Knowledge of one's own states of mind is one of the varieties of self-knowledge. Do any nonhuman animals have the capacity for this variety of self-knowledge? The question is open to empirical inquiry, which is most often conducted with primate subjects. Research with a bottlenose dolphin gives some evidence for the capacity in a nonprimate taxon. I describe the research and evaluate the metacognitive interpretation of the dolphin's behaviour. The research exhibits some of the difficulties attached to the task of (...) eliciting behaviour that both attracts a higher-order interpretation while also resisting deflationary, lower-order interpretations. Lloyd Morgan's Canon, which prohibits inflationary interpretations of animal behaviour, has influenced many animal psychologists. There is one defensible version of the Canon, the version that warns specifically against unnecessary intentional ascent. The Canon on this interpretation seems at first to tell against a metacognitive interpretation of the data collected in the dolphin study. However, the model of metacognition that is in play in the dolphin studies is a functional model, one that does not implicate intentional ascent. I explore some interpretations of the dolphin's behaviour as metacognitive, in this sense. While this species of metacognitive interpretation breaks the connection with the more familiar theory of mind research using animal subjects, the interpretation also points in an interesting way towards issues concerning consciousness in dolphins. (shrink)

Tools and technologies expand our capacities, including our cognitive capacities. Microscopes extend our perceptual capacities. Notebooks extend the natural limits of memory. These facts are important, for all that they are obvious. The extended cognition hypothesis wants more. Some external devices and processes are literal parts of cognitive processes themselves. When there is fast and reliable access to external data or processes, then the cognitive processes that occur uncontroversially inside the brain literally and controversially extend out into the world to (...) incorporate external structures or processes. Retrieval of an address from memory and retrieval of the same information from a notebook can both be fully cognitive processes involving fully cognitive representations. So say the proponents of extended cognition.It is an attractive metaphor. But is there any good reason to take it as literal truth? Adams and Aizawa argue that the debate on extended cognition implicates an …. (shrink)

The simple version of the HOT theory of consciousness is easily refuted. Carruthers escapes this refutation because he is actually a closet introspectionist. I agree with Carruthers that the subjective properties of experience are constituted from discriminatory and other cognitive responses, but I disagree that conceptual uptake into a language of thought is the form of uptake that is necessary. Carruthers' neocartesian argument for a divide between 'man and brute' should be rejected.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bookmarks Raman Selden's A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory is now published in the United States by the University Press of Kentucky ($17.00 cloth, $7.00 paper). It is a discerning introduction for students (and anyone else) to the current state of "theory"—a word which in this context seems for the present to have lost its neutral sense. Given the tendentious climate of literary studies, Selden's book is all (...) the more remarkable for its sober, equable attitude. Whether he is describing Russian formalism, Lacan, the Frankfurt School, reader-response theory, or Gerald Prince's "narratee," he is always a fair guide, generous without descending to the breathlessness "theory" so often incites. While I miss a detailed or persuasive account ofArnoldian, New Critical, or Leavisite criticism to serve as a foil for his discussion of poststructuralism, Seiden does nevertheless usually give some idea of what or who the enemy is for each of his theorists. Selden's quotations are well chosen, and he is adroit in elucidating the internal problems of theories, as, for example, when he says that Cixous's approach runs the risk of "driving women into an obscure unconscious retreat where silence reigns interrupted only by uterine 'babble.' " This is a danger, according to Seiden, well understood by Kristeva, who views women writers as "caught." He makes the point by citing Kristeva. "On the one hand," he says, "as writers they inevitably collude with [what Kristeva describes as] 'phallic dominance, associated with the privileged father-daughter relationship, which gives rise to the tendency towards mastery, science, philosophy, professorships, etc....' " On the other hand, Kristeva continues, "we flee everything considered 'phallic' to find refuge in the valorisation of the silent underwater body, thus abdicating any entry into history." Raman Seiden does not attempt to dazzle, but there is substance for thought on almost every one of the 146 pages in his book. Far weightier are two literary theory anthologies which have come our way. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle have edited Critical Theory Since 1965 (Florida State University Press, $29.95 paper). It resembles a telephone book and widi two-column pages it packs a lot in. The book begins with Stanley Cavell's 325 326Philosophy and Literature splendid essay "Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy," and continues with Chomsky, John Searle, Kermode, Derrida and his American followers, Ingarden, Foucault,Jauss, Frye (a figure Seiden has chosen to ignore), Girard, Cixous and various feminists, Culler, Abrams—and on it goes. It was a pleasant surprise to find Clifford Geertz's "Blurred Genres" here; curiously missing is any contribution from Richard Rorty. And though the tide says the material starts in '65, Adams and Searle actually take us back farther. The main text ends with Said on page 622, but we are dien given a 233-page appendix—an anthology in itself—which begins with Frege and Peirce and goes through selections from various linguists and philosophers from Saussure, Bakhtin, and Whorf, to Heidegger on Hölderlin, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Lacan. Adams and Searle have contributed good introductions for each author, as well as a wide-ranging general introduction (Adams) and an afterword (Searle). In the last paragraph of his opening remarks, Adams says, "The theme of poststructuralism in its deconstructive phase is that poems resist interpretation. Demonstration of how this is so has been important (though not as new as some have thought), but repeated demonstration of this has already eventuated in its own form of reduction and thematization. Every text submitted to deconstruction considered as a critical method will yield the same theme, which may be true enough but remains only that story: the allegory of uninterpretability. It quickly becomes a repetition of the older formalist discovery that every text is about itself. It is no wonder that there has been a stirring—not so much a resistance to deconstruction (there has been that too, of course)—that expresses a desire to go beyond it. There has even been the idea of returning to Kant and trying again." Critical Theory Since 1965 is a big, useful book. On the somewhat more trim and basic side is Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: An Introductory Anthology... (shrink)

