Ontological Status Research Articles

Passion for programming: to the determination of the status and content of the concept

Introduction. Programming is very attractive for today's youth in terms of future professional activities. The professional choice of a significant number of high school students is associated with admission to IT specialties in the country's leading universities; professional dreams and plans of many young people are related to competitive training and work in an IT company. The increased interest of young people in this specialty and the demand for highly qualified specialists in this field from the state actualizes the need to study the psychological characteristics of the development of children, adolescents and young people who are passionate about programming. The theoretical significance is the definition of the ontological status and content of the concept of passion for programming. Is the passion for programming a socially and historically conditioned characteristic of personality development, or should this concept be considered as a kind of giftedness? Materials and Methods. The article presents the results of a review of theoretical approaches to defining the essence of the concept of "enthusiasm for activity" and considers the possibility of its application in relation to programming in the context of the general theory of youth giftedness. During the review, such methods of theoretical research as comparative analysis, generalization, interpretation were used. Results. Passion for programming can be defined as a state of energy, devotion and absorption in this activity, requiring physical, cognitively active and emotional involvement in the process. Passion for programming must be considered in the context of the general theory of giftedness. In relation to the studied target group, it seems appropriate to use the term "computer talent". Computer talent includes a high level of development of computer thinking as an analogue of the development of intellectual abilities and creativity of the classical model. Enthusiasm for programming as an activity and in solving a specific problem is a personal component of computer talent. Discussion and Conclusions. Passion for programming as a special state of the individual when certain conditions are created, including those that support and enhance motivation and form and develop computer thinking, can develop into a property as a special ability for programming. And a high level of development of this ability, together with a high level of development of computer thinking, will represent a special kind of giftedness – giftedness in the field of programming. Thus, enthusiasm for programming can be considered as a personal prerequisite for the development of giftedness in the field of programming. Identification and development of computer talent is a special pedagogical task.

Spinoza's Epistemology through a Geometrical Lens by Matthew Homan

Reviewed by: Spinoza's Epistemology through a Geometrical Lens by Matthew Homan Yitzhak Y. Melamed Matthew Homan. Spinoza's Epistemology through a Geometrical Lens. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pp. xv + 256. Hardback, €114.39. Like most, if not all, of his contemporaries, Spinoza never developed a full-fledged philosophy of mathematics. Still, his numerous remarks about mathematics attest not only to his deep interest in the subject (a point that is also confirmed by the significant presence of mathematical books in his library), but also to his quite elaborate and perhaps unique understanding of the nature of mathematics. At the very center of his thought about mathematics stands a paradox (or, at least, an apparent paradox): Mathematics provides Spinoza with an epistemic model. Mathematical knowledge is certain (Spinoza, Opera, ed. Carl Gebhardt [Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, 1925], referred to as G and cited by volume.page.line number; G II.138.9), clear (G IV.261.8), and free from teleological thinking (G II.79.33), but the objects of mathematical knowledge—namely, mathematical entities—are nothing but "auxilia imaginationis [aids of the imagination]" (G IV.57.16 and II.83.15; quotations are from The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, 2 vols. [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985–2016]), entities that are not real and merely assist the imagination in carving up the world in a manner that is suitable to our limited and distortive cognitive capacities. Matthew Homan's new book is a study of Spinoza's epistemology "based on an interpretation of the epistemic and ontological status of mathematical entities in Spinoza" (4). The book has many virtues. It is well written, clear, and highly informed by the secondary literature. For the most part, Homan defends his claims through serious engagement and [End Page 329] consideration of objections and alternatives to his reading. The book is also quite ambitious in its scope as it describes Spinoza's response to skepticism, his view of the ontology of mathematics, his scientific methodology, his understanding of essence, and the notion of scientia intuitiva, the highest kind of cognition in Spinoza's epistemology. It is impossible to do justice to such a book in a brief review. For this reason, I will focus my discussion here on two critical points: one related to Spinoza's understanding of mathematics, the other to his understanding of the proper order of philosophizing. According to Homan, Spinoza is a (weak) realist about mathematics and mathematization. He defines this notion of realism as the thesis "that all finite bodies in nature are geometrical inasmuch as they have some figure—whether circular, triangular, or what have you—just by virtue of being spatially extended" (8). Thus, to count as a genuine realist it would suffice to assert that "bodies must have one kind of shape or another" (9). This radically relaxed definition of mathematical realism includes even views that assert that mathematical entities "exist [only] as properties of bodies" (8), as long as these entities (or properties) are mind-independent (views of this latter kind Homan calls "weak realism" [8]). According to Homan, the category of weak realism encompasses not only the views of Aristotle and his followers, but also those of Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, and even Spinoza (9). One might question the analytical benefit of employing such a deflationary definition of mathematical realism (few philosophers will count as nonrealist under this definition), but for my part, I was still unsure whether Spinoza would count as a realist even under Homan's permissive definition. In one of his late letters, Spinoza notes that geometrical shapes are just "beings of reason, and not real beings" (G IV.335.4). Addressing this passage, Homan suggests that Spinoza might be referring in this passage only to shapes that are abstracted from concrete bodies, while shapes that are embedded determinations of concrete bodies are—so claims Homan—real (148; cf. 70). Unfortunately, Homan provides hardly any textual support for the suggestion that Spinoza draws such a distinction between different conceptions of shape. Moreover, one may wonder in what sense embedded shapes are the objects of mathematics (prima facie, geometrical proofs seem to be indifferent to the fact...

