Privileged Representation Research Articles

Time coding in rat dorsolateral striatum

To assess the role of dorsolateral striatum (DLS) in time coding, we recorded neuronal activity in rats tasked with comparing the durations of two sequential vibrations. Bayesian decoding of population activity revealed a representation of the unfolding of the trial across time. However, further analyses demonstrated a distinction between the encoding of trial time and perceived time. First, DLS did not show a privileged representation of the stimulus durations compared with other time spans. Second, higher intensity vibrations were perceived as longer; however, time decoded from DLS was unaffected by vibration intensity. Third, DLS did not encode stimulus duration differently on correct versus incorrect trials. Finally, in rats trained to compare the intensities of two sequential vibrations, stimulus duration was encoded even though it was a perceptually irrelevant feature. These findings lead us to posit that temporal information is inherent to DLS activity irrespective of the rat's ongoing percept.

S43 Insular semiology: From observation of cases to cortical stimulation

Objectives Stereotactic stimulations of the insular cortex through intracranial electrodes aim at characterizing the semiology of insular seizures. These stimulations, carried out in the context of Stereo-Electro-Encephalography (SEEG) during pre-surgical monitoring of epilepsy, reproduce the ictal symptoms observed during the development of insular seizures. Methods We reviewed the results of insular stimulations performed in 222 patients admitted between 1997 and 2015 for pre-surgical SEEG exploration of atypical temporal or perisylvian epilepsy. Stimulations (50 Hz, trains of 5s, pulses of 0.5 ms, intensity 0.2–3.5 mA) were carried out using trans-opercular electrodes implanted orthogonal to mid-sagittal plane. Results 550 of 669 stimulations were clinically eloquent in the absence of any post-discharge (237 and 313 respectively in right and left insula). Somatosensory responses (61% of evoked sensations) including pain and visceral sensations (14.9%) were the most frequent, followed by auditory sensations (8%), vestibular illusions (7.5%), speech impairment (5%), gustatory, (2.7%) and olfactory (1%) sensations. Although these responses showed some functional segregation (in particular a privileged pain representation in the postero-superior quadrant), there was a clear spatial overlap between representations of the different modalities. Discussion Symptoms evoked by insular stimulations are multiple. None of them can be considered as absolutely specific to the insular cortex, but the occurrence in given seizure of a somatosensory symptom such as pain or of a laryngeal spasm associated to vestibular, auditory, aphasic, or olfacto-gustatory symptoms points to a discharge development in the insular cortex. Conclusion Inular cortex is the only cortical region where stimulations demonstrate such a multi-modal representation.

“Blessed the Breasts at Which You Nursed”: Mother-Child Intimacy in St. Francis de Sales’ Treatise on the Love of God