In this paper I shall put forward a version of the so-called logical connection argument to try to show that desires cannot be causes of actions. Now for anyone who wishes to use that kind of argument to show this, the ideal way of proceeding would be to first set out a complete analysis of the causal relation, and then to go on to argue that the relation between desires, certain other conditions, and actions fails to match some essential feature (...) revealed by that analysis. But I cannot proceed in this way; for I do not possess any full-blooded analysis of the causal relation. Nonetheless, I do not think that this places me in a position of real weakness. For the argument I shall present requires the truth of only one claim with respect to the nature of the causal relation. This is the claim that the causal relation is a contingent relation. I think that this claim is a relatively uncontroversial one; I am going to assume that it is true; and the argument which follows will exploit that claim. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor divides the mind into peripheral, domain-specific modules and a domaingeneral faculty of central cognition. John Tooby and Lisa Cosmides argue instead that the mind is modular all the way through; cognition consists of a multitude of domain-specific processes. But human thought has a flexible, innovative character that contrasts with the inflexible, stereotyped performances of modular systems. My goal is to discover how minds that are constructed on modular principles might come to exhibit cognitive versatility.Cognitive versatility is exhibited in (...) the ability to learn from experience. How can this ability emerge from the resources made available by earlier stages of cognitive specialization without sacrificing the many benefits of modularization? A transition into versatile cognition occurred in the history of our species. A similar development which occurs within individual ontogeny provides clues about the phylogenetic changes. (shrink)

Representational redescription (Karmiloff-Smith 1994a; 1994) translates implicit, procedural knowledge into explicit, declarative knowledge. Explicit knowledge is an enabling condition of cognitive flexibility. The articulation and inferential integration of knowledge are important in explaining flexibility. There is an interesting connection to the availability of knowledge for verbal report, but no clear explanatory work is done by the idea of knowledge that is available to consciousness.