Is the maximum entropy production just a heuristic principle? Metaphysics on natural determination

The Maximum Entropy Production Principle (MEPP) stands out as an overarching principle that rules life phenomena in Nature. However, its explanatory power beyond heuristics remains controversial. On the one hand, the MEPP has been successfully applied principally to non-living systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. On the other hand, the underlying assumptions to lay the MEPP’s theoretical foundations and range of applicability increase the possibilities of conflicting interpretations. More interestingly, from a metaphysical stance, the MEPP’s philosophical status is hotly debated: does the MEPP passively translate physical information into macroscopic predictions or actively select the physical solution in multistable systems, granting the connection between scientific models and reality? This paper deals directly with this dilemma by discussing natural determination from three angles: (1) Heuristics help natural philosophers to build an ontology. (2) The MEPP’s ontological status may stem from its selection of new forms of causation beyond physicalism. (3) The MEPP’s ontology ultimately depends on the much-discussed question of the ontology of probabilities in an information-theoretic approach and the ontology of macrostates according to the Boltzmannian definition of entropy.

On What Is Personally Appealing on Conceptual Relativism

Conceptual relativism is not an attractive position. Surely, it has its ups and downs, but the ups are rarely mentioned. This article has no ambition to provide a resolute groundbreaking argument in favour of the conceptual realism. It only aims to reconstruct the very basis of the given position from the defendant’s point of view, while giving a bit of a personal (or existential if you will) touch to the whole topic.The personal element in question resides in the fact that there are incommensurable percepts, experiences, even worlds which all “feel” equally real to the subjects. This is something to what realism does not seem to be able to do justice without diminishing the ontological status of the “wrong” opinions, beliefs, etc., but this does not seem to go well with how we experience our “imperfect” realities. Conceptual relativists, however, are free from strictly distinguishing between correct and incorrect views on reality and, thus, they are able, if nothing else, to retain and appreciate the reality of our subjective worlds.

