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Recently, the key point of contention in Kant scholarship has revolved around a question concerning whether, for Kant, intuitions can play their role of presenting objects to the mind without the discursive activity of the intellect. According to 'conceptualist' interpretations, intuitions depend for their generation on the activity of the understanding. According to 'nonconceptualist' interpretations, at least some intuitions do not depend for their generation on the activity of the understanding. I argue that although the conceptualism/nonconceptualism debate has brought greater clarity to a number of issues within Kant's critical philosophy, the debate partially rests on a conflation of two importantly distinct representational states, namely 'intuition' [Anschaaung] and 'perception' [Wahrnehmung]. I argue that once this distinction is noted, many of the passages that would appear to threaten a nonconceptualist interpretation lose their force. In addition, I argue that if we understand the conceptualist claim in terms of the kind of structure a particular representational state possesses, then we have good reason to reject the idea that, for Kant, sensory experience is fundamentally conceptual in character. / Master of Arts

Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis is a proposed methodology for attributing correct application conditions, or 'meanings', to concepts. This methodology involves two stages: first, we seek an empirical understanding of the ways in which usage of a given concept has regularly delivered benefits, and, second, we seek an explication of that concept which is optimally capable of delivering benefits in these ways. Such an explication captures the 'pragmatic meaning' of a given concept. Chapters 1-3 articulate Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis and the notion of pragmatic meaning, and show how these are related to other philosophical methodologies and accounts of concept-meaning.Chapter 4 uses a 'bootstrapping argument' to establish that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis has two important virtues. The first phase of this argument establishes that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis has normative authority - it reveals explications that we have practical and epistemic reason to adopt, whether we take these explications to be semantically revisionary or not. This normative authority licenses using Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis, in the second phase, to explicate our shared concept of concept-meaning. This yields the conclusion that we have epistemic reason to adopt the notion of pragmatic meaning as our explication of 'concept-meaning'. Having explicated our concept in this way, we see that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis also has descriptive authority - it is a semantically conservative tool that reveals concept-meaning, thus explicated.The initial presentation of the bootstrapping argument considers only one sort of work that our concept of concept-meaning does - helping to guide our application of other concepts. But this concept also regularly delivers benefits in a second way - by helping us to give good explanations for the behavior and behavioral success of various concept-users. Chapter 5 uses the normative authority of Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis to justify a particular account of how good explanations work. Chapter 6 draws upon this account to argue that, in order best to explain people's behavioral successes, we need an explication of concept-meaning that is closely related to the one presented in Chapter 4.Chapter 7 considers several objections and hard cases, and argues that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis weathers these storms in good shape.

A series of studies were conducted with the aim of showing that the Representational Redescription (RR) model (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) can be used a general model of cognitive development. In this thesis, 3 aspects of the RR model were explored. The first set of experiments involved analysing the generalisability of RR levels across tasks in a domain. In an initial study, the levels of the RR model were successfully applied to a balance scale task. Then, in a subsequent study, children’s RR levels on the balance scale task were compared with their RR levels on a balance beam task (see Pine et al, 1999). Children were seen to access the same level of verbal knowledge across both tasks. This suggests that it is verbal knowledge which provides the basis for generalisation of knowledge. The second set of experiments involved a consideration of the RR model in relation to the domain of numeracy. The levels of the RR model were applied to children’s developing representations for the one-to-one and cardinality principles. The RR levels were shown to have utility in predicting children’s openness to different types of “procedurally based” and “conceptually based” teaching interventions, with pre-implicit children benefiting from procedural interventions, and children who have implicit and more advanced representational levels benefiting from conceptual interventions. The final study involved a microgenetic analysis of children’s representational levels on the balance beam task. The findings from this study indicated the importance of a period of stability prior to a cognitive advance, and demonstrated that cognitive advances can be driven by changes in the verbal explanations that are offered, rather than changes in successful performance. This provides support for the mechanism of change proposed by Karmiloff-Smith, 1992. Together, the findings indicate that the RR model provides a useful perspective about the cognitive development of children. In particular, the thesis highlights when children can use the same representations for different tasks in a domain and suggests the mechanism that brings about representational change.

This thesis investigates the injunction to experiment in the social sciences and, more specifically, geography. This is both a geography of certain ways of thinking experiment, and an exploration of how particular strands of geographical thinking are being re-imagined and reworked as experimental under the influence of ideas and practices from within and beyond the discipline. Against the backdrop of recent debates about the status of experiment, it poses a number of key questions about what it means to be experimental, how experimental practices emerge and travel, and how these processes are inflected by the organization and atmospheres of particular sites of experimentation. These questions are addressed through a form of attentive participation at four key sites: The SenseLab and the Topological Media Lab in Montreal, the Institut für Raumexperimente in Berlin, and FoAM in Brussels. Based upon these encounters, and drawing upon the work of a range of exemplary experimentalists, the thesis develops the argument that there are new spaces of experiment which are worthy of such examination as part of a renewal of experimentation within geographical thinking. As such, the thesis outlines the logics of these forms of experiment and proposes the notion of ecologies of experiment. It also speculates on the possibilities for re-imagining what constitutes a geographical experiment, foregrounding the necessity of reactivating experiment as an ongoing ethos that needs careful cultivation and tending.

The experimental maps produced by artists working with locative media both bear witness to and participate in a radical reworking of the way in which space is conceived and encountered that destabilizes longstanding assumptions about the nature of representation, knowledge, and power. These mapmaking practices, it is argued, operate at the juncture of a cartographic tradition that entails distinctively modern ways of seeing, knowing, and acting in the world, and digital technologies and software operations that propose alternative ways of linking the world up. The thesis charts how these art maps engage in a critique of cartography, the extent to which they remain indebted to it, but also their use of coded operations to pioneer novel apprehensions of space that mark a decisive ‘break’ with a modern worldview. The map works of locative media are accordingly positioned in relation to what is seen as a paradigmatic shift from Cartographic Space to Code Space, and the analysis of case studies supplies a means of comprehending this ongoing transformation, demonstrating that mapping survives beyond cartography but entails a tearing apart of the cartographic surface and the representational epistemology that accompanies it. Gone are the compass, scale and fix-points by which, for centuries, a sense of place was anchored and the world made knowable, yet to be set adrift in this way is not to be left ‘all at sea’. Working with the novel intuitions, forms and geometries that arise from the operations of software code, post-cartographical mapping practices continue to supply a sense of orientation. However, they also pioneer novel forms of territory, and power over territory, that call for new strategies of counter-mapping and, with it, a ‘post-cartographical’ reframing of the study of locative media. Now pictured as a site of contestation between antithetical spatial paradigms, locative media is rehabilitated as a vital force, operating at a pivotal moment, in a broadly epoch-defining reshaping of space and spatial representation.

Recent studies in rodents (McTighe et al, 2010; Burke et al, 2010) have suggested that forgetting is caused by the misidentification of novel stimuli as being familiar, matching the predictions of the representational-hierarchical model of Saksida & Bussey (2010). Here, we tested this idea in humans. Three groups of participants (young, healthy elders, elders at-risk for MCI) viewed novel and repeated stimuli in a continuous viewing task while their eye movements were recorded. According to the eye-movement based memory effect (Ryan et al, 2000) individuals make fewer fixations on items which are perceived as familiar. As interference increased, eye-movements directed to the novel stimuli declined, indicating these novel items were perceived as familiar. This effect was stronger in groups more vulnerable to interference (eg. at-risk elders). These results suggest that forgetting in humans, like rats, is driven by the misidentification of novel items as being familiar.

Recent studies in rodents (McTighe et al, 2010; Burke et al, 2010) have suggested that forgetting is caused by the misidentification of novel stimuli as being familiar, matching the predictions of the representational-hierarchical model of Saksida & Bussey (2010). Here, we tested this idea in humans. Three groups of participants (young, healthy elders, elders at-risk for MCI) viewed novel and repeated stimuli in a continuous viewing task while their eye movements were recorded. According to the eye-movement based memory effect (Ryan et al, 2000) individuals make fewer fixations on items which are perceived as familiar. As interference increased, eye-movements directed to the novel stimuli declined, indicating these novel items were perceived as familiar. This effect was stronger in groups more vulnerable to interference (eg. at-risk elders). These results suggest that forgetting in humans, like rats, is driven by the misidentification of novel items as being familiar.

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