This paper applies a consumer‐based teleosemantic framework to give a detailed analysis of a particular algorithm for generating word embeddings. In the process, it addresses several of the challenges facing teleosemantic approaches to artificial neural networks. It distinguishes the content of embeddings from the contents of their features and argues that word embeddings should be seen as pushmi‐pullyu representations whose descriptive contents are facts about the contexts in which words appear. Furthermore, it argues that embeddings meet Millikan's conditions for iconic representation as transformations between embeddings correspond to transformations of the contents of their representations.
People regularly profess belief in religious ideas. But do they merely think of themselves as believing, or do they think of themselves as possessing knowledge ? I first argue that it is difficult to determine this based purely on religious people's self‐descriptions. I instead appeal to functionalist considerations about the way religious metacognitive attitudes are formed and guide action, which suggest ordinary religious people often do self‐attribute knowledge. This raises problems for recent arguments that first‐order religious attitudes are a form of make‐believe instead of genuine belief, while also bringing out the importance of religious metacognition for fully understanding religious psychology.
The main claim of When minds converse is that speaking a language enables new cognitive and practical capacities that radically transform the human mind. The book is a rich source of inspiration for developmental and comparative cognitive science. In this commentary, I discuss some of the questions that the book raises for cognitive scientists and wonder how its armchair genealogy could be psychologized.
Rumination is a central factor in depression and philosophers are increasingly interested in the phenomenon. Yet there is a gap between the philosophical and psychological discussions. This paper aims to narrow this gap by defending three interrelated claims. First, philosophical theorising must acknowledge that rumination involves two constructs—brooding and pondering—where brooding is characteristic of depression. Second, empirical work suggests that brooding exhibits features associated with both automaticity and control, relevant to philosophical discussions of agency. Third, structural theories of depression in philosophy should consider brooding as a key causal factor in the changes of consciousness in depression.
An influential account of moral judgment suggests there are two distinctive domains: that of conventional wrongs (a breach of social norms that can be changed/"modified" by an authority figure) and moral wrongs (that are viewed as breaching "natural law" and cannot be "modified"). However, pertinent tests conflate behaviors' content (for instance, theft vs. rudeness) with victims' proper consent. Initial studies suggest that this (victims' consent) is integral to the process whereby conventional wrongs are modified or de-wronged; we then demonstrate that this process also applies in the moral domain. The two "domains", thus, appear far more alike than is claimed.
This is a response to a discussion of two chapters of my recent book, Movements of the mind, that focus on the relation between intention and working memory. I argue that intention is a type of practical memory for action and that its properties are illuminated by drawing on empirical research on working memory. In what follows, I respond to critical replies by Mikayla Kelley and Juan Pablo Berm & uacute;dez.
The human pointing gesture is a species-unique and species-universal form of communication that depends on humans' especially powerful forms of cooperative cognition and motivation. I have previously hypothesized that the pointing gesture evolved as a behavioral tool empowering individuals to better coordinate their interdependent collaborative activities by informing one another of things helpfully. Here I provide new data in support of this hypothesis, focusing on the different ways in which human children and nonhuman great apes communicate to initiate, coordinate, and self-regulate their collaborative activities. All great apes collaborate and communicate, but humans collaborate and communicate in coordinated ways.
I discuss the evolution of ostensive behaviours (behaviours that display the communicative intent to influence others through the perception of signals and actions addressed to them). Ostensive communication evolved out of evolutionary adaptations to the challenges and opportunities created by the evolutionary scenario of the meeting of intentionalities (in Brentano's sense of "aboutness") between two agents. Apes evolved specialised ostensive behaviours for managing "attention contact" situations with the structure of Gricean communicative intentions. Apes' ostensive communication consists of "behavioural utterances" combining both species-specific signals (with naturally selected meaning) and ordinary behaviours made to function communicatively to convey Gricean non-natural meaning.
We argue that intentionalist accounts of ostensive-inferential communication fail to adequately explain the role of external representations in human communication. We propose that the contents of a specific form of representational communication, symbolic depictions via spatio-temporal arrangements of objects, can be inferred without attributing mental states. We analyze the cognitive capacities that underpin the production and interpretation of depictions and emphasize their potential role in transmitting generic knowledge. We then propose an evolutionary scenario in which depictive demonstrations of tool use and instrumental actions fostered diverse types of inferential communication as well as the emergence of metarepresentational capacities.
