Contents
29 found
Order:
  1. Cognition as management of meaningful information. Proposal for an evolutionary approach (IACAP Aarhus July 2011).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    Humans are cognitive entities. Our ongoing interactions with the environment are threaded with creations and usages of meaningful information. Animal life is also populated with meaningful information related to survival constraints. Information managed by artificial agents can also be considered as having meanings, as derived from the designer. Such perspective brings us to propose an evolutionary approach to cognition based on meaningful information management. We use a systemic tool, the Meaning Generator System (MGS), and apply it consecutively to animals, humans (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Transitive Inference over Affective Representations in Non-Human Animals.Sanja Srećković - forthcoming - Review of Philosophy and Psychology.
    The mainstream philosophical approach to inference, which insists on sentence-like representations and a linguistic capability, excludes non-human animals as possible agents capable of making inferences. However, an abundance of studies show that many animal species exhibit behaviors that seem to rely on some kind of reasoning. My focus here are the transitive inference tasks, which most species solve quite successfully. These findings put pressure on the mainstream views, and still lack a convincing explanation. I introduce the concept of affective representations, (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī on Animal Cognition and Immortality.Peter Adamson & Bethany Somma - 2024 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 106 (1):23-52.
    This paper is devoted to a fascinating passage in Faḫr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210), in which he argues that non-human animals have rational souls. It is found in his Mulaḫḫaṣ fī l-manṭiq wa-l-ḥikma (Epitome on Philosophy and Logic). Following a discussion of the afterlife, Faḫr al-Dīn suggests that animals should, like humans, be capable of grasping universals, and that they are aware of their own identity over time. Furthermore, animal behavior shows that they are capable of rational planning and problem-solving. (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  4. Is there only one innate modular system for spatial navigation?Alexandre Duval - 2024 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 47:e125.
    Spelke convincingly argues that we should posit six innate modular systems beyond the periphery (i.e., beyond low-level perception and motor control). I focus on the case of spatial navigation (Ch. 3) to claim that there remain powerful considerations in favor of positing additional innate, nonperipheral modules. This opens the door to stronger forms of nativism and nonperipheral modularism than Spelke's.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death.Susana Monsó - 2024 - Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press.
    "A philosophical exploration of what animal behavior reveals about their understanding of death, as well as our own"--.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  6. The Nonlinguistic Mind: Nonlinguistic Concepts, Normativity, and Animal Cognition.Erik Nelson - 2024 - Dissertation, Dalhousie University
    I argue that at least some nonlinguistic animals have conceptual capabilities. First, I show that positions that take linguistic capabilities to be necessary for conceptual capabilities are unable to explain the possibility of concept acquisition. Second, I argue that awareness of abstract relations requires conceptual capabilities and success at relational matching-to-sample tasks requires awareness of the abstract relations of same and different. Crows and amazons are able to succeed at relational matching-to-sample tasks, so we should attribute conceptual capabilities to them. (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7. The precision of content characterizations.Fabian Hundertmark - 2023 - Philosophical Psychology 36 (3):678-694.
    The contents of representations in non-human animals, human core cognition, and perception cannot precisely be characterized by sentences of a natural language. However, this fact does not stop us from giving imprecise characterizations of these contents through natural language. In this paper, I develop an account of the precision of content characterizations by appealing to possible-world semantics combined with set and measurement theory.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. The Role of Picturing In Sellars’s Practical Philosophy.Jeremy Randel Koons & Carl B. Sachs - 2022 - Journal of Philosophical Research 47:147-176.
    Picturing is a poorly understood element of Sellars’s philosophical project. We diagnose the problem with picturing as follows: on the one hand, it seems that it must be connected with action in order for it to do its job. On the other hand, the representational states of a picturing system are characterized in descriptive and seemingly static terms. How can static terms be connected with action? To solve this problem, we adopt a concept from recent work in Sellarsian metaethics: the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  9. Atomic event concepts in perception, action and belief.Lucas Thorpe - 2022 - Journal of the American Philosophical Association 8 (1):110-127.
    Event concepts are unstructured atomic concepts that apply to event types. A paradigm example of such an event type would be that of diaper changing, and so a putative example of an atomic event concept would be DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER.1 I will defend two claims about such concepts. First, the conceptual claim that it is in principle possible to possess a concept such as DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER without possessing the concept DIAPER. Second, the empirical claim that we actually possess such concepts and that they (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  10. Temporal binding: digging into animal minds through time perception.Antonella Tramacere & Colin Allen - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-24.
