Any theory of semantic cognition is also a theory of concepts. There are two ways to construe the models presented by Rogers & McClelland (R&M) in Semantic Cognition. If we construe the input and output representations as concepts, then the models capture knowledge acquisition within a stable set of concepts. If we construe the hidden-layer representations as concepts, the models provide a simulation of conceptual change.

What are the semantic representations that underlie language production? We use structural priming to distinguish between two competing theories. Thematic roles define semantic structure in terms of atomic units that specify event participants and are ordered with respect to each other through a hierarchy of roles. Event structures instead instantiate semantic structure as embedded sub‐predicates that impose an order on verbal arguments based on their relative positioning in these embeddings. Across two experiments, we found that priming for datives depended on (...) the degree of overlap in event structures. Specifically, while all dative structures showed priming, due to common syntax, there was a boost for compositional datives priming other compositional datives. Here, the two syntactic forms have distinct event structures. In contrast, there was no boost in priming for dative light verbs, where the two forms map onto a single event representation. On the thematic roles hypothesis, we would have expected a similar degree of priming for the two cases. Thus, our results support event structural approaches to semantic representation and not thematic roles. (shrink)

A well‐known typological observation is the dominance of subject‐initial word orders, SOV and SVO, across the world's languages. Recent findings from gestural language creation paradigms offer possible explanations for the prevalence of SOV. When asked to gesture transitive events with an animate agent and inanimate patient, gesturers tend to produce SOV order, regardless of their native language biases. Interestingly, when the patient is animate, gesturers shift away from SOV to use of other orders, like SVO and OSV. Two competing hypotheses (...) have been proposed for this switch: the noisy channel account (Gibson et al., 2013) and the role conflict account (Hall, Mayberry, & Ferreira, 2013). We set out to distinguish between these two hypotheses, disentangling event reversibility and patient animacy, by looking at gestural sequences for events with two inanimate participants (inanimate‐inanimate, reversible). We replicated the previous findings of a preference for SOV order when describing animate‐inanimate, irreversible events as well as a decrease in the use of SOV when presented with animate‐animate, reversible events. Accompanying the drop in SOV, in a novel condition we observed an increase in the use of SVO and OSV orders when describing events involving two animate entities. In sum, we find that the observed avoidance of SOV order in gestural language creation paradigms when the event includes an animate agent and patient is driven by the animacy of the participants rather than the reversibility of the event. We suggest that findings from gestural creation paradigms are not automatically linkable to spoken language typology. (shrink)

Past work has shown systematic differences between Easterners' and Westerners' intuitions about the reference of proper names. Understanding when these differences emerge in development will help us understand their origins. In the present study, we investigate the referential intuitions of English- and Chinese-speaking children and adults in the U.S. and China. Using a truth-value judgment task modeled on Kripke's classic Gödel case, we find that the cross-cultural differences are already in place at age seven. Thus, these differences cannot be attributed (...) to later education or enculturation. Instead, they must stem from differences that are present in early childhood. We consider alternate theories of reference that are compatible with these findings and discuss the possibility that the cross-cultural differences reflect differences in perspective-taking strategies. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 2, February 2022.

The Conscious Brain brings neuroscientific evidence to bear on enduring philosophical questions. Major philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness are surveyed, challenged, and extended.

In this chapter, I outline and defend a version of concept empiricism. The theory has four central tenets: Concepts represent categories by reliable causal relations to category instances; conceptual representations of category vary from occasion to occasion; these representations are perceptually based; and these representations are all learned, not innate. The last two tenets on this list have been central to empiricism historically, and the first two have been developed in more recent years. I look at each in turn, and (...) then I discuss the most obvious objection to empiricism. According to that objection, some concepts cannot be perceptually based because they represent things that are abstract, and hence unperceivable. I discuss two standard examples: democracy and moral badness. I argue that both can be explained using resources available to the empiricist. (shrink)