Metacognitive knowledge of one's own cognitive states is not as useful as is often thought. Differences between cognitive states often come down to differences in their intentional contents. For that reason, differences in behaviour are often explained by differences just in contents of first-order states. Uncertainty need not be a metacognitive condition. First-order interpretations of the target experiments are available.

Tools and technologies expand our capacities, including our cognitive capacities. Microscopes extend our perceptual capacities. Notebooks extend the natural limits of memory. These facts are important, for all that they are obvious. The extended cognition hypothesis wants more. Some external devices and processes are literal parts of cognitive processes themselves. When there is fast and reliable access to external data or processes , then the cognitive processes that occur uncontroversially inside the brain literally and controversially extend out into the world (...) to incorporate external structures or processes. Retrieval of an address from memory and retrieval of the same information from a notebook can both be fully cognitive processes involving fully cognitive representations. So say the proponents of extended cognition.It is an attractive metaphor. But is there any good reason to take it as literal truth? Adams and Aizawa argue that the debate on extended cognition implicates an …. (shrink)

Block's (1995) cognitive conception of consciousness might be introduced in the service of two different projects. In one, the explanatory gap between science and folklore remains. In the other, a reductive claim is advanced, but the intuitive idea of consciousness is abandoned.

There are two kinds of useful traits: adaptations, and all the others. Exaptations are just all the others. Exaptations are not for anything. Because there is such diversity in all the others, exaptation is not an explanatory concept. Its only real use is to block adaptationist excesses.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in major stressors such as unemployment, financial insecurity, sickness, separation from family members, and isolation for much of the world population. These stressors have been linked to mental health difficulties for parents and caregivers. Religion and spirituality, on the other hand, is often viewed as promotive of mental health. However, the mechanisms by which R/S might promote mental health for parents during the pandemic remain unclear. Thus, this longitudinal study explores how R/S is associated with (...) better caregiver mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic through higher levels of positive coping skills. A sample of N = 549 caregivers across Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia were recruited through the Prolific® research panel [67.8% female; age M = 41.33 years, 72.3% White/European]. Participants were assessed on measures of psychological distress, coping, R/S, and COVID-19 disruption at three time points between May and November 2020. Cross-lagged panel analysis revealed that caregiver coping mediated the relationship between caregiver R/S and caregiver mental health. Findings highlight a mechanism through which R/S naturally conveys a mental health benefit during periods of social disruption, which may provide an important target for public health promotion and clinical intervention. (shrink)

The COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted the psychosocial functioning of children and families. It is important to consider adversity in relation to processes of positive adaptation. To date, there are no empirically validated multi-item scales measuring COVID-related positive adaptation within families. The aim of the current study was to develop and validate a new measure: the Family Positive Adaptation during COVID-19 Scale. The sample included 372 female and 158 male caregivers of children ages 5–18 years old from the United Kingdom, (...) the United States, Canada, and Australia, who completed measures in May 2020. Participants responded to a 14-item survey indexing a range of perceived coping and adaptation behaviors at the beginning of the pandemic. An exploratory factor analysis yielded an optimal one-factor solution comprised of seven items related to family cohesion, flexibility, routines, and meaning-making. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated measurement invariance across female and male caregivers, demonstrating that the factor structure, loadings, and thresholds did not vary by caregiver sex. There was evidence for concurrent validity with significant bivariate correlations between the Family PACS scores and measures of caregiver positive coping, parenting practices, couple satisfaction, and family functioning, but not negatively-valenced constructs. Findings inform our conceptualization of how families have adapted to adverse pandemic-related conditions. Further, we provide preliminary support for the Family PACS as a practical tool for evaluating positive family adaptation during this global crisis, with implications for future widespread crises. (shrink)

Consciousness has been defined as that annoying period between naps, and this grumpy definition may not be wholly facetious, if Michael Tye’s latest book is right. Tye’s main goal here is to develop a theory of the phenomenal unity of experience at a time, and its diachronic analog, the moment-to-moment continuity of one’s experiential stream from the time one wakes up to the time consciousness lapses.