    Temporal binding is the phenomenon in which events related as cause and effect are perceived by humans to be closer in time than they actually are). Despite the fact that temporal binding experiments with humans have relied on verbal instructions, we argue that they are adaptable to nonhuman animals, and that a finding of temporal binding from such experiments would provide evidence of causal reasoning that cannot be reduced to associative learning. Our argument depends on describing and theoretically motivating an (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  11. The Harm of Desire Modification in Non-human Animals: Circumventing Control, Diminishing Ownership and Undermining Agency.Marc G. Wilcox - 2022 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 35 (3):1-15.
    It is seemingly bad for animals to have their desires modified in at least some cases, for instance where brainwashing or neurological manipulation takes place. In humans, many argue that such modification interferes with our positive liberty or undermines our autonomy but this explanation is inapplicable in the case of animals as they lack the capacity for autonomy in the relevant sense. As such, the standard view has been that, despite any intuitions to the contrary, the modification of animals’ desires (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  12. Can Informational Theories Account for Metarepresentation?Miguel Ángel Sebastián & Marc Artiga - 2020 - Topoi 39 (1):81-94.
    In this essay we discuss recent attempts to analyse the notion of representation, as it is employed in cognitive science, in purely informational terms. In particular, we argue that recent informational theories cannot accommodate the existence of metarepresentations. Since metarepresentations play a central role in the explanation of many cognitive abilities, this is a serious shortcoming of these proposals.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  13. The representation selection problem: Why we should favor the geometric-module framework of spatial reorientation over the view-matching framework.Alexandre Duval - 2019 - Cognition 192 (C):103985.
    Many species rely on the three-dimensional surface layout of an environment to find a desired goal following disorientation. They generally do so to the exclusion of other important spatial cues. Two influential frameworks for explaining that phenomenon are provided by geometric-module theories and view-matching theories of reorientation respectively. The former posit a module that operates only on representations of the global geo- metry of three-dimensional surfaces to guide behavior. The latter place snapshots, stored representations of the subject’s two-dimensional retinal stimulation (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  14. Temporal updating, temporal reasoning, and the domain of time.Christoph Hoerl & Teresa McCormack - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42 (e278):51-77.
    We focus on three main sets of topics emerging from the commentaries on our target article. First, we discuss several types of animal behavior that commentators cite as evidence against our claim that animals are restricted to temporal updating and cannot engage in temporal reasoning. In doing so, we illustrate further how explanations of behavior in terms of temporal updating work. Second, we respond to commentators’ queries about the developmental process through which children acquire a capacity for temporal reasoning and (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  15. Animals are not cognitively stuck in time.Gerardo Viera & Eric Margolis - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42.
    We argue that animals are not cognitively stuck in time. Evidence pertaining to multisensory temporal order perception strongly suggests that animals can represent at least some temporal relations of perceived events.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  16. Deception: a functional account.Marc Artiga & Cédric Paternotte - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (3):579-600.
    Deception has recently received a significant amount of attention. One of main reasons is that it lies at the intersection of various areas of research, such as the evolution of cooperation, animal communication, ethics or epistemology. This essay focuses on the biological approach to deception and argues that standard definitions put forward by most biologists and philosophers are inadequate. We provide a functional account of deception which solves the problems of extant accounts in virtue of two characteristics: deceptive states have (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  17. Zoomorphism.Bence Nanay - 2018 - Erkenntnis 86 (1):171-186.
    Anthropomorphism is the methodology of attributing human-like mental states to animals. Zoomorphism is the converse of this: it is the attribution of animal-like mental states to humans. Zoomorphism proceeds by first understanding what kind of mental states animals have and then attributing these mental states to humans. Zoomorphism has been widely used as scientific methodology especially in cognitive neuroscience. But it has not been taken seriously as a philosophical explanatory paradigm: as a way of explaining the building blocks of the (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  18. Mirror Self‐Recognition and Self‐Identification.Alexandria Boyle - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (2):284-303.
    That great apes are the only primates to recognise their reflections is often taken to show that they are self-aware—however, there has been much recent debate about whether the self-awareness in question is psychological or bodily self-awareness. This paper argues that whilst self-recognition does not require psychological self-awareness, to claim that it requires only bodily self-awareness would leave something out. That is that self-recognition requires ‘objective self-awareness’—the capacity for first person thoughts like ‘that's me’, which involve self-identification and so are (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  19. Liberal Representationalism: A Deflationist Defense.Marc Artiga - 2016 - Dialectica 70 (3):407-430.