A timely and uniquely compelling plea for the importance of nurture in the ongoing nature-nurture debate. In this era of genome projects and brain scans, it is all too easy to overestimate the role of biology in human psychology. But in this passionate corrective to the idea that DNA is destiny, Jesse Prinz focuses on the most extraordinary aspect of human nature: that nurture can supplement and supplant nature, allowing our minds to be profoundly influenced by experience and culture. (...) Drawing on cutting-edge research in neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Prinz shatters the myth of human uniformity and reveals how our differing cultures and life experiences make each of us unique. Along the way he shows that we can’t blame mental illness or addiction on our genes, and that societal factors shape gender differences in cognitive ability and sexual behavior. A much-needed contribution to the nature-nurture debate, Beyond Human Nature shows us that it is only through the lens of nurture that the spectrum of human diversity becomes fully and brilliantly visible. (shrink)

There seem to be two kinds of emotion the rists in the world. Some work very hard to show that emotions are essentially cognitive states. Others resist this suggestion and insist that emotions are noncognitive. The debate has appeared in many forms in philosophy and psychology. It never seems to go away. The reason for this is simple. Emotions have properties that push in both directions, properties that make them seem quite smart and properties that make them seem quite dumb. (...) They exemplify the base impulses of our animal nature while simultaneously branching out into the most human and humane reaches of our mental repertoires. Depending on where one looks, emotions can emerge as our simplest instincts or our subtlest achievements. This double nature makes emotions captivating, but also confounding. Researchers find themselves picking one side at the expense of the other, or packaging seemingly disparate components into unstable unions. I will defend a more integrative approach. For a more thorough treatment, see Prinz (forthcoming). (shrink)

Writers in the propositions literature consider the Benacerraf objection serious, often decisive. The objection figures heavily in dismissing standard theories of propositions of the past, notably set-theoretic theories. I argue that the situation is more complicated. After explicating the propositional Benacerraf problem, I focus on a classic set-theoretic theory of propositions, the possible worlds theory, and argue that methodological considerations influence the objection’s success.

This chapter contains section titles: Introduction Innerism and Outerism Are Some Concepts Inside‐Out? Millikan's Concepts.

Against the turbulent backdrop of Enlightenment Scotland, Adam Smith lays out a succinct and highly engaging account of Smith's life and times, reviews his work as a whole and traces his influence over the past two centuries. Dispelling myths and debunking caricatures, this book explores his ideas in detail, from ethics to law to economics and government and the impact of those ideas on thinkers as diverse as Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek. Adam Smith emerges (...) as one of the founders of modern social psychology and behavioural theory, offering a strikingly modern evolutionary theory of political economy, which recognises the often complementary roles of markets and the state. (shrink)

A series of interviews with people from various backgrounds, showing how people's personal experiences influences their politics.

We seem to have private privileged access to our own minds through introspection, but what exactly does this involve? Do we somehow literally perceive our own minds, as the common idea of a 'mind's eye' suggests, or are there other processes at work in our ability to know our own minds? Rethinking Introspection offers a new pluralist framework for understanding the nature, scope, and limits of introspection. The book argues that, contrary to common misconceptions, introspection does not consist of a (...) single mechanism but rather a diverse range of mental states and cognitive processes with a broad spectrum of epistemic properties. Building upon this revised conception of introspection, the book illustrates and analyzes the variety of ways in which we introspectively grasp the contents of our own minds, from the immediate phenomenal knowledge generated by conscious experience to the self-deceptive possibilities enabled by certain kinds of inner speech. (shrink)

This volume makes a welcome contribution to the burgeoning philosophical scholarship on human rights by foregrounding methodological and meta-philosophical issu.

This chapter contains sections titled: Born to Be Good? Are There Moral Universals? Is There a Morality Acquisition Device? Morality Without Innateness Appendix: Moral Anti‐nativism and Moral Relativism References.

Acquisitions : an overview -- Assemblages of access -- Assemblages of discovery -- Assemblages of feedback -- The acquisitions assemblage : putting it all together.

This is a reproduction of the original artefact. Generally these books are created from careful scans of the original. This allows us to preserve the book accurately and present it in the way the author intended. Since the original versions are generally quite old, there may occasionally be certain imperfections within these reproductions. We're happy to make these classics available again for future generations to enjoy!