“Blessed the Breasts at Which You Nursed”:Mother-Child Intimacy in St. Francis de Sales’ Treatise on the Love of God Suzanne Toczyski (bio) Of the myriad motifs St. Francis de Sales invokes to illustrate his conception of God’s love for humankind, none is perhaps as touching or as iconic as the set of images used to capture the love relationship between mother and child, images ostensibly informed by both personal observation and Christian inspiration (in the form of texts, art), as well as by Francis’ profound devotion to Mary and her role as nurturer of the child Jesus. Indeed, Francis accords particular value to this motif in the first chapter of Book VII of the Treatise on the Love of God, when, having already had recourse to the mother-child image several times, he writes, “The comparison of the love of little children for their mothers must not be abandoned, because of its innocence and purity.”1 As drawing explicit attention to the rhetorical function of a particular image (here, comparison) is not a frequent occurrence in the Treatise, one must surmise that this comparison was particularly dear to Francis. Moreover, among the many mother-child interactions described by Francis, that of the child nursing at the mother’s breast holds a place of honor; Henri Lemaire has suggested it is one of the images that “best reveals the soul of the saint.”2 In this study, I will first explore the personal, cultural, historical and aesthetic context that may have informed Francis’ attraction to the image of the mother nursing her child as a privileged representation of love, both God’s for the devout soul and the soul’s for God, and the union that results. I will also offer a close reading of a few key passages of the Treatise in an attempt to arrive at a more thorough understanding of the power of this image in the Treatise as a whole, and of its place in the mystical theology of the saint. While much has been written about the nature of prayer in the Salesian tradition as heart-to-heart,3 a state captured by the pray-er laying her head against the heart of God,4 relatively little attention has been paid to the even more intimate image of the soul at prayer drinking at the breasts of God. My hope is that this study will offer a new appreciation of this image as a novel entry into Salesian spirituality and practice, one that may enhance St. Francis de Sales’ readers’ understanding of their own intimacy with God in new and decidedly modern terms. [End Page 191] Click for larger view View full resolution La Vierge allaitant l’Enfant, Pisanello from the Codex Vallardi [End Page 192] ESTABLISHING A CONTEXT WITHIN WHICH TO CONSIDER THE TREATISE Textual clues in the Treatise on the Love of God suggest that, when evoking the image of the nursing mother and her child, Francis de Sales is basing his description to a large extent upon his own personal observation of this phenomenon, not only in the very true-to-life details he includes—realistic signs of the child’s eagerness to nurse such as his surging toward the breast and his feet beating with pleasure5—but also in verbs of visual perception used to draw forth what he imagines to be a memory he shares with his fictional interlocutor Théotime and others. For example, Book VI, Chapter 9, begins: “Have you never noticed, Théotime, the ardor with which little children attach themselves to their mother’s breast when they are hungry?”6 Francis goes on to use the verb voir, to see, twice in the following two sentences: “One sees them mumbling …” and “You would see them close their little eyes right up. …” Also noteworthy is Francis’s choice of vocabulary to describe the mother’s breast, including the very familiar chicheron, meaning “nipple.” This word will have lost its common usage by the time Antoine Furetière publishes his Dictionnaire universel in 1690,7 though it will receive an indirect and passing reference in César de Rochefort’s 1685 Dictionnaire général...

Captives or Conquerors: Debates of Overcoming Representationalism

This paper analyses the various epistemological construals which aim to overcome representationalism. Rorty’s anti-representationalism claims that there is no privileged representation as Cartesian philosophy, and thus, he assumes that the questions of modern epistemology need not be answered. Taylor argues that Rorty’s critique of epistemology is imprisoned in the Cartesian epistemological picture. Rorty attacks Taylor by arguing that realism of any sort including that of Taylor is self-destructive. Though I show that Taylor’s arguments are not sufficient to refute the Rorty’s anti-representationalist stance, I argue that Taylor’s realist position is in the right direction. Dreyfus seeks to show that by accepting Rorty’s position, which he calls ‘deflationary realism’, Taylor can enrich his own position which Dreyfus calls ‘Robust Realism’ by way of adding a pluralist dimension to his position and Taylor’s sympathy for pluralism in social and political philosophy can be extended to his epistemological position.

Mischief, Mystery, and Moments That Matter

Here we challenge the traditional separation of science and art and demonstrate significant ways in which the social sciences can be enriched through performative inquiry. We begin with a brief commentary on philosophic work that detaches representation from observation. In effect, there is no privileged (in principal, accurate, neutral, or objective) representation of a given observation. We then explore the potentials of expanding the repertoire of representation to include forms more traditionally located within the arts. Included are instances of experimental writing, performative monologue, autoethnography as poetry; dramatic performance and visual art as theory. By expanding the repertoire of inquiry in this way, not only are the social sciences enriched but also their capacity to communicate with the surrounding culture.

Knowing Your Lines but Missing Your Cue: Rostral Prefrontal Lesions Impair Prospective Memory Cue Detection, but Not Action-intention Superiority

Prospective memory (PM) deficits are a common consequence of lesions to PFC, but their underlying neurocognitive mechanisms and processes are poorly understood. Here, we report on a patient, Z. P., who suffers from a chronic focal PM deficit, while other cognitive functions including memory are intact. His lesion involves right polar PFC (Brodmann's areas 10 and 9). Z. P. was very impaired on tasks that require detection of PM cues during an ongoing task. He was impaired regardless of whether the PM cues involved effortful or nearly effortless detection on the part of controls. By contrast, on tasks that tap the underlying (implicit) representations of intentions to perform an action, Z. P. showed normal patterns of intention superiority effects (ISEs) for to-be-performed actions and an inhibition effect for prospective actions after they had been performed. Thus, this is the first report of a neuropsychological dissociation between preserved privileged representation of prospective intentions and impaired detection of cues that support the opportune recovery of PM. Our data are compatible with the "gateway hypothesis" of rostral PFC, but also suggest there are components that are unique to PM and that remain intact after lesions to this region.