In this paper, I raise two challenges to Wayne Wu's proposal that intentions are practical memories. The first questions whether practical memories possess the functional roles that Michael Bratman's influential planning theory identifies for intention. The second suggests that a conception of intention as practical memory obscures the logic of intention in our ordinary ethical thought and talk. Both challenges are grounded in methodological reflections on the sources of disagreement in the philosophy of action.
Developmental work on ostensive communication calls for reconsidering existing theoretical accounts within a comprehensive framework of early pragmatics and its development. In this paper, we propose a new perspective on the ontogeny and development of ostensive communication as underpinned by a process of knowledge and representational redescription. By discussing relevant empirical data, we ground early pragmatics on in-built principles of implicit knowledge that are redescribed during communicative development, shedding new light on the representations underlying infant ostensive communication and its development into rich pragmatic knowledge involving complex intentions and metarepresentations.
Young children's spontaneous production of mental state utterances involving want, know, and think differed markedly depending on the target of the utterance. Whereas children's affirmations and denials mostly pertained to their own mental states rather than those of others, their questions mostly pertained to the mental states of others rather than their own. This asymmetry was evident for all three mental state verbs, and among both English-speaking and Mandarin-speaking children. By implication, children enjoy some form of special access to their own mental states but presume no such special access to the mental states of other people.
This essay argues for a mixed-resource approach to scientific modeling and applies it to questions in philosophy of mind. A mixed-resource approach makes use of whatever resources-at whatever scale, from whatever academic discipline-seem useful, freely combining such varied resources in individual models. The success of mixed-resource modeling challenges the widely shared commitment to a personal level in the context of which mental states are to be studied in relative isolation. The adoption of a mixed-resource perspective has the potential to transform treatment of further matters in philosophy of mind, which is illustrated by discussion of psychological Frege cases.
I assess Wayne Wu's thesis that intention is a form of practical memory functionally analogous to working memory. Wu argues that being active in intention involves vigilance and steadfastness (sustaining attention). I argue that being active in intention also requires strategic management, a distinct process of modulating intention's influence against other sources of bias like habit or emotion. I argue this strategic management (which relies on a particular form of practical reasoning I identify as meta-reasoning) is not reducible to Wu's concepts of steadfastness or fine-tuning, and conclude that an agent's activeness in intention involves more than the memory-like functions Wu identifies.
I discuss three key differences between Pettit's philosophical genealogy and other influential works of cognitive development. They are: (i) concern with the temporal distribution of changes from a starting state A to the envisaged end state B, (ii) constraints on the specification of A and (iii) claims about the likelihood of the transition from A to B. I argue that legitimate concerns can be raised about Pettit's treatment of (ii) and (iii). Nonetheless, When minds converse proposes a series of original, compelling and empirically testable hypotheses about the role of conversation in cognitive development.
The idea that cognition involves dialogic interchange between mutually influencing "voices" has long featured in psychology and philosophy. While dialogic structure is most explicit in inner speech, some authors have argued that other types of mental activity can be (or always are) dialogic. We introduce two dimensions of dialogism, strength and depth, and characterize a particularly deep form of dialogism of the mind. We offer a developmental interpretation of deep dialogism and show how this form of dialogism has important payoffs for explaining the mechanisms and the phenomenology of human psychological experiences in general and mental health conditions in particular.
After briefly providing a broad outline of Pettit's genealogical account of the emergence of distinctive human capacities from the capacities of imaginary prehuman ancestors-the "humanoids"-I articulate a specific worry concerning what Pettit takes to be the humanoids' starting point as they get on their journey toward acquiring a "human soul". This is the worry that the humanoids' starting point is not theoretically innocent.
This paper offers a brief overview of When minds converse followed by a characterization of each response and a consideration of some of the observations that it makes.
Evolutionarily minded psychologists and philosophers routinely invoke gradualism when theorising about human cognition, assuming human cognitive evolution evolved via a series of gradual phenotypic steps from an ancestral trait to the trait of interest. I argue this assumption is neither theoretically required nor empirically well supported. Evolutionary biology provides clear cases where major phenotypic shifts occur rapidly, and there is no principled reason to exempt cognition from this pattern. Acknowledging this leads to a more nuanced view of what makes explanations of human psychology evolutionarily plausible, and of what a successful evolutionary approach to psychology should aim to provide.
Cognitive scientific explanations can take either a mechanistic or design perspective. Some recent philosophical works propose to apply the mechanistic perspective to the influential mental file framework. The design perspective, however, remains underexplored. This paper takes on this task, arguing that mental files have been designed by natural selection to efficiently represent property cluster structures in the environment-such as objects and kinds-to facilitate our learning about them. It also shows that the design perspective can help resolve a previous debate between two specific accounts of mental files.