Let me offer an early disclaimer. I know exactly who the Founders were. I know exactly the crimes against humanity that they were responsible for and those they inherited and were not responsible for. I do not spend time extolling the virtues of Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Adams, Mr. Franklin, and Mr. Madison. Nothing in this work or in my experiment (my life's work) can change the fact or alter the history of the debasement of humanity that preceded the Declaration of (...) Independence (1776), the Constitution (1787), and the Bill of Rights (1791) they were a part of and the obvious fact that the major accomplishment of the Founders' theories about self-government did not apply to African Americans and Native Americans, women, and specifically Black women in their thinking. Still, there exists in their theological imagination infinite hope for their experiment. This work seeks to identify the evidence that shows and suggests that some of them were aware of a grand architectural experiment and design for the nation and its future. Every cracked, broken, and imperfect vessel can be used to bring forward hope. I am a personal witness to this fact of human existence. (shrink)

The moral domain is broader than the empathy and justice concerns assessed by existing measures of moral competence, and it is not just a subset of the values assessed by value inventories. To fill the need for reliable and theoretically grounded measurement of the full range of moral concerns, we developed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire on the basis of a theoretical model of 5 universally available sets of moral intuitions: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. We present evidence for the (...) internal and external validity of the scale and the model, and in doing so we present new findings about morality: Comparative model fitting of confirmatory factor analyses provides empirical justification for a 5-factor structure of moral concerns; convergent/discriminant validity evidence suggests that moral concerns predict personality features and social group attitudes not previously considered morally relevant; and we establish pragmatic validity of the measure in providing new knowledge and research opportunities concerning demographic and cultural differences in moral intuitions. These analyses provide evidence for the usefulness of Moral Foundations Theory in simultaneously increasing the scope and sharpening the resolution of psychological views of morality. (shrink)

Virtue and deontological ethics are now commonly contrasted as rival approaches to moral inquiry. However, I argue that neither metaethical party should seek complete, solitary domination of the ethical domain. Reductive treatments of the right or the virtuous, as well as projects that abandon the former or latter, are bound to leave us with a sadly diminished map of the moral territories crucial to our lives. Thus, it is better for the two parties to seek a more cordial and equal (...) relationship, one that permits metaethical pluralism, and acknowledges mutual dependence. I do not seek to prescribe how that relationship should look: this essay offers less a positive metaethical position than a prolegomenon to such a position, one that attempts to head off harmful attempts to reduce the territory of the aretaic to that of the deontic, or that of the deontic to the aretaic. (shrink)

Much earlier work claims that appositives and expressives are invariably speaker-oriented. These claims have recently been challenged, most extensively by Amaral et al. (Linguist and Philos 30(6): 707–749, 2007). We are convinced by this new evidence. The questions we address are (i) how widespread are non-speaker-oriented readings of appositives and expressives, and (ii) what are the underlying linguistic factors that make such readings available? We present two experiments and novel corpus work that bear directly on this issue. We find that (...) non-speaker-oriented readings, while rare in actual language use, are systematic. We also find that non-speaker-oriented readings occur even outside of attitude predications, which leads us to favor an account based in pragmatically-mediated perspective shifting over one that relies on semantic binding by attitude predicates. (shrink)

Psychologism is defined as “the doctrine that the laws of mathematics and logic can be reduced to or depend on the laws governing thinking” (Moran & Cohen, 2012 266). And for Husserl, the laws of logic include the laws of meaning: “logic evidently is the science of meanings as such [Wissenschaft von Bedeutungen als solchen]” (Husserl ( 1975 ) 98/2001 225). I argue that, since it is sufficient for a theory to be psychologistic if the empiricistic theory of abstraction is (...) employed, it follows that neural networks are psychologistic insofar as they use this theory of abstraction, which I demonstrate is the case (Husserl ( 1975 ) 191/2001 120). It’s sufficient for psychologism because, according to Husserl, the theory in question reduces one’s phenomenological ability to intend types (or universals) to one’s past history of intending tokens (or particulars), usually amalgamated in some fashion (classically via associations; recently via autoencoders) (ibid; Kelleher, 2019 ). Similarly dynamical systems theory entails psychologism. For dynamical systems theory ties content to the temporal evolution of a system, which, according to Husserl, violates the fact that intentionality toward validities and objectivities does not pertain to "particular temporal experience[s]" (Husserl ( 1975 ) 194/2001 121). It follows that neither the species (neural networks), nor the genus (dynamical systems), can avoid psychologism and intend objects "in specie" (ibid). After critiquing these two approaches, I proceed to give an account based on the essentialist school of cognitive psychology of how we may intend objects "in specie" while avoiding the empiricistic theory of abstraction (Keil, 1989, Carey, 2009, Marcus & Davis, 2019 ). Such an account preserves the type-token distinction without psychologistic reduction to the temporal evolution of a dynamical system (Hinzen, 2006 ). This opens the way toward a truly unifying account of Husserlian phenomenology in league with cognitive science that avoids Yoshimi's ( 2016 ) and neurophenomenology's psychologistic foundation (herein demonstrated) and builds upon Sokolowski's ( 2003 ) syntactic account of Husserlian phenomenology. (shrink)