A proposal of Saint Teresa de Ávila's rhetorical strategy in the twentieth chapter of Libro de la vida

If we accept claims of her Jewish ancestry and her personal divine revelations, Saint Teresa de Avila had plenty to conceal from a dominant Church. In Libro de la vida, the methods she uses to avoid any threat to her orthodox status within the Roman Catholic Church are many and varied, exemplified by the chapter in which she defines and describes her possibly heretical rapture (arrobamiento). Borrowing two epistemological terms from the philosopher Richard Rorty, we can trace those moments where Saint Teresa employs ‘conversational justification’ of belief in her status as a non-heretic contrasted with those where she uses first-person claims of an ‘epistemological justification’. Saint Teresa manages to assimilate into conversation what would otherwise be a personal statement; she shifts the privileged representation of rapture from her own account to the readers’ shared understanding.

The Paper Age

Published during the economic crisis of 1836–37, The French Revolution exploits nineteenth-century anxieties about paper money and the erosion of the gold standard to investigate a historical crisis in political, moral, and economic value. This essay investigates how Carlyle draws on the substitution of paper money and the speculation and inflation it engendered in revolutionary France as part of a larger meditation on the role and efficacy of symbols in a democratic culture. As the essay demonstrates, for Carlyle the inconvertibility of banknote into gold during the Paper Age parallels the inconvertibility of signs into time-honored systems of reference and signals the loss of privileged representations of value.

ANALYSIS, ABSTRACTION PRINCIPLES, AND SLINGSHOT ARGUMENTS

AbstractFrege's views regarding analysis and synomymy have long been the subject of critical discussion. Some commentators, led by Dummett, have argued that Frege was committed to the view that each thought admits of a unique ultimate analysis. However, this interpretation is in apparent conflict with Frege's criterion of synonymy, according to which two sentence express the same thought if one cannot understand them without regarding them as having the same truth–value. In a recent article in this journal, Drai attempts to reconcile Frege's criterion of synonymy with unique ultimate analysis by holding that, for Frege, if two sentences satisfy the criterion without being intensionally isomorphic, at most one of them is a privileged representation of the thought expressed. I argue that this proposal fails, because it conflicts not only with Frege's views of abstraction principles but also with slingshot arguments (including one presented by Drai herself) that accurately reflect Frege's commitment to the view that sentences alike in truth–value have the same Bedeutung. While Drai helpfully connects Frege's views of abstraction principles with such slingshot arguments, this connection cannot become fully clear until we recognise that Frege rejects unique ultimate analysis.

O efeito obsceno

Este artigo investiga a importância do vocabulário obsceno no interior da cultura pornográfica que se inaugura na Europa a partir do Renascimento, cuja pedra de toque é a nomeação explícita do sexo. Para tanto, interroga o estatuto da moderna ficção erótica enquanto gênero literário, atentando para a condição de fetiche da linguagem licenciosa. Representação privilegiada do erotismo, a palavra obscena subverte sua função abstrata de signo para ganhar um corpo próprio que, no limite, substitui a presença do corpo real.

“Bugs” built into the system:: How privileged representations influence mathematical reasoning across the lifespan

The initial foundations of human mathematical reasoning appear to be based on “naı̈ve mathematics”—specific and persistent privileged mental representations that develop as a normal part of the human evolved phenotype. Based on the proposed existence of privileged representations in the conceptual domain of mathematics, this paper incorporates findings from early development, childhood mathematical reasoning, and adult statistical decision-making research. The utility of such a framework is demonstrated by analyzing how common errors in fraction and decimal use are explicable in terms of these systematic and reliably developing aspects of human mathematical reasoning. Additionally, the idea that privileged representations continue to exert some influence beyond early childhood holds implications for both research and practice in mathematics education.