Pandemic Capitalism: Metabolic Rift, World-Ecology Crossing Dialectical Biology

Abstract In this article, I contrast two of the main schools of thought within eco-Marxism, namely Metabolic Rift (MR) and World-Ecology (WE). These differ above all else in their accounts of the ontological status of society and nature. The Covid-19 pandemic constitutes a moment of concretisation of this long-standing debate, which is able to dissolve at least in part its issues. The article consists of four parts. I begin with a summary of the two schools of thought and their core stances, before proceeding to unpack their respective theoretical points of contention. I subsequently proceed to explore the conceptualisation of health according to the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin through the model of dialectical biology. In the third section, I unpack the conceptualisation of the Covid-19 pandemic by the epidemiologist Robert Wallace, before finally concluding with the contrasts of the two schools in the light of dialectical biology.

Онтологическата база на историята в теорията на Асен Игнатов

This article aims to point out Ignatov's heuristic approach in revealing the ontological status of history, the metaphysical factors and conditions for it to be as it is, as well as the specific position of man as an individual among these essential circumstances forming socio-historical reality and her history.Ignatov indicates these initial circumstances as material, spiritual and ideal, placed in a time-space discourse, and in relations with each other. The essence of history as such, and the history of social communities, is revealed through the oppositions individual/common, nature/history, spirit/history, man/genus, which, as interrelationships, reveal changes in social existence at a deeper ontological level.

Ontological Commitment and Its Implication to Semantical Objects of Religious Language

This research is aimed at explaining and analyzing the ontological status of semantical objects of religious language. This ontological status concern how every term in religious language refers to an object and how we interpret those terms, whether it represents the object itself or merely its sensual or constructive properties. This finding lies in the disputation between religious realism and non-realism. The results of this research are (1) every believer is exactly a realist because he or she has the ontological commitment to the object of the utterance, but (2) God exists independently from human thought and consciousness, (3) it is possible to put God as the object of intentional and semantic but only represents sensible qualities of the real object, and (4) the meaning of religious language depends on believer's ontological commitment on God's existence.

Stylistic directions of accordion-bayan music in modern art

The article demonstrates that modern button accordion culture is an important part of the cultural paradigm of society, spiritual self-development and self-expression of peoples and nationalities. The ontological status of bayan and accordion performance is highlighted in the context of various styles, determined by the specifics of national cultural landscapes and historical realities.

Некоторые аспекты моистского понимания «Неба»

This article examines the question of the ontological status of ‘Heaven’ in Mo­hist teachings (5th–3rd centuries BC). The reconstructions of the Mohist under­standing of ‘Heaven’ (‘Heaven’ as personal deity, as natural force or community of spirits) that have been proposed in modern philosophical sinology are all based in the original source, but logically fit with each other poorly. They are an­alyzed based on the material of Mozi, ch. 4, 26–28 etc. The analysis shows both strong and controversial points of these interpretations (the question of the an­thropomorphism of ‘Heaven’: from the point of view of their philosophical op­ponents, the Mohists undeniably humanize ‘Heaven,’ but from their own point of view, it is more correct to talk about ‘heavenization’ of people; the question of ‘karmic’ nature of ‘Heaven’s actions: the Mohists often describe these actions as reactive and regular, however, the textual material allows one to conclude that they rather think within the framework of ‘legal providentialism’, i.e. when the will of a deity is an ‘administrative’ law, implemented by the ‘apparatus’ of the ‘heavenly’ government of spirits, it is not ontological law; the question of the degree of identity of ‘Heaven’ and other representatives of the spiritual world: the Mohist ‘Heaven’ can have its representatives in the spiritual world, but mostly the name ‘Heaven’ is interchangeable with the name ‘Supreme Sov­ereign’; the question of correctness of understanding ‘Heaven’ as ‘Nature’: de­spite the classical view that ‘Heaven’ in ancient Chinese philosophy is a syn­onym or personification of ‘Nature’, for Mohists this does not seem to be the case, since they do not include ‘man’ in the ‘heavenly’ realm). The conclusion is made that these reconstructions can be reconciled with each other if one accepts the pragmatically oriented nature of Mohist theology. The hypothesis is made that Mohist ‘Heaven’ is a kind of an ‘umbrella term’ that arose from the synec­docheal expansion of the meaning of a location (‘sky’) on the things that/who in­habit it or govern it (and from inside it)

Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image by Thomas Pfau

Reviewed by: Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image by Thomas Pfau Thomas Zingelmann PFAU, Thomas. Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022. xxiii + 785 pp. Cloth, $80.00 Thomas Pfau reconstructs one of the most traditional and possibly most decisive philosophical debates, [End Page 559] namely, the one about the form and function of appearance (Schein). This debate is taken up on the basis of the concept of image. This means that Pfau concentrates historically as well as systematically on a specific topic within this debate. The book is divided into two major sections. In the first section, Pfau examines how the history of the metaphysics and theology of the image develops, starting with Plato in the first chapter. The basic idea in this section is that the image has a crucial epistemic role in the metaphysical and theological systems of the authors addressed. Here Pfau shows that Plato, at the latest in the Sophist, develops a theory of images that revalues appearance contrary to the assumptions in the Republic. Chapter 1 is about the mediation of unity and multiplicity, as it is also shown in Plotinus. Chapter 2 attempts to show how the Byzantine icon embodies the conviction that the invisible truth of the visual world can be revealed only through images. Pfau's demonstration of various epistemic dimensions of the image then begins with chapter 3: the eschatological vision from Augustine to Bonaventure to Julian of Norwich. Chapter 4, the last of the first section, reconstructs Nicholas of Cusa's position, which attempts to understand mystical visions mediated by images of Christ. The second section examines how the metaphysics of the image—in the sense of an epistemology, which tries to establish ultimate justifications—nevertheless persists and even evolves despite two crucial switches in philosophy. On the one hand, this concerns philosophy that subordinates the visual to the abstract (for example, Hegel) and, on the other, the supposedly nonmetaphysical status of the image in the developing natural sciences. Chapter 5 then attempts to show, through Goethe's botanical investigations and reflections, how, despite the establishment of the natural sciences, Goethe attempts to defend intuition as a scientific method and appearance as a scientific object of investigation. This position is then pursued historically in chapter 6, through the work of Lyell, Darwin, and Ruskin, where the visible is understood as the connecting point of the sciences in general. Gerard Manley Hopkins is then identified in chapter 7 as representing a position that combines theological with proto-phenomenological arguments to highlight the epistemic value of images. The last chapter then deals with decisive developments at the beginning of the twentieth century. In phenomenology (Husserl), painting (Cézanne), and poetry (Rilke), a conception develops that epistemically valorizes sensual and intuitive experience. Generally speaking, Pfau attempts to trace historically what arguments and positions have been developed on the relationship between image and knowledge. His work is based on the conviction that the image is the basis for human orientation in the world and is therefore of great epistemological value. Of outstanding importance for his question is that the epistemological value of images is not to be located in the properties of images, that is, an ontology of the image; rather, Pfau is interested in those positions that reflect on the relationship between knowledge and [End Page 560] experience of images. While clarifying the ontological status of images remains important, the epistemological status of images—what role the experience and usage of images has for humans—is in the foreground. Pfau reconstructs positions that hold that the pictorial is a medium of knowledge. He puts forward the thesis that there is a tradition that is of the opinion that in and through the medium of the image—and this closes the arc to the Schein-debate—being can be experienced by man. In other words, the invisible is to become recognizable through the visible. Of particular importance is his reading of the late Platonic dialogues: While appearance and being are still thought of as distinct in these dialogues, they are not opposed, in the sense of an epistemic opposition. Plato's...

