The fluid nature of perceptual experience and the transient repetition of patterns in neurophysiological data attest to the dynamical character of neural activity. An approach to neuroscience that starts from this premise holds the potential to unite neuronal connectivity and brain activity by treating space and time in the same framework. That is the philosophy of this chapter. Our goals are t…

Why should one believe that evolutionary aspects could bring new insights into linguistics, semiotics, and cognitive science? Saussure dismissed historical, and with them developmental, issues as secondary for our understanding of language, stating that all languages and all their developmental stages constitute self-contained entities in their purely conventional regularity. In cognitive scien…

To successfully model the adversary, not only the opponent?s capabilities but also the intent should be considered. The adversary?s intent is composed of the adversary?s desired end-states, reasons for pursuing such end-states, methods to achieve the goals, and the levels of commitment to achieving the goals. In this chapter, we present a comprehensive adversarial modeling approach that account…

From this perspective and that of Genesis, the opposite of looking at, listening to, or grasping is not blackness, silence, or lack of pressure, but unstructured energy, energy that does not afford the perceiving of things or events in the world. The energy in the physical world and the energy coded by the receptors at the periphery are neutral. Perceiving is not merely attending to parts of th…

Is our understanding of the mind to be explained in terms of our mastering a theory, or in terms of a general capacity for simulating other agents? The first type of theory, called the ?Theory Theory?, claims that children learn how to understand and predict other people?s psychological states in a way that closely parallels how they learn physical and biological facts. They posit unobservable …

Appropriating and modifying the sociological concept of role distance, the chapter highlights the impersonal way in which legal actors enact their roles and reveals their avowedly strategic forms of communication as weapons deployed within what is sometimes a literally life-and-death agon. In a coercion-saturated environment, speech is the continuation of force by other, and milder, means. Chap…

This opening chapter begins with an overview of the issues and questions addressed in the remainder of this book, the contents of which reflect the wide diversity of eye-movement research. We then provide the reader with an up-to-date impression of the most significant developments in the area, based on findings from a survey of eye-movement researchers and database searches. We find that the m…

Culture is information that people acquire from others by teaching, imitation, and other forms of social learning. On a scale unknown in any other species, people acquire skills, beliefs, and values from the people around them, and these strongly affect behavior. People living in human populations are heirs to a pool of socially transmitted information that affects how they make a living, how t…

Personality is that which makes us what we are and that which makes us different from others. People who are especially different, for example, are said to have ?personality? or be ?quite a character.? Other people have ?no personality at all.? Depending on how someone affects us, he or she may be viewed as having a ?good personality? or a ?bad personality.? In the past several decades, the stu…

The linguistic representation of conceptual structure is the central concern of this volume and of its companion volume. While such conceptual organization in language had once been insu½ciently addressed, attention to it has been increasing over the last two to three decades. The growing research in this relatively recent linguistic domainÐwhich has generally come to be known as cognitive li…