Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at (...) work. In this paper. we show how this argument by analogy is flowed with respect to the case of second-order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states. (shrink)

Cognitive representations are typically analysed in terms of content, vehicle and format. While current work on formats appeals to intuitions about external representations, such as words and maps, in this paper we develop a computational view of formats that does not rely on intuitions. In our view, formats are individuated by the computational profiles of vehicles, i.e., the set of constraints that fix the computational transformations vehicles can undergo. The resulting picture is strongly pluralistic, it makes space for a (...) variety of different formats, and is intimately tied to the computational approach to cognition in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This article describes a representation-based framework of distributed cognition. This framework considers distributed cognition as a cognitive system whose structures and processes are distributed between internal and external representations, across a group of individuals, and across space and time. The major issue for distributed research, under this framework, are the distribution, transformation, and propagation of information across the components of the distributed cognitive system and how they affect the performance of the system as a whole. To demonstrate (...) the value of this representation-based approach, the framework was used to describe and explain an important, challenging, and controversial issue — the concept of affordance. (shrink)

The present study evaluates the cognitive representation of a kicking movement performed by a human and a humanoid robot, and how they are represented in experts and novices of soccer and robotics, respectively. To learn about the expertise-dependent development of memory structures, we compared the representation structures of soccer experts and robot experts concerning a human and humanoid robot kicking movement. We found different cognitive representation structures for both expertise groups under two different motor performance (...) conditions . In general, the expertise relies on the perceptual-motor knowledge of the human motor system. Thus, the soccer experts’ cognitive representation of the humanoid robot movement is dominated by their representation of the corresponding human movement. Additionally, our results suggest that robot experts, in contrast to soccer experts, access functional features of the technical system of the humanoid robot in addition to their perceptual-motor knowledge about the human motor system. Thus, their perceptual-motor and neuro-functional machine representation are integrated into a cognitive representation of the humanoid robot movement. (shrink)

This article describes a representation-based framework of distributed cognition. This framework considers distributed cognition as a cognitive system whose structures and processes are distributed between internal and external representations, across a group of individuals, and across space and time. The major issue for distributed research, under this framework, are the distribution, transformation, and propagation of information across the components of the distributed cognitive system and how they affect the performance of the system as a whole. To demonstrate (...) the value of this representation-based approach, the framework was used to describe and explain an important, challenging, and controversial issue — the concept of affordance. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that properties of cognitive/conceptual representations and formal‐logical structures of linguistic meaning can be inter‐translated, recast, transformed into one another, and so united together, even though cognitive/conceptual representations and formal‐logical structures of linguistic meaning are apparently distinct in ontology and divergent in their form or character. While cognitive/conceptual representations are ultimately rooted in sensory‐motor systems, formal‐logical structures of linguistic meaning are abstractions detached from and independent of the actualized world. This paper sketches out (...) the foundations of how representations of linguistic meaning in terms of cognitive/conceptual structures in Cognitive/Conceptual Semantics can be unified with those in terms of formal‐logical structures in Formal Semantics. This is done by recasting cognitive/conceptual representations in terms of formal‐logical structures of linguistic meaning and re‐encoding formal‐logical structures of linguistic meaning in terms of cognitive/conceptual representations. Then, these two types of semantic representations, thus shown representationally equivalent, will be related to a series of derivations across levels in neuronal networks and dynamics. The general discussion on unifying cognitive/conceptual representations of linguistic meaning with formal‐logical structures is contextualized within the broader context of theorizing in cognitive science. (shrink)

Product differentiation has emerged as a central dynamic in contemporary agrofood systems. Departure from the mode of standardization emblematic of agrofood modernization raises questions about future technical trajectories and the ways in which learning will be sustained. This article examines two innovation trajectories: the rapid coupling of biotechnologies and information technologies to yield products differentiated by constituent components—a model based on a cognitive logic of decomposition/ recomposition—and the proliferation of product networks that mobilize distinctive, localized resources to create complete (...) identities—a model based on a cognitive logic of identity. The article analyzes the information structures—institutional mechanisms that support information exchange and learning—in each of these opposed development paradigms. We find that knowledge creation under each of the logics occurs through mechanisms not recognized within the respective paradigms. On this basis, we derive institutional hybridity as a fundamental resource in systems of innovation. (shrink)

