School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Context (language use). The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Imagination in Thought Experimentation: Sketching a Cognitive Approach to Thought Experiments

Abstract: We attribute the capability of imagination to the madman as to the scientist, to the novelist as to the metaphysician, and last but not least to ourselves. The same, apparently, holds for thought experimentation. Ernst Mach was the first to draw an explicit link between these two mental acts; moreover - in his perspective - imagination plays a pivotal role in thought experimentation. Nonetheless, it is not clear what kind of imagination emerges from Mach’s writings. Indeed, heated debates among cognitive scientists and philosophers turn on the key distinction between sensory and cognitive imagination. Generally speaking, we can say that sensory imagination shares some processes with perception, cognitive imagination with the formation of belief. Both the vocabulary used in the literature on thought experiments and what I refer to as “Machian tradition” indicate imagination as a notion of central importance in the reasoning involved in thought experiments. However, most authors have really focused on sensory (in particular, visual) imagination, but have neglected the second kind. Moreover, some authors attribute to Mach the idea that it is visual imagery that is primarily at work in thought experiments. I claim another interpretation is possible, according to which Mach can be said to deal with cognitive imagination. The main aim of this paper is to retrace Mach’s original arguments and establish a connection with the cognitive literature on imagination. I will argue that imagination tout court could play a role in thought experimentation. Once imagination is seen as the key to the “cognitive black-box” of the thought experiment, we will have moved a step closer to a simulative imagining-based account of thought experimentation.

Early Word Recognition in Sentence Context: French and English 24-Month-Olds' Sensitivity to Sentence-Medial Mispronunciations and Assimilations

Abstract: Recent work has shown that young children can use fine phonetic detail during the recognition of isolated and sentence-final words from early in lexical development. The present study investigates 24-month-olds' word recognition in sentence-medial position in two experiments using an Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm. In Experiment 1, French toddlers detect word-final voicing mispronunciations (e.g., buz [byz] for bus [bys] “bus”), and they compensate for native voicing assimilations (e.g., buz devant toi [buzdəvɑtwa] “bus in front of you”) in the middle of sentences. Similarly, English toddlers detect word-final voicing mispronunciations (e.g., sheeb for sheep) in Experiment 2, but they do not compensate for illicit voicing assimilations (e.g., sheeb there). Thus, French and English 24-month-olds can take into account fine phonetic detail even if words are presented in the middle of sentences, and French toddlers show language-specific compensation abilities for pronunciation variation caused by native voicing assimilation.

Dialektik des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the symptom paradigm

Abstract: This text explores the fundamental relationship between Aby Warburg’s ‘psychology of expression’ and the nineteenth-century psychology of unconsciousness. It traces the important distinctions and links between Warburg’s key concepts for thinking about images. Nachleben and the Pathosformel and nineteenth-century models for thinking about the symptom (Charcot and Freud). Through an examination of the formal, visual and temporal structures of the symptom, and such psychoanalytic concepts as repression, the return of the repressed, displacement, conflict and compromise, the Freudian symptom emerges as a critical paradigm for understanding Warburg’s history of images as a psychopathology.