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12The “complex first” paradoxIn M. Arbib D. Bickerton (ed.), The Emergence of Protolanguage: Holophrasis Vs Compositionality, John Benjamins. pp. 24--67. 2010.
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72Descartes discarded? Introspective self-awareness and the problems of transparency and compositionality☆Consciousness and Cognition 19 (3): 751-761. 2010.What has the self to be like such that introspective awareness of it is possible? The paper asks if Descartes’s idea of an inner self can be upheld and discusses this issue by invoking two principles: the phenomenal transparency of experience and the semantic compositionality of conceptual content. It is assumed that self-awareness is a second-order state either in the domain of experience or in the domain of thought. In the former case self-awareness turns out empty if experience is transparent…Read more
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161The temporal dimension of thought: Cortical foundations of predicative representationSynthese 146 (1-2): 203-224. 2005.The paper argues that cognitive states of biological systems are inherently temporal. Three adequacy conditions for neuronal models of representation are vindicated: the compositionality of meaning, the compositionality of content, and the co-variation with content. Classicist and connectionist approaches are discussed and rejected. Based on recent neurobiological data, oscillatory networks are introduced as a third alternative. A mathematical description in a Hilbert space framework is develope…Read more
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10Neuronal Synchronization, Covariation, and Compositional RepresentationIn Gerhard Schurz, Edouard Machery & Markus Werning (eds.), Applications to Linguistics, Psychology and Neuroscience, De Gruyter. pp. 283-312. 2005.
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182Compositionality, context, categories and the indeterminacy of translationErkenntnis 60 (2): 145-178. 2004.The doctrine that meanings are entitieswith a determinate and independent reality is often believed tohave been undermined by Quine's thought experiment of radicaltranslation, which results in an argument for the indeterminacy oftranslation. This paper argues to the contrary. Starting fromQuine's assumption that the meanings of observation sentences arestimulus meanings, i.e., set-theoretical constructions of neuronalstates uniquely determined by inter-subjectively observable facts,the paper sho…Read more
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Lexicon in action: N400 effect on affordances and telicity.In P. Bello (ed.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Austin, Tx: Cognitive Science Society. pp. 2079-84. 2014.
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15The “complex first” paradox: Why do semantically thick concepts so early lexicalize as nouns?Interaction Studies 9 (1): 67-83. 2008.
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13How to Compose Contents A Review of Jerry Fodor's In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of MindPSYCHE: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Research On Consciousness 8. 2002.The paper critically reviews Jerry Fodor's book In Critical Condition: Polemic Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind. It focuses on Fodor's compositionality arguments and their relevance to the following questions: How should concepts be individuated? What has semantics to do with epistemology? Who is right in the debate over classical and connectionist theories of cognition? How can the semantic properties of a mental state be inherited from the semantic properties of the state…Read more
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87Ventral versus dorsal pathway: The source of the semantic object/event and the syntactic noun/verb distinction?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26 (3): 299-300. 2003.Experimental data suggest that the division between the visual ventral and dorsal pathways may indeed indicate that static and dynamical information is processed separately. Contrary to Hurford, it is suggested that the ventral pathway primarily generates representations of objects, whereas the dorsal pathway produces representations of events. The semantic object/event distinction may relate to the morpho-syntactic noun/verb distinction.