Theorizing about religious ritual systems from a cognitive viewpoint involves (1) modeling cognitive processes and their products and (2) demonstrating their influence on religious behavior. Particularly important for such an approach to the study of religious ritual is the modeling of participants' representations of ritual form. In pursuit of that goal, we presented in Rethinking Religion a theory of religious ritual form that involved two commitments. The theory’s first commitment is that the cognitive apparatus for the (...) class='Hi'>representation of action in general is the same system deployed for the representation of religious ritual form. The differences between everyday action and religious ritual action turn out to be fairly minor from the standpoint of their cognitive representation. This system for the representation of action includes representations of agents. Whether we focus on an everyday action such as closing a door or a ritual action such as initiating a person into a religious group, our understanding of these forms of behavior as actions at all turns critically on recognizing agents. The theory's second crucial commitment (1990, p. 61) is that the roles of culturally postulated superhuman agents (CPS-agents hereafter) in participants' representations of religious rituals will prove pivotal in accounting for a wide variety of those rituals' properties. On our view religious ritual systems typically involve presumptions about CPS-agents. This theoretical commitment is orthogonal to the pervasive assumption throughout the study of religion that only meanings matter. By contrast, we hold that other things matter too (specifically, cognitive representations of religious ritual form). Large conflicts lurk behind the previous sentences but we cannot adequately address them here. For now we will only identify two of the most fundamental and comment on them briefly. First, amazingly (by our lights anyway), our claim that (conceptual) commitments to the existence of CPS-agents is the most important recurrent feature of religion across cultures is quite controversial.. (shrink)

Cognitive theory (CT) is currently the most widely acknowledged framework used to describe the psychological processes in affective disorders like depression. The purpose of this paper is to assess the philosophical assumptions upon which CT rests. It is argued that CT must be revised due to significant flaws in many of these philosophical assumptions. The paper contains suggestions as to how these problems could be overcome in a manner that would secure philosophical accuracy, while also providing an account that (...) is better suited to explaining some of the cognitive, emotional, and bodily manifestations of affective disorders. (shrink)

Naturalistic theories of representation seek to specify the conditions that must be met for an entity to represent another entity. Although these approaches have been relatively successful in certain areas, such as communication theory or genetics, many doubt that they can be employed to naturalize complex cognitive representations. In this essay I identify some of the difficulties for developing a teleosemantic theory of cognitive representations and provide a strategy for accommodating them: to look into models of signaling (...) in evolutionary game theory. I show how these models can be used to formulate teleosemantics and expand it in new directions. (shrink)

In their scholarly target article, Gilead et al. explain how abstract mental representations and the predictive brain enable prospection and time-traveling. However, their exclusive focus on intrapsychic capacities misses an important point, namely, the degree to which mind and brain are tuned by the environment. This neglected aspect of adaptive cognition is discussed and illustrated from a cognitive-ecological perspective.

Natural language meaning has properties of both (embodied) cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures. But it is not clear how they actually relate to one another. This article argues that how properties of cognitive representations and formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning can be united remains one of the puzzles in cognitive science. That is primarily because formal/mathematical structures of natural language meaning are abstract, logical, and truth‐conditional properties, whereas cognitive/conceptual representations are embodied and grounded in sensory‐motor (...) systems. After reviewing the current progress, this work offers, in outline, the general formulations that show how these two different kinds of representations for semantic structures can (potentially) be unified and also proposes three desiderata for testing, in brain dynamics, the mathematical equivalence between formal symbolic representations (and their transitions), and neuronal population codes (and their transitions). (shrink)

In this paper we claim that the notion of cognitive representation (and scientific representation in particular) is irreducibly plural. By means of an analogy with the minimalist conception of truth, we show thatthis pluralism is compatible with a generally deflationary attitude towards representation. We then explore the extent and nature of representational pluralism by discussing the positive and negative analogies between the inferential conception of representation advocated by one of us and the minimalist conception of (...) truth. (shrink)

In this introduction to the special issue on time and viewpoint in narrative discourse, we highlight the central contributions of the issue concerning the relation between the linguistic construal and cognitive representation of time and viewpoint. We explain how linguistic and gestural cues guide the representation of narrative time progression and argue that this representation involves various cognitive operations regulating the alignment between the viewpoints of narrator, addressee, and narrative characters. These operations are steered by (...) a variety of linguistic phenomena, including verb tense, adverbs, demonstratives, reduplication and negation, as well as body partitioning. We discuss how genre characteristics influence the relation between the linguistic and cognitive representation of time and viewpoint. Finally, we explain how the analyses presented in the various papers both demonstrate and clarify how the cognitive representation of time in narrative discourse relies on the human capacity to simultaneously manage multiple viewpoints, leading to the conclusion that time and viewpoint are closely related in the representation of narrative discourse. (shrink)

In this paper we claim that the notion of cognitive representation is irreducibly plural. By means of an analogy with the minimalist conception of truth, we show that this pluralism is compatible with a generally deflationary attitude towards representation. We then explore the extent and nature of representational pluralism by discussing the positive and negative analogies between the inferential conception of representation advocated by one of us and the minimalist conception of truth.

Two aspects of Tomasello et al.'s account would benefit from further elaboration: (1) the construction of dialogic cognitive representations through social interaction, and (2) the cognitive consequences of operating with such representations. Vygotskian ideas on internalisation and verbal mediation may help us better to understand how dialogic cognitive representations can transform human cognition.

