
Chairman: Karl Schuhmann
15.00-16.00 W. Wildgen (Bremen), Gestalt Psychology and Semiotics: The Case of Kurt Lewin
16.00-17.00 Ruggero Pierantoni (Genova), The Children's Drawings as Sensitive Probes Sent into the Realm of Representations
17.00-17.30 Coffee Break
17.30-18.30 Luciano Mecacci (Firenze), Morphological Classification of Concepts
18.30-19.30 Alfred Zimmer (Regensburg), The Function of Multiple Formats in Mental Representation

Categorie ontologiche e spazi cognitivi

Bolzano, Castel Mareccio, 22-23 maggio 1997

At the origins of the contemporary idea of exact philosophy

Bolzano, November 14-16, 1996

Speakers

BISCA — Bolzano International Schools in Cognitive Analysis (1996-2002)

(The previous series of the schools (1988-1995) was organized under the name "Bolzano international school in philosophy and artificial intelligence")

Design and Cognition

Sept 2 - 6 , 2002

(Exile. Painting by Michael Leyton)


Description:

Most of the world that we know is designed. Furthermore, almost everyone in the Western world has become a designer at their personal computer (e.g., publishing their own web-pages). Design has become everyone's domain, and the 21st century communicates via design. This has made it extremely important to understand the relation between design and cognition. This school brings together four speakers who are internationally known for their work in the areas of design and cognition.


Speakers:

John Gero

Lectures:

John Gero is Professor of Design Science and Co-Director of the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition, Department of Architectural and Design Science, at the University of Sydney. He is the author or editor of 30 books and over 400 papers in the fields of design science, artificial intelligence, optimization and computer-aided design. He has been a Visiting Professor of Architecture, Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or Computer Science at UC-Berkeley, UCLA, Columbia and CMU in the USA, at Strathclyde and Loughborough in the UK, at INSA-Lyon in France and at EPFL-Lausanne in Switzerland. His former doctoral students are professors in the USA, UK, Australia, Singapore and Korea. He has been the recipient of many excellence awards including the Harkness, two Fulbrights, two SRC Fellowships and various named chairs. He is on the editorial boards of numerous journals related to computer-aided design, artificial intelligence and knowledge engineering and is the chair of the international conference series Artificial Intelligence in Design.


Michael Leyton

Lectures:

Michael Leyton is on the faculty in the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers. His mathematical work on shape has been used in over 20 disciplines from chemical engineering to radiology. His scientific contributions have received several prizes, such as a presidential award, and a medal for scientific achievement. His paintings, sculptures, and architectural projects, have been featured in international design journals and invited exhibitions. The scores of his string quartets are currently being published. Leyton's books "Symmetry, Causality, Mind" (MIT Press) and "A Generative Theory of Shape" (Springer-Verlag) elaborate a new theory of geometry which argues that geometry is the means of recording history; i.e., that geometry is equivalent to memory storage. Related to this, he argues that art works are maximal memory stores. This is supported with lengthy studies of art-works as well as the design process itself. Leyton is president of the International Society for Mathematical and Computational Aesthetics.


Michael J. Pratt

Lectures:

Michael Pratt has been Professor of Computer Aided Engineering and Head of the Department of Applied Computing and Mathematics at Cranfield University in the UK. He has held a senior research positions at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research interests include all aspects of product modelling in mechanical engineering, and especially the use of geometry in the integration of computer aided design (CAD). He is actively involved in the development of the international standard ISO 10303 (STEP) for the exchange of product data; in this context he leads the ISO TC184/SC4 Parametrics Group. Pratt has an MA in physics from Oxford University, an MSc in aeronautical science and a PhD in mechanical engineering from Cranfield. He has published numerous papers and book contributions on CAD and related topics, and is on the editorial boards of the journals Computer Aided Geometric Design, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and International Journal of Shape Modelling.