    The idea that only complex brains can possess genuine representations is an important element in mainstream philosophical thinking. An alternative view, which I label ‘liberal representationalism’, holds that we should accept the existence of many more full-blown representations, from activity in retinal ganglion cells to the neural states produced by innate releasing mechanisms in cognitively unsophisticated organisms. A promising way of supporting liberal representationalism is to show it to be a consequence of our best naturalistic theories of representation. However, several (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   22 citations  
  20. Es pot naturalitzar la intencionalitat?Marc Artiga - 2016 - Quaderns de Filosofia 3 (2):83-119.
    Intentionality is a central feature of our understanding of the world. We daily attribute intentional states (like beliefs, desires or perceptual states) to explain the behavior of other agents, and many theories appeal to them to understand more complex notions. Nonetheless, intentional states are puzzling entities. This article explains what intentionality is and why it is so important and problematic at the same time. Secondly, it examines various naturalistic theories, which seek to show that intentionality is compatible with a scientific (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  21. Signaling without cooperation.Marc Artiga - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (3):357-378.
    Ethological theories usually attribute semantic content to animal signals. To account for this fact, many biologists and philosophers appeal to some version of teleosemantics. However, this picture has recently came under attack: while mainstream teleosemantics assumes that representational systems must cooperate, some biologists and philosophers argue that in certain cases signaling can evolve within systems lacking common interest. In this paper I defend the standard view from this objection.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  22. Teleosemantics and Pushmi-Pullyu Representations.Marc Artiga - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (3):1-22.
    One of the main tenets of current teleosemantic theories is that simple representations are Pushmi-Pullyu states, i.e. they carry descriptive and imperative content at the same time. In the paper I present an argument that shows that if we add this claim to the core tenets of teleosemantics, then (1) it entails that, necessarily, all representations are Pushmi-Pullyu states and (2) it undermines one of the main motivations for the Pushmi-Pullyu account.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  23. Animal minds: a non-representationalist approach.Hans Johann Glock - 2013 - American Philosophical Quarterly 50 (3):213-232.
    Do animals have minds? We have known at least since Aristotle that humans constitute one species of animal. And some benighted contemporaries apart, we also know that most humans have minds. To have any bite, therefore, the question must be restricted to non-human animals, to which I shall henceforth refer simply as "animals." I shall further assume that animals are bereft of linguistic faculties. So, do some animals have minds comparable to those of humans? As regards that question, there are (...)
    Remove from this list   Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  24. Beyond Assimilationism and Differentialism. Comment on Glock.Geert Keil - 2012 - In Julian Nida-Rümelin & Elif Özmen (eds.), Welt der Gründe: Xxii. Deutscher Kongress Für Philosophie. 11.-15. September 2011 an der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Kolloquienbeiträge. Meiner. pp. 914-922.
    In a number of articles, Hans-Johann Glock has argued against the »lingualist« view that higher mental capacities are a prerogative of language-users. He has defended the »assimilationist« claim that the mental capacities of humans and of non-human animals differ only in degree. In the paper under discussion, Glock argues that animals are capable of acting for reasons, provided that reasons are construed along the lines of the new »objectivist« theory of practical reasons.
    Remove from this list   Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  25. Learning and Selection Processes.Marc Artiga - 2010 - Theoria 25 (2):197-209.
    In this paper I defend a teleological explanation of normativity, i. e., I argue that what an organism is supposed to do is determined by its etiological function. In particular, I present a teleological account of the normativity that arises in learning processes, and I defend it from some objections.
    Remove from this list   Direct download (11 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  26. Do monkeys think in metaphors? Representations of space and time in monkeys and humans.Dustin J. Merritt, Daniel Casasanto & Elizabeth M. Brannon - 2010 - Cognition 117 (2):191-202.
  27. Belief and representation in nonhuman animals.Sarah Beth Lesson, Brandon Tinklenberg & Kristin Andrews - 2009 - In Sarah Robins, John Symons & Paco Calvo (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 370-383.
    It’s common to think that animals think. The cat thinks it is time to be fed, the monkey thinks the dominant is a threat. In order to make sense of what the other animals around us do, we ascribe mental states to them. The cat meows at the door because she wants to be let in. The monkey the monkey fails the test because he doesn’t remember the answer. -/- We explain animal actions in terms of their mental states, just (...)
    Remove from this list  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  28. Ape metaphysics: Object individuation without language.Natacha Mendes, Hannes Rakoczy & Josep Call - 2008 - Cognition 106 (2):730-749.
  29. What, if anything, is represented? Objects in their worlds.David L. Thompson - manuscript
    The received Cognitive Science paradigm holds that the brain manipulates mental representations of reality. This position is problematic. My alternative to representationalism is that each organism lives in its own "world" made up of objects defined by reference to the organism’s perceptual systems. These objects act as supervenient causes on organisms without the mediation of mental representations. (1992).
    Remove from this list   Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark