52 - Gabriel Greenberg: Semiotics, Representation, and Cognitive Science & Film

Gabriel Greenberg is a professor of philosophy at the University of California Los Angeles, and currently a visiting professor at Stanford University. He works widely across the philosophy of mind, but in particular studies iconic representation, modality, and computation. Gabe and Robinson talk about the rough divide between representation and consciousness studies in the philosophy of mind before going into the distinction between signs and symbols, and how the brain interprets them. They finish with a departure into the world of philosophy, film, and cognitive science, discussing how our minds stitch together the scenes of a movie and integrate them into a whole.

linktree: https://linktr.ee/robinsonerhardt

Outline:

00:00 In This Episode

00:39 Introduction

5:17 Gabe’s Taste in Comics

9:53 Gabe’s Interest in Philosophy of Mind

18:14 What is a Representation?

26:02 Gabe’s Dialogue with Linguistics

27:51 Aboutness in the Philosophy of Mind

34:21 The Iconic-Symbolic Spectrum

59:48 A Semantics for Signs and Icons

1:09:33 A Course on Visual Narrative

1:11:20 Film and The Norms of Spatial Coherence

1:15:43 Film Spaces as Abstract Spatial Graphs

1:46:20 Film, Semantics, and Pragmatics

1:51:38 On Scott McCloud

Robinson Erhardt researches symbolic logic and the foundations of mathematics at Stanford University. Join him in conversations with philosophers, scientists, weightlifters, artists, and everyone in-between.