Gerhard Schmitt

Lectures:

Gerhard Schmitt is Professor of Architecture and Computer Aided Architectural Design (CAAD) at the Department of Architecture of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich. His research focuses on the development of intelligent design support systems and the architectural design of the information territory. Since April, 1998, he is Vice President for Planning and Logistics of ETH Zürich. His most recent books are Architektur mit dem Computer (Vieweg, 1996), a publication on physical, virtual and information architecture, Architectura et Machina (Vieweg, 1993) and Information Architecture (Testo & Immagine) describing the rapidly growing relations between architecture and the machine. In 1996, he completed a two-year term as Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at ETH Zurich. From 1984-88 he was on the Faculty of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. He holds a Dr.-Ing. degree from the Technical University of Munich and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

List of Panels

BISCA 2001: Hierarchies of Representation

10-14 September 2001

Abstracts

BISCA 2000: Dependence and Dynamic Categories

18-22 September 2000

BISCA 1999: Advances in Cognitive Semantics

6-10 September 1999

BISCA 1998: Unfolding Perceptual Continua

7-11 September 1998

Categories: ontological perspectives in knowledge representation (1997)

Semantic fields (1996)

Spatial reasoning (1995)

Life strategies: From reflex to cognition (1995)

Cognitive semantics (1994)

What is a form? (1994)

Natural language processing and multilingualism (1993)

Philosophy of language (1993)

Temporal reasoning (1992)

Formal ontology (1992)

Symbol and reference (1991)

Phenomenology and analytic philosophy (1991)

Cognitive architectures. Connessionism versus Symbolism (1990)

Central European roots of modern epistemology (1990)

Knowledge representation (1989)

Austrian philosophy (1988) (in German)

Philosophical perspectives in artificial intelligence (1988)

Summer School


Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language

San Marino, 9-12 June 2003

Lecturers:

Information:

Seminar on bi- and multilingualism and cognition

May, 19-21 2005


The aim of this seminar is to discuss the most recent research on cognitive aspects of bi- and multilingualism. Since language research is basically cognitive research, a cognitive theory of language is the most suitable theoretical framework in which to bring together psychology, linguistics, and bilingualism. Research has demonstrated that a significant amount of cognitive development results from the internalization of interpersonal communicative processes. Cognitive approaches to bi- and multilingualism attempt to find out what happens if these interpersonal communicative processes involve the use of more than one language. Earlier research studies concentrated on the bilingual person and the product of thinking, while recent trends have seemed to favor the process of thinking, focusing on language recall, reaction time, information processing and memorization, on the one hand, and social and conceptual development on the other. Issues reflecting these developments will be addressed and discussed in the seminar. Ample time will be allocated to discussion. The first two days will be devoted to presentation/discussion of the invited speakers' contributions, while the third one will be taken up by panel/short presentations. Power point presentations are encouraged.

Invited keynote speakers (confirmed):

Michel Paradis (McGill University, Cognitive Neuroscience Center, Canada) "The components of the bilingual cognitive system."

In recent years neuropsychologists have been investigating pragmatic deficits, while language pathologists have been using aphasic patients' preserved pragmatic abilities to help them compensate for their deficits in linguistic competence. From the viewpoint of linguistic theory, there is now an external justification for treating sentence grammar independently of pragmatics. Based on research findings Paradis proposes a linguistic theory of bilingualism that integrates a neurofunctional model (the components of verbal communication and their relationships: implicit linguistic competence, metalinguistic knowledge, pragmatics, and motivation).

Ton Dijkstra (Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information, The Netherlands) "Task and context effects in bilingual processing."

In his former studies Dijkstra used several different tasks to investigate bilingual word recognition and cognate processing independent of context. This study gives a new twist to the old story because he investigates bilingual processing in context, mainly in sentence environment. Dijkstra also gives a state-of-the-art review of current issues in bilingual visual word recognition research, considering effects of relative proficiency, stimulus materials, task demands, stimulus list composition, and modality on bilexical processing. All these factors are integrated in a coherent and partially implemented theoretical framework within the localist connectionist tradition.

Ellen Bialystok (Department of Psychology, York University, Canada) "Cognitive effects of bilingualism across the lifespan."