Medieval Crime and Social Control ed. by Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace

REVIEWS social order, but might not necessarily want to reinvent the anus as their symbolic grave. Yet Dinshaw’s success in inflecting postmodernism’s rethinking of history and temporality with the queer and the medieval (she is equally committed to both) is indisputable. Some sense of this is conveyed by the arresting artwork on the cover: a painting by Roger Brown that fuses a Boschian medieval imaginary (lurid flames, silhouetted devils and angels) with a Daliesque (post)modern one (moustaches, strangely windowed beards, swagged curtains). This image perfectly captures the queerly disjunctive temporalities of the premodern and the postmodern that Dinshaw’s book strives to articulate. In this volume Dinshaw has probably done more than any medievalist to compel medievalists and nonmedievalists alike to rethink how we touch the past and how it touches us, as scholars and as bodies. She has raised the stakes for all of us. Ruth Evans Cardiff University Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds. Medieval Crime and Social Control. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pp. xvi, 259. $49.95 cloth. $19.95 paper. This timely collection of essays goes a long way toward defining a field of inquiry frequently mislabeled as ‘‘literature and law.’’ As the editors state in their introduction, questions of law and representation provide ideal venues for the investigation of relations among such diverse sources as ‘‘legal treatises, statutes, court cases, court poems, romances, canonical texts, and comic tales (p. xvi). The study of the law creates a ‘‘common currency of discourse’’ that allows both historians and literary scholars to investigate and challenge ‘‘hard-and-fast distinctions between theory and practice, the ‘fictional’ and the ‘real’, the literary and the historical’’ (p. xvi.). Salutary as such an ambition may be, one might fear that the collection itself would be dominated by textual analyses of legal rhetorics and literary discourse, excluding consideration of the material and social practices of the law and of literature. But as the previous volumes of the Minnesota ‘‘Medieval Cultures’’ series would 551 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:15 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER suggest, this collection achieves its goal of interdisciplinarity without sacrificing investigative rigor. In this sense, it is a model for those wishing to carry on research and scholarship that articulates the past but does not erase its differences from the present. The field set out by this collection might broadly be called ‘‘law and representation’’; all of the essays address—directly or indirectly—the problem of interpreting legal evidence in light of its status as privileged representation, or as the representation of privilege. Because the focus of the volume is on ‘‘crime and social control’’ (rather than, say, property and politics)—on the specific area of the law devoted to relations of power among persons and between persons and institutions—this problem becomes especially pointed. As several contributors remark, crime is a category whose definition can be enforced only by the enfranchised, though it may be invoked rhetorically by any group. Four essays in particular explore the problem: both the first and last chapters (Claude Gauvard’s ‘‘Fear of Crime in Late Medieval France’’ and William Perry Marvin’s ‘‘Slaughter and Romance: Hunting Reserves in Late Medieval England’’) as well as James H. Landman’s ‘‘ ‘The Doom of Resoun’: Accommodating Lay Interpretation in Late Medieval England’’ and William Ian Miller’s ‘‘In Defense of Revenge.’’ Gauvard and Marvin map, in France and England respectively, a general trend toward greater state control over and interest in crime during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Both illustrate this trend by examining narratives about crime: the Chronique scandaleuse (and predecessors) for Gauvard and the romance Sir Degrevant for Marvin. Marvin in particular does a brilliant job of linking this literary representation to both an act of legislation (the game law of 1390) and a historical series of events (the Northern Rebellion of the Beckwiths in the 1380s). A very different historical focus obtains in Miller’s account of revenge in Icelandic sagas and contemporary ‘‘vengeance films’’ (Death Wish, Dirty Harry, and the like); by illustrating the ways in which revenge in Icelandic culture was bounded and constrained by the law...