Experimenting on the Enactment of Predictive AI: The Quest for a Future Proactive Healthcare Sector

Currently, a large number of AI projects are experimenting with the use of AI and big data for various purposes, especially in the public sector. In this article, we explore one such AI project. Specifically, we study a group of developers in Scandinavia and their efforts to enact predictive AI through the development of a clinical decision support system (CDSS) in pursuit of a future proactive healthcare sector. This yet-to-be system was envisioned to prevent unplanned hospitalizations by ‘turning’ what we term ‘potential patients’, i.e. the effective management of patient trajectories, in pursuit of a proactive healthcare sector. In the article, we investigate this particular project as an ‘experiment’ and conceptualize the developing CDSS as a ‘partially existing object’ with an uncertain ontological status. By studying the gradual enactment and emergence of the CDSS, we illuminate how this fuzzy data-driven object is performed and gradually attributed with solid reality: during its creation process, it advances from being a proactive device imagined to be used in primary healthcare to becoming a triage tool embedded in the prehospital emergency department. Along the way, the project developers are also transformed, learning what ‘moves’ and ‘actions’ to make, and, thereby, becoming skillful CDSS-operators. By using ‘experiment’ as our analytical lens, the article renders visible how persons, locations, and procedures have to be changed, revoked, and suspended in order for the AI project to succeed. Thus, the article contributes to showing how ‘social mangling’ is an essential precondition for predictive AI to succeed as a prolific solution to specific healthcare challenges, along with developers’ learning and transformation.

Homologues and homology and their related terms in phylogenetic systematics.

In the field of phylogenetic systematics, the terms homology and homologue and their relationship to cladistic terms such as character, character state, synapomorphy and symplesiomorphy, as well as their relationships to each other, have been and are still discussed frequently. A recent re-emergence of concepts of homology/homologue free of any reference to explanatory hypotheses prompted us to explore these concepts and their relationships to each other as well as to the concept of morpheme, as introduced recently. All concepts are examined with regard to their ontological status and their bearing in the epistemological process in morphology and phylogenetic systematics. To us, morphemes, homologues and in partem character states refer to things (concrete objects in the ontological sense). However, although morphemes are exclusively descriptive, the latter two represent objects of causal explanations. Homologue always refers to the things themselves, yet a character state also can be a property or the absence of a thing. In this context, a character as a transformation series of character states does not represent a thing but a natural kind. Character states of one character are connected by homology relationships, i.e. common descent. Synapomorphy and symplesiomorphy represent different states of a single transformation series. A nonexplanatory, purely descriptive, concept of homologues is contradictory to its original as well as the post-Darwinian, evolutionary, concept which refers to causal relationships between parts of organisms and their correspondences in the archetype or ancestor, respectively. Character states, homologues and synapomorphies/symplesiomorphies can only be approximated in the form of hypotheses. We argue that the high value of the concept of homology and its related concepts for evolutionary biology should be maintained by acknowledging their explanatory nature and that dilution with nonexplanatory (even idealistic) definitions should be avoided.

Value magic

The urban process encompasses vast structures and practices engaged in creating, extracting, and accumulating value in and from the urban landscape. But what is value and how does it attain its coercive power over urban life? The unreflective deployment of axiomatic assumptions regarding the source and substance of value constitutes a form of magical thinking conjuring something out of nothing and transforming an immaterial abstraction into a material force that is real in its consequences. Unpacking the concept of value reveals a contentious debate regarding the ontological status of value as a driver of the urban process. Alternative formulations posit value as intrinsic or extrinsic, objective or subjective, residing in the world or constructed in the mind, driven by universal law or spatially and temporally contingent. Transcending all such dualisms, a transactional approach drawn from Deweyan pragmatism understands value as a co-constitutive interrelation among a valuing subject, an object of valuation, and the enveloping context in which valuation occurs. The delineation of value's ontology is fraught with political consequences for reproducing or altering the urban status quo. The move toward desired outcomes begins with articulating the foundational assumptions that underlie the value practices propelling the urban process in specific situations. Pluralizing value assumptions focuses the problem on the political question concerning whose value(s) prevail in a given situation. This redefinition shifts the focus from ameliorating current practices of extracting value to politically contesting the value commitments at work in the world.