In her paper Bialystok reports a series of studies that traces bilingual processing difference into adulthood and eventually aging. The innovative elements of the paper are twofold. First, the presented studies follow bilinguals through the lifespan. We know quite a lot about child bilingualism but much less about bilingualism in adulthood. This paper makes an attempt to change this. Second, there is little consistency in the type of tasks researchers have used to demonstrate bilingual advantages. This paper, however, uses one particular task in all groups, from children to older adults. It is the Simon task, a measure of stimulus-response incompatibility. Participants are required to ignore the position of a target stimulus in order to respond to its colour. The extra reaction time required when the position conflicts with the correct response is the Simon Effect, a measure of inhibitory control. The results demonstrated that bilinguals performed better than monolinguals in early childhood, adulthood, and later adulthood.

Istvan Kecskes (State University of New York, Albany, USA) "Synergic concepts in the bilingual mind."

In his presentation Kecskes seeks answer to the following questions: How does bilingualism modify the concept-word symbiosis? His hypothesis is that in the mind of bi- and multilingual speakers there are synergic concepts that are the results of conceptual blending. Bilinguals get information about the same or similar concepts through two language channels. Because they have a common underlying conceptual base the blended information results in concepts that are neither exactly equal to the corresponding L1 concept nor to the corresponding L2 concept. Kecskes presents the results of a survey with speakers of several languages to test his hypothesis and raises the question of building bilingual ontologies.

If you are interested in attending the workshop and/or contributing your own ideas, please send an email (with a two-page abstract in attachment if you intend to give a presentation/panel) to the secretary of Mitteleuropa Foundation, Dr. Paola Benevento before April 15.

Important Dates: How to reach Bolzano

Projected Perception. At the Edge of Natural and Artificial Reality and Abstraction

Bolzano 1st – 3rd September 2005


Speakers:

Ernest Edmonds, University of Technology, Sydney

The Language and Logic of Concrete Perception: an Art Context

First lecture: On Creative Engagement

Second lecture: White Noise: the Question of Economy

Few would dispute the role of Cézanne as the father of the early 20th century revolution in visual art. His insight into art practice is especially interesting to me:

"The technique of any art consists of a language and a logic".

That statement captures the core contextual point of the discussion to follow. Another significant grounding point is in Malevich’s essay of 1919, "On new systems in art". In it, he introduces the notion of making art with the help of "a law for the constructional inter-relationships of forms", by which he meant the language, or system of form, rather than representations of the visual world. Matisse’s work was helpful because it was clear that he was organising shapes and colours on the flat canvas in ways that gave such vibrancy in the work. I became concerned with composition more than with representation. It became clear that the most significant aspect of a painting was neither in what it represented figuratively nor in what it represented symbolically: the significance was in the very form of the work itself, its composition, just as in music. Malevich’s insight into science and systems came well before the advent of computers, but at a time when mathematical logicians were developing theories that proved to be very important for the invention of the computer. The new constructs in art could only have come about as a result of the invention of the computer and the development of the understanding of computation that preceded it. Remarkably, the direction that artists such as Malevich were going in during the early part of the 20th Century pointed directly towards these, at that time, unimaginable new directions. The introduction of the computer into art practice has transformed both that practice and the forms of the resulting artworks.


Fredo Durand, MIT CSAIL

Computer Depiction: A synergy between computer science, physics, perception and the visual arts

First lecture: First Introduction to computer graphics

Second lecture: Computer depiction

Computer graphics offers unprecedented opportunities to explore the picture creation process. Art training has heavily – and successfully – relied on teaching by example, where the rules of depiction do not need to be explicit and where metaphors are often used. In contrast, programming a computer to synthesize images requires a systematic and explicit formulation of procedures, usually in the form of a programmino language. This makes crucial the precise definition of the objects and concepts manipulated, and it encourages the organization of depiction into well-identified subtasks and explicit rules.

On the other hand, computer graphics often underestimates the complexity of the interactions between features in the picture and features of the represented scene. Depiction is not always a mechanical and unidirectional projection from a 3D scene to a 2D picture, but involves much feedback and influence from the picture space to the object space.

Depiction can be seen as a pre-existing 3D reality projected onto 2D, but also as a 2D pictorial representation that is superficially compatible with a hypothetic 3D scene. The successes and limitations of current computer graphics techniques offer exciting insights into picture creation and picture perception.