Quantization and the foundations of chemistry

The mass relationships associated with a system of chemical equations are studied in a general way as a linear algebraic structure; initially the linear space is represented in terms of the matrix relations of stoichiometry, and subsequently more abstractly in terms of linear operators working on a carrier space. Various mathematical structures arise naturally so that ultimately the framework might be extended to a Hilbert space. The determination of a consistent set of atomic weights from the directly accessible experimental information recorded in equivalent weights was a notorious indeterminate problem in the nineteenth century. The indeterminacy arises in the present formalism because of the freedom to represent the linear space in terms of any valid basis, while the physical interpretation requires the selection of a privileged representation. It is argued that at a fundamental level this should arise through quantization, and the paper represents a first step in that direction by formulating the sto...

Varieties of Pragmatism

Richard Rorty's commitment to pragmatism involves profound and subtle views, both doctrinal and methodological, concerning truth, reference, justificatory holism, epistemically privileged representation, relations between ontology and social practice, and the illegitimacy of 'grounding' institutional practices in facts about confrontations with ob jects. It is not always easy to see what Rorty's various formulations amount to, or how the positions designated as 'pragmatist' relate to one another. Sometimes, for example, pragmatism is presented as the view that

Rorty's Pragmatism and Gadamer's Hermeneutics

SINCE ITS PUBLICATION in 1979, Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature has generated a great deal of discussion and debate. In this book, Rorty attacks wholesale not only the idea of mind, the representation theory of knowledge, and the correspondence theory of truth, but (if that were not enough) also the long-reigning understanding of philosophy itself as, in some sense, a foundationalist enterprise. In brief, Rorty argues that since knowledge involves neither accurate nor privileged representations, the idea of the mind is a fiction. And if there is no such thing as a mind, then the notion of philosophy as the foundational discipline which adjudicates disputes about the mind and prescribes the correct or appropriate epistemological methods can and must be abandoned. Philosophy must, in Rorty's words, be therapeutic rather than constructive, edifying rather than systematic (1979:5). It must give up entirely the whole business of epistemology and become instead a form of hermeneutics.

Causality and Mimesis in Contemporary Fiction

There's a feeling about that cause-and-effect may have been taken as far as it will go. [. . .] The next great breakthrough may come when we have courage to junk cause and effect entirely and strike off at some other angle. Roger Mexico, probabilist and statistician, arch opponent of Pavlovian conditioning, thus expresses in Gravity's Rainbow credo of post-modern hero who threatens neat causal order of the elegant rooms of history. Causality is villain of post-modern melodrama. As secret wish to establish the stone determinacy of everything, it appears as diversionary tactics, a historical conspiracy to which even Pynchon will have to pay his toll: You [reader] want cause and effect. All right. To strike off at another angle, post-modern fabulator is confronted with task of scattering overpowering presence of causality at all levels of graphic structure, from particles of speech to segments of narrative. He is challenged to upset order of words, supposedly predetermined by God, Nature or Mind, to suspend misreading of signifier as cause of signified in order to dispel pre-semantic apprehension of causation as law of constitution of verbal sequence. Vorstellung operates first in shadow of Vorstellungsmechanik and encoding of object in mnemic systems of subject tends to constitute associative series, i.e., to reconstruct sequences subjected to a finality determined by privileged representations which Freud called Zielvorstellung, translated, revealingly enough, by purposive idea. This unconscious finality overpowering figure of speech production reigns supreme over constitution of narrative sequences properly so called. Chapter 23 of Aristotle's Poetics teaches us virtues, if not dogmatic necessity, of finality in narrative poetry, a finality, or telos which is endpoint of a logically constructed narrative process: telos, in sense of extremity in space and time is clearly superseded in Aristotle's analysis, by telos in sense of denouement of a finalized process resting on an appearance of causality.

Are presentation frequency and spatial numerosity distinct attributes of memory?

Twenty-five words were assigned to all combinations of the spatial numerosities 1-5 and the presentation frequencies 1-5. Frames displaying the appropriate number of copies of each word were repeated the appropriate number of times, and subjects attempted to memorize the words’ numerosities. A combination frequency-judgment and numerosity-recall test was then given. Numerosity showed no tendency to intrude in the frequency-judgment task, and there was only marginal evidence for interference in the opposite direction. The results are interpreted as further support for the view that presentation frequency has a privileged representation, which is not shared with other kinds of quantitative information in memory.