Latimer & Stevens (1997) develop a useful framework for discussing issues surrounding the definition and explanation of perceptual gestalts. They use this framework to raise some doubts about the possibility of “holistic” perceptual processing. However, I suspect that these doubts ultimately stem from assumptions about the nature of representation and processing in the brain, rather than from an analysis of part/whole concepts. I attempt to spell out these assumptions, and sketch an alternative perspective (deriving from Gestalt theory) that has (...) the potential to make sense of holism in perception. (shrink)

An influential view in cognitive science is that computation in cognitive systems is semantic, conceptually depending on representation: to compute is to manipulate representations. I argue that accepting the non-semantic teleomechanistic view of computation lays the ground for a promising alternative strategy, in which computation helps to explain and naturalise representation, rather than the other way around. I show that this computation-based approach to representation presents six decisive advantages over the semantic view. I claim that (...) it can improve the two most influential current theories of representation, teleosemantics and structural representation, by providing them with precious tools to tackle some of their main shortcomings. In addition, the computation-based approach opens up interesting new theoretical paths for the project of naturalising representation, in which teleology plays a role in individuating computations, but not representations. (shrink)

Book review of Danks, D. (2014) Unifying the Mind: Cognitive Representations as Graphical Models.

Introduction: Something on the State of the Art 1 I. Functionalism and Realism 1. Operationalism and Ordinary Language 35 2. The Appeal to Tacit Knowledge in Psychological Explanations 63 3. What Psychological States are Not 79 4. Three Cheers for Propositional Attitudes 100 II. Reduction and Unity of Science 5. Special Sciences 127 6. Computation and Reduction 146 III. Intensionality and Mental Representation 7. Propositional Attitudes 177 8. Tom Swift and His Procedural Grandmother 204 9. Methodological Solipsism Considered as (...) a Research Strategy in Cognitive Psychology 225 IV. Nativism 10. The Present Status of the Innateness Controversy 257 Notes 317. (shrink)

How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Systematicity of Inference The Systematicity of Cognitive Representations The Compositionality of Representations Another Systematicity Argument Can Functional Combinatorialism Explain the Systematic Relations in Thought? Conclusion.

Most areas of the cognitive and social sciences assume that knowledge representations are constructed and used during communication and that much of its content is social. Those of us who build computer models of comprehension and conversation are forced to be explicit about the nature of these knowledge representations and affiliated processes. There are some conditions when knowledge is not sufficiently social, and other conditions when knowledge is overly grounded in social mechanisms. The argument is advanced that constraints, coherence, (...) and precision are very much at the heart of an explanation of the nature and amount of social knowledge. Asocial content reigns supreme when the referential world knowledge is highly constrained, coherently structured, and precisely specified. The social context of knowledge construction becomes progressively more influential to the extent to that world knowledge is vague, open-ended, imprecise, underspecified, and fragmentary. (shrink)

Epistemic Logic is our basic universal science, the method of our cognitive confrontation in reality to prove the truth of our basic cognitions and theories. Hence, by proving their true representation of reality we can self-control ourselves in it, and thus refuting the Berkeleyian solipsism and Kantian a priorism. The conception of epistemic logic is that only by proving our true representation of reality we achieve our knowledge of it, and thus we can prove our cognitions to (...) be either true or rather false, and otherwise they are doubtful. Therefore, truth cannot be separated from being proved and we cannot hold anymore the principle of excluded middle, as it is with formal semantics of metaphysical realism. In distinction, the intuitionistic logic is based on subjective intellectual feeling of correctness in constructing proofs, and thus it is epistemologically encapsulated in the metaphysical subject. However, epistemic logic is our basic science which enable us to prove the truth of our cognitions, including the epistemic logic itself. (shrink)

Research on brain or cognitive/affective processes, culture, social interaction, and structural analysis are overlapping but often independent ways humans have attempted to understand the origins of their evolution, historical, and contemporary development. Each level seeks to employ its own theoretical concepts and methods for depicting human nature and categorizing objects and events in the world, and often relies on different sources of evidence to support theoretical claims. Each level makes reference to different temporal bandwidths (milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours, days, (...) months, years, decades, and centuries) and focuses on different spatio-temporal activities and controlled and non-controlled stimulus conditions. Biological mechanisms and environmental pressures for survival simultaneously created a gradual intersection and enhancement of cognitive/affective skills, cultural practices, and changes in collaborative social interaction and communicative skills. The evolution of a given level of analysis is assumed to have been incremental and overlapping. These innovative and independent ways humans have learned to characterize their brain or cognitive/affective and social/economic/political life often depend on unexamined, representational re-descriptions or cognitive/affective and socio-cultural devices and forms of communication that facilitate the depiction of practices and beliefs we attribute to respondents or subjects and research colleagues. (shrink)

There are individual and cultural differences in how memories of our emotions are cognitively represented. This article examines the cognitive representation of emotions in different cultures, as a result of emotional (in)consistency in different cultures. Using a continuous semantic priming task, we showed in two studies that individuals who were less emotionally consistent across relationships have stronger associations of their emotions within those relationships. Further, we found (in Study 2) that in a culture characterised by higher levels of (...) emotional inconsistency across relationships (Singapore), stronger associations between emotions within relationships were found than in