Barbara Tversky, Stanford University

Minimal Artificial Reality

First lecture: How Space is Schematized

Second lecture:How Events are Schematized

The features that make an artificial world seem natural may not be the same as what the natural world provides; people's perceptions and conceptions of the natural world differ systematically from natural reality. Thus, human conceptions of natural reality can give clues to what aspects of natural reality need to be preserved in artificial reality. Previous work on human conceptions of the structures of the space of the body, the space around the body, and the space of navigation can constrain the minimal structure needed for artificial reality.

Frederic Fol Leymarie, London University at Goldsmith

The Medial Scaffold for 3D Shape Representation and some Recent Applications

First lecture: Shape representation: from the medial axis to the medial scaffold

Second lecture: Shape representation: Applications

Frederic Fol Leymarie will discuss his recent work on the representation of 3D shape involving collaborations with artists and scientists, including mathematicians, engineers, sculptors, archaeologists.

In the last few years he has developed, with Prof. Ben B. Kimia of Brown University and Prof. Peter J. Giblin of Liverpool University, a new technology to represent 3D pieces of spatial data, for example using point clouds from laser scanners used to sample the surfaces of objects in a scene. The representation is called a Medial Scaffold: it is a 3D graph structure formally derived from another representation that was proposed in pattern recognition in the 1960's, called the Medial Axis. It also represents an extension to 3D of shock graphs defined by Siddiqi, Kimia et al. for 2D problems. The graph structure for a given set of input samples (e.g., points, polygons, curved surface patches) is built from special medial nodes taken as the centers of maximal contact spheres and located at singularities of a certain flow obtained from propagating geometric waves initiated at the input loci. The theory is related to the geometry of spheres and singularity theory. http://www.lems.brown.edu/vision/researchAreas/Shocks3D/

These graphs are "flexible" in that small perturbations or deformations of the input sets do not modify their topology; however sudden transition changes in the graph structure can occur for sufficiently large deformations. These topological events have been recently entirely understood and I will report on their use in simplifying the medial scaffolds to elicit what may be thought of as qualitative versus quantitative shape descriptions. This represents a major step toward object recognition by a cybernetic system.

The result of recent collaborations, with applications to archaeology http://www.lems.brown.edu/shape/ and sculpting http://www.karlaspelund.com/biomimes/ will also be discussed.

If you are interested in attending the workshop and/or contributing your own ideas, please send an email (with a two-page abstract in attachment if you intend to give a presentation/panel) to the secretary of Mitteleuropa Foundation, Dr. Paola Benevento before July 15.

Important Dates: Timetable


Causality and Motivation

1st workshop of the interest area Causality and Motivation

Bolzano (Italy), April 20-21, 2006

The Causality and Motivation research group is one of the three interest areas of SophiaEuropa, a project of Metanexus Institute in conjunction with leading universities in Europe, made possible by the support of the John Templeton Foundation (USA).

Rationale

The belief is widely held that the physical world is causally-driven. The world is one because a tangled web of causally-driven processes keeps it together. The actual world is the way it is, because it is the causally-driven outcome of its previous states. However, both the psychological and the social worlds cannot be articulated in causal terms only. Hereby, “motivation” is used as the most general term referring to whatever keeps (synchronically) together and provides (diachronic) reasons explaining the behavior of psychological and social systems.

Biology does not fit easily with either picture. Organisms are part and parcel of nature but they cannot be reduced to a complex web of physical causes, causes that can merely explain the “mechanical” side of such organisms. No serious scholars deny that organisms contain and are based on many mechanisms. However, it cannot be argued that organisms are nothing else than (collections of) mechanisms. Something more is needed. At the same time, motivation does not work for organisms. Again, something else is needed.