Legal and Cultural Construction of the Maori Corporate Person

Our understandings of what corporations are—narratives of why they exist, who they serve, and their basic ontological status—matter for the way in which legal and ethical responsibilities become imputed to them. Interactions between the law of corporations and ordinary peoples’ thinking about themselves (as agents, as owners, and as responsible, or not, for an organization’s adherence to social mores) contribute to the way in which they imagine the corporation to be. Beyond the question of personhood, then, is the question of how the jurisprudence of the corporation is (en)cultured. To tease apart the multiple layers of this inquiry—to make the anthropologist’s move of rendering the familiar strange—it is useful to shift our attention to less typically encountered uses of the corporate form; here, a look at Indigenously owned corporations provides that new perspective. This slant view makes apparent new intersections between understandings of the reasons for corporate existence and the rights that the corporation might properly claim, suggesting the crucial role that these intersections might play in theorizing the corporation.

The Aesthetic Views of E.T.A. Hoffmann

The essay is devoted to an analysis of aesthetic views of one of the most distinguished German Romantics, which came through with particular fullness in his fiction. Hoffmann’s aesthetic views focus around his understanding of art. He is convinced that art has an anagagogical nature. It elevates the human being from everyday life to the sphere of the divine and thereby ennobles everyday life itself. Art draws the artist away from the world and manifests to the world his prophetic gift, which is often perceived as “poetic madness.” The fantastic in art, as well as the terrible and the frightening, does not contradict artistic truth. The elements of the terrible give philosophical significance to the work of art and please the recipient. Art is cognitive to a high degree, because nature itself reveals its secrets to the artist and allows him to intuit the “truth of nature.” Hoffmann is convinced about the ontological status of art. It must “be something, and not mean it.” Artistic creativity takes place fully within the inner world of the artist as he aspires for his ideal. Hoffmann allows for a certain degree of vagueness in a concrete work of art, whose purpose is additional aesthetic effort on the part of the recipient, who must be internally ready for communication with art. Creative activity is based on imagination and reason. It is based on natural foundations and is inspired by the illuminating effect of divine energy. Hoffmann considers music as the highest form of art and the ideal for all the arts. According to Hoffmann, music is the truly Romantic form of art. He sees the meaning of music in its foundation in nature, its aspiration for the heavens, the fact that it includes the world of the spirits in its orbit, and that it incites a longing for the unattainable in the listener. Hoffmann paid much attention to irony as one of the features of Romantic art.

The Ontological Status of Yahweh and the Existence of the Thing we call God

The essence of deities has captured our imaginations for as long as we can remember. Does a God exist, or is the divine entity just a figment of our dreams, a projection? Is God what Aribiah Attoe calls a “regressively eternal and material entity” or what Gericke calls “a character of fiction with no counterpart outside the worlds of text and imagination”? This paper aims to wrestle with those questions from a theological perspective and to look at the ontological status of Yahweh and how that worldview lends itself to African Traditional Religions in conversation with Attoe's method of inquiry from the perspective of African Metaphysics. This paper aims to be a part of the larger project undertaken by the author, showing that philosophy can and should be an auxiliary discipline in Old Testament Studies as it has been seen, both fields have ways of similar arguing and coming to the same conclusions. This paper is intended to be an interlocutory exercise or experiment and does not seek to validate any hypothesis about either view.

Introducing an attitude-based approach to emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence (EI) was originally conceived as an ability, followed soon after by mixed, competency and trait theoretical models, broadly described as emotional efficacies (EE). Several models have attempted to integrate both approaches, with different views on whether EI and EE operate in sequence or parallel. One reason for this may be that EE constructs are given the same ontological status whether they represent underlying attitudes, such as self-regard, or behavioral competencies, such as assertiveness. In this paper, it is proposed that attitudes may predominantly act as underlying antecedents of ability-EI and behavioral-EE. Five benefits of this approach are drawn out that help to address some key concerns with current models and measures of EI and EE. First, the inclusion of implicit and explicit attitudes within integrated models of EI/EE would support the dual-processing of conscious and automated processes. From this, an attitude-based dual-processing framework for EI/EE is recommended. Second, the concept of Unconditional Positive Regard (UPR) for self and others, is identified as a potential attitude that may underpin the two core pillars of intrapersonal and interpersonal EI/EE. Third, UPR attitudes would provide an ethical basis for EI/EE that may support ethical and prosocial behavior. Fourth, UPR attitudes may differentiate between the optimal and sub-optimal elements of EI/EE. Fifth, an attitude-based approach to EI/EE may be more aligned with EI/EE being developmental than are the more static ability or trait-based models of EI/EE.

Particles, fields, and the ontology of the standard model

In this work we discuss issues of ontological commitment towards one of the most important examples of contemporary fundamental science: the standard model of particle physics. We present a new form of selective structural realism, which uses as its basis the distinction between what have been called framework and interaction theories. This allows us to advance the ongoing debate about the ontological status of (quasi-)particles and quantum fields, by emphasising the distinction between quantum field theory serving as a framework, and the standard model itself, which we argue is an interaction theory embedded within this framework. Following a discussion of what ontological commitments corresponds to each of these two classes, we argue that some of the previous proposals in the literature might have been misguided by the blending of quantum field theory and the standard model into an undifferentiated unity, and defend a moderate form of object realism with respect to particle-like entities.

Cognitive and semiotic determinants of sign order in gestural and pictorial event representations

The way people order signs in non-verbal event representations of events has been a topic of extensive research in recent decades, with conflicting findings. Based on a literature review, we distinguish the following factors that have been argued to influence sign order: (a) diagrammatic iconicity, (b) manipulation vs. construction events, (c) reversibility, (d) most common word order of L1, (e) the semiotic system (gesture, depiction) used, and (f) a putative “natural” Agent–Patient–Act order. To test the role of these factors, we conducted a study where Swedish participants observed events that varied with respect to reversibility and construction/manipulation status, and then had to communicate them to an addressee using gestures for half the stimuli. For the other half, they used sequences of simple drawings of the event participants and the action. The results showed the huge influence of the semiotic system (e) on sign order. There was a role of reversibility (c) only when gestures were used, while L1 word order (d) only had an effect when sequences of pictures were used. The “ontological status” of the Patient (b) was shown to affect the representations in both semiotic systems but was much stronger for gestures. Even the two most general factors (a) and (f) where shown to be sensitive to the type of semiotic system. Future studies of how such cognitive and semiotic determinants interact are needed to fully understand the phenomenon of sign order preference.

Body and Thou

Martin Buber has always made it clear that his dialogic principle is not to be treated as an abstract conception but an ontological reality. But admittedly, in I And Thou he could only point to such reality and could not properly present it in discursive prose. However there are instances in the text where he strives to do the latter. One particular instance is where he elaborates the emergence of consciousness of “I”. Through this elaboration, what Buber has tried to point at is the bringing forth of the primary word ‘I-It’ forming part of his dialogic principle, as it ‘emerges round about’ the perceptual consciousness realised in body as some sort of a ‘primitive function of knowledge’. However, this still amounts only to an abstract conception, and not to a description of ontological reality as Buber would have aspired for. Hence the thought: what if there exists an endeavour carried out independently of Buber’s work, nevertheless in the same spirit as Buber but without his notorious mixing up of philosophy and religion? There indeed has been such an Existential-phenomenological take on embodiment and perception by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as is laid out in his magnum opus Phenomenology of Perception. In the present paper we will explicate this interesting coincidence, thereby honouring Buber’s aspiration for ontological status to his dialogic principle, at the same time demonstrating how existentially resonating and ontologically converging the thought of these two great thinkers’ have been, though they had totally different intellectual pursuits and concerns.