The Binding Problem

Kant's account of cognitive judgment is sophisticated, sound and philosophically far more illuminating than is often appreciated. Key features of Kant's account of cognitive judgment are widely dispersed amongst various sections of the Critique of Pure Reason, whilst common philosophical proclivities have confounded these interpretive difficulties. This paper characterises Kant's account of causal-perceptual judgment concisely to highlight one central philosophical achievement: Kant's finding that, to understand and investigate empirical knowledge we must distinguish between predication as a grammatical form of sentences, statements or (candidate) judgments, and predication as a (proto-)cognitive act of ascribing some characteristic(s) to some localised particular(s). With Kant's finding in view, I then elucidate how we have occluded his achievement. My results are not merely interpretive, but philosophical , because they show that Kant's account of perceptual judgment accords with – and indeed justifies – a central and sound point regarding language, thought and reference advocated by apparently unlikely philosophical comrades. These finding highlight some method-ological cautions which require re-emphasis today. (10.10.2017) For Paul Guyer, in admiration and gratitude

This thesis uses concepts developed by Ruth Millikan as part of her “biosemantic” theory of intentional signs to explain her theory of about what it means to identify the “substance” that is the object of one’s thoughts. It then applies these concepts and the theory to elucidate her analysis of identity statements. Finally, it develops and explores Millikan’s notion of “sameness marker” functioning, the notion being that there exist sameness markers in the mind or brain that allow people to recognize that the same substance is being encountered at different points of time. It relates this notion to Millikan’s theory of identification, on the one hand, and to her analysis of identity statements, on the other. Throughout the thesis, Millikan’s notions are contrasted with those she attributes to Frege.

In a wide-ranging analysis, Karl-Heinrich Ostmeyer concludes that the various New Testament authors express the same purpose for prayer: successfully binding people to God in Christ. For Ostmeyer, Paul’s prayer language manifests this single-mindedness as the intent to integrate everyone into a prayer-relationship to God. Given the coherence-contingency conundrum of Pauline theology, these are bold assertions. This thesis examines to what extent Ostmeyer’s conclusions may be valid and valuable for understanding how prayer functioned in Paul’s Gentile mission. The enquiry can be summarised in three questions. To what extent did prayer define the mission? To what extent was Paul’s own act of prayer necessary to execute the mission, and why? To what extent did the prayers of his audiences constitute their participation in that mission?

To address these questions, this thesis appropriates aspects of Embodied Cognitive Science, which maintains that human cognition is not a localised process within the brain, but phenomenally emerges from embodied human interaction with others and the environment. Thought, language, and behaviour are grounded in, and partially constituted by, sensorimotor perception (i.e. that which is seen, heard, touched, tasted, and smelt). Paradoxically, these activities are generally perceived as coherent even though they are perpetually contingent processes of dynamic integration. Consciousness, commonly called the human mind, is simultaneously the process and product of integrating the individual’s perception of needs, desires, and volition with the continual sensorimotor experience characteristic of human life.

This thesis argues that Paul’s prayer language was necessarily grounded in his sensorimotor perception of the resurrected Jesus. Understanding the function of prayer language in his Gentile mission begins by asking how it related to what he perceived, and concludes by asking how his prayer language provided the sensorimotor perception necessary for his audience to understand what he was trying to tell them. The conclusion is that the formative aspect of prayer in Paul’s Gentile mission was a reciprocal property: organising time and space to conceptualise divine-human communication, and being reorganized in time and space by the resurrection of Jesus to actualise divine-human interaction. The contribution to Pauline scholarship is illustrating that engagement between biblical studies and neuroscience is both necessary and beneficial due to the common quest to understand being human.

Philosophers of perception frequently assume that we see actual states of affairs, or facts. Call this claim factualism. In his book, William Fish suggests that factualism is supported by phenomenological observation as well as by experimental studies on multiple object tracking and dynamic feature-object integration. In this paper, I examine the alleged evidence for factualism, focusing mainly on object detection and tracking. I argue that there is no scientific evidence for factualism. This conclusion has implications for studies on the
phenomenology and epistemology of visual perception.

Is the great god Pan reborn? For a while there, it seemed every intellectual movement began with the prefix ‘post’, implying non-totality, but now there are indications that ‘pan’ (all) is returning to provide another answer to one of the most basic of ontological questions: What is the relationship of mind to matter? In this important book with 17 different authors, panpsychism is given its due.

Evidence suggests that synchronized brain oscillations in the low gamma range (around 33 Hz) are involved in the perceptual integration of harmonic complex tones. This process involves the binding of harmonic components into “harmonic templates” – neural structures responsible for pitch coding in the brain. We investigated the hypothesis that oscillatory harmonic binding promotes a change in pitch perception style from spectral (frequency) to virtual (relational). Using oscillatory priming we asked 24 participants to judge as rapidly as possible, the direction of an ambiguous target with ascending spectral and descending virtual contour. They made significantly more virtual responses when primed at 29, 31, and 33 Hz and when the first target tone was harmonically related to the prime, suggesting that neural synchronization in the low gamma range could facilitate a shift
toward virtual pitch processing.

Despite its prominent role in cognitive psychology, its relevance for the research of consciousness, and some helpful clarification (eg, Revonsuo 1999), the binding problem is still surrounded by considerable confusion. In this paper, I first give an informal but systematic overview on the diversity of forms the binding problem can assume, and then attempt to extract, on the basis of “working definitions” of various much-discussed types of binding, a common denominator. I propose that at the heart of the binding problem lies the ...