This section of the project will address basic category issues. The aim is to sketch at least some fragment of the conceptual framework needed for understanding the various types of realities populating the world and their interrelations and will pave the way for acknowledging types of realities so far excluded from the realm of scientific entities.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:



Programm

April 20

Chairperson: Angela Ales Bello

9,00-9,20 Welcome addresses

9,20-9,40 Eric Weislogel, Presentation of Metanexus Institute and Templeton Foundation

9,40-10,30 Roberto Poli (Trento). Systemic Preliminaries to Causality and Motivation

10,30-11,00 Coffee break

11,00-11,50 Johanna Seibt (Aarhus). Levels of Reality and Forms of Interactivity

11,50-12,40 Liliana Albertazzi (Trento). Causation: A Subjective Integration on Data Driven Information


Lunch


Chairperson: Liliana Albertazzi

14,30-15,20 Maurice Yolles (Liverpool), The Ontology of Knowledge Cybernetics

15,20-16,10 Alicia Juarrero, (Largo, US), Intentional Causation as the Operation of Second-Order Context-Sensitive Constraints

16,10-16,40 Coffee break

16,40-17,30 Chris Groves (Cardiff), Teleology Without Telos: Deleuze and Jonas on the Living Future

17,30-18,20 Arno Wouters (Nijmegen), Organization is what bridges the material and the living realm

18,20-19,10 Jens Thisted (Aarhus), Ontology, “the science war” and conflicting world views


April 21


Chairperson: Massimo Stanzione

8,30-9,20 Zbigniew Kotulski (Warsaw), Human and Software Agent Analogies. How IT Attempts to Solve this Problem?

9,20-10,10 Riccardo Manzotti (Milan), Developing new motivations: a teleologically-open architecture for motivational plasticity

10,10-10,40 coffee break

10,40-11,30 Angela Ales Bello (Lateran University, Rome). Causality and Motivation according to Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein

11,30-12,20 Antonio Clericuzio (Cassino). Mechanism and Vitalism in 17th-Century Science


Lunch


Chairperson: Johanna Seibt

14,30-15,20 Jean-Michel Roy (Lyon). Motivation and the Exclusion Problem

15,20-16,10 Wolfgang Hofkirchner (Salzburg), Self-Organisation, Less-than-strict-Determinism and the four Aristotelian Causes

16,10-16,40 Coffee break

16,40-17,30 Stefano Visintin (S. Anselm University, Rome), Intelligent Design Movement and Theology

17,30-18,20 Antonio Russo (Trieste). The man and his "naturale Neigung" according to F. Brentano

18,20-19,10 Mikuláš Blažek, Miroslav Karaba (Bratislava), The role of causes (forces) in our everyday life



Selected list of talks

Roberto Poli (Trento). Systemic Preliminaries to Causality and Motivation

After distinguishing four main ontological types of systems (material, biological, psychological and social) I shall submit them to a finer-grained classification organized along different dimensions (open—closed, computable—non-computable; reactive—adaptive; deterministic—non-deterministic; etc). The main outcome of this exercise will be the distinction among three main families of systems: simple, complex, and hyper-complex. The concept of hyper-complex systems will then be spelt out in some details and the thesis will be defended that biological, psychological and social systems are all hyper-complex systems.


Johanna Seibt (Aarhus). Levels of Reality and Forms of Interactivity

The main purpose of the talk is to show that different levels of reality can be distinguished in terms of forms of interaction between the components of that level. I introduce a basic relationship of generative composition defined on processes. I rehearse common arguments for a non-reductive approach in the philosophy of mind and the ontology of social structures and show that these arguments crucially draw on characteristic forms of interaction between the entities at that 'level'. I then show how one might define these various characteristic forms of interaction (causation, functional dependency, circular and reciprocal dependencies, weakly and strongly entangled agency) as species of process composition.


Jean-Michel Roy (Lyon). Motivation and the Exclusion Problem

A leading assumption of contemporary cognitive science is that specific psychological properties are necessary to account for cognitive phenomena, but that these properties only count as bona fide scientific ones under the condition that they can be naturalized, that is to say, account for in terms of natural properties (be they neurobiological ones, or even more fundamentally, physical ones). However, another widespread assumption of contemporary cognitive science is that physico-neurobiological reductionism, in the classical sense of a type identity theory, is not a viable of route to such naturalization, and great hopes were put in non-reductionist forms of naturalism, functionalism in particular. In the course of years, functionalism has nevertheless faced a growing number of difficulties. One of them is the accusation (known in the literature as the exclusion problem) that it deprives psychological properties of any non redundant causal efficacy. In other words, that it makes them epiphenomenal. Several rejoinders to this accusation are possible and have been recently explored, ranging from the plain rejection of the accusation, to the investigation of alternative naturalizing strategies, such as neo-reductionism or emergentism. In this contribution, I want to take a different route and analyse the possible roots the exclusion problem might have in the conception of psychological causality in which it is framed. Accordingly, the general question I want to address is whether the concept of motivation, which has frequently been opposed to the concept of causality, could offer a viable way out of the difficulty. This question, in turn, raises four main problems: (1) How should the notion of motivation be exactly understood, and how does it differ from mainstream conceptions of causality, while retaining a necessary causal or efficacious component? (2) Is it theoretically and empirically relevant for a theory of cognition? (3) Can it be itself naturalized, and how? (4) Does it eliminate the source of the exclusion problem?


Liliana Albertazzi (Trento). Causation: A subjective integration on data driven information

Laboratory research shows that the structural characteristics of certain dynamic events involving the perception of causation constitute the origin of conceptual categories expressed linguistically by causatives of the type ‘launching’, ‘entraining’, ‘avoiding’, etc. My intention is to show that the perception of causation is based on specific spatio-temporal structures, to which one can connect the conceptualizations relative to the differences in meaning among the terms expressing mechanical causation, or among the terms expressing movements which manifest intentional sentiments.


Zbigniew Kotulski (Warsaw), Human and Software Agent Analogies. How IT Attempts to Solve this Problem?

Every human being is an individual, distinguishable item, something which is a whole; sometimes she wants to be anonymous, sometimes she wants to be explicitly seen and presents herself to other beings. She lives somewhere and moves around in the environment. She may both keep secrets and present certain information to her audience. Human beings have will, collect information and make decisions. They reacts to other human beings. These reactions can be typical or individual, cooperative or adversative. Finally, human beings may react to their partners' feelings. I shall enquiry whether and to what extend software agents could behave in the same way.


Angela Ales Bello (Lateran University, Rome). Causality and Motivation according to Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein

My contribution will be dedicated to the comparative analysis of Husserl's Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and Edith Stein's Beitraege regarding the meaning of the two notions, in order to discuss their interpretation in contraposition with a positivist point of view.


Antonio Russo (Trieste). The man and his "naturale Neigung" according to Franz Brentano

The main purpose of my talk is to investigate the impact of Blaise Pascal on Franz Brentano. I shall consider in particular Brentano's Die Bleibende Deutung der Lehre Jesu (1916) and some of his unpublished writings on Modernism. I shall further analyse the differences between Brentano, Schell and Blondel on this topic.


Antonio Clericuzio (Cassino). Mechanism and Vitalism in 17th-Century Science

In my paper I will take into account two rival conceptions of matter and life that were formulated in the 17th century, namely, the mechanical and the iatrochemical. Mechanical philosophers explained human body in terms of matter and motion. In Descartes' description of human body shape, size and motion of particles of matter account for the main physiological processes. Descartes' matter is inert and motion is communicated by impact. The human body is an automaton and its operations are performed according to the laws of movement. By contrast, iatrochemists described human body as a chemical laboratory, the main physiological operations were deemed as chemical reactions, that were conceived as qualitative changes, produced by forces, vital principles (the so called archaei), spirits and ferments. According to the chemical philosophers, matter is active, or it is activated by some spiritual agent. The latter view was advocated by Jean Baptiste van Helmont, who opposed both Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galenism and postulated that immaterial forces were the source of life and of the main physiological processes. In the last part of my paper I will take into account Isaac Newton's physiological views, which were based on aether and short range forces, marking a departure from the orthodox mechanical philosophy.

If you are interested in attending the workshop and/or contributing your own ideas, please send an email (with a two-page abstract in attachment if you intend to give a presentation/panel) to Roberto Poli before March 15.

How to reach Bolzano