We analyse Hutto & Myin's three arguments against computationalism [Hutto, D., E. Myin, A. Peeters, and F. Zahnoun. Forthcoming. “The Cognitive Basis of Computation: Putting Computation In Its Place.” In The Routledge Handbook of the Computational Mind, edited by M. Sprevak, and M. Colombo. London: Routledge.; Hutto, D., and E. Myin. 2012. Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds Without Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Hutto, D., and E. Myin. 2017. Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press]. The Hard Problem (...) of Content targets computationalism that relies on semantic notion of computation, claiming that it cannot account for the natural origins of content. The Intentionality Problem is targeted against computationalism using non-semantic accounts of computation, arguing that it fails in explaining intentionality. Theion Problem claims that causal interaction between concrete physical processes and abstract computational properties is problematic. We argue that these a... (shrink)

The present article examines how people’s belief in an afterlife, as well as closely related supernatural beliefs, may open an empirical backdoor to our understanding of the evolution of human social cognition. Recent findings and logic from the cognitive sciences contribute to a novel theory of existential psychology, one that is grounded in the tenets of Darwinian natural selection. Many of the predominant questions of existential psychology strike at the heart of cognitive science. They involve: causal attribution (why is mortal (...) behavior represented as being causally related to one’s afterlife? how are dead agents envisaged as communicating messages to the living?), moral judgment (why are certain social behaviors, i.e., transgressions, believed to have ultimate repercussions after death or to reap the punishment of disgruntled ancestors?), theory of mind (how can we know what it is “like” to be dead? what social-cognitive strategies do people use to reason about the minds of the dead?), concept acquisition (how does a common-sense dualism interact with a formalized socio-religious indoctrination in childhood? how are supernatural properties of the dead conceptualized by young minds?), and teleological reasoning (why do people so often see their lives as being designed for a purpose that must be accomplished before they perish? how do various life events affect people’s interpretation of this purpose?), among others. The central thesis of the present article is that an organized cognitive “system” dedicated to forming illusory representations of (1) psychological immortality, (2) the intelligent design of the self, and (3) the symbolic meaning of natural events evolved in response to the unique selective pressures of the human social environment. (shrink)

Gut Reactions is an interdisciplinary defense of the claim that emotions are perceptions of changes in the body.

Jesse Prinz argues that recent work in philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology supports two radical hypotheses about the nature of morality: moral values are based on emotional responses, and these emotional responses are inculcated by culture, not hard-wired through natural selection. In the first half of the book, Jesse Prinz defends the hypothesis that morality has an emotional foundation. Evidence from brain imaging, social psychology, and psychopathology suggest that, when we judge something to be right or wrong, we are (...) merely expressing our emotions. Prinz argues that these emotions do not track objective features of reality; rather, the rightness and wrongness of an act consists in the fact that people are disposed to have certain emotions towards it. In the second half of the book, he turns to a defense of moral relativism. Moral facts depend on emotional responses, and emotional responses vary from culture to culture. Prinz surveys the anthropological record to establish moral variation, and he draws on cultural history to show how attitudes toward practices such as cannibalism and marriage change over time. He also criticizes evidence from animal behavior and child development that has been taken to support the claim that moral attitudes are hard-wired by natural selection. Prinz concludes that there is no single true morality, but he also argues that some moral values are better than others; moral progress is possible. Throughout the book, Prinz relates his views to contemporary and historical work in philosophical ethics. His views echo themes in the writings of David Hume and Friedrich Nietzsche, but Prinz supports, extends, and revises these classic theories using the resources of cutting-edge cognitive science. The Emotional Construction of Morals will stimulate and challenge anyone who is curious about the nature and origin of moral values. (shrink)