0000000000880721
AUTHOR
Verena Gottschling
showing 2 related works from this author
Visual Imagery, Mental Models, and Reasoning
2006
Abstract: The focus of this paper is the relation between Steven Kosslyn’s visual mental images and Johnson-Laird’s mental models. Knauff et al. presented empirical evidence and a challenging argument for the hypothesis that in fact “visual imagery impedes reasoning.” I argue that these results may look embarrassing for pictorialists, but closer inspection suggests that they are actually harmless. I argue that the presented evidence fails to show that imagery impedes reasoning. I present some objections to the explanation proposed by Knauff and Johnson-Laird by pointing out some terminological and conceptual problems. Afterwards, I sketch an alternative explanation, which is more pictoriali…
Keeping the Conversational Score: Constraints for an Optimal Contextualist Answer?
2005
Conversational contextualism states that the truth-conditions expressed by knowledge-attributing sentences vary relative to the context of utterance. This context is determined partly by different standards the person involved must meet in order to make the sentence true. I am concerned with the question of how these standards can be raised or lowered, and especially what happens to the standards and the conversational score when parties in a discussion push the conversational scores in different directions. None of the available options for an answer seems satisfying. I argue that this results from a misunderstanding of the characteristics of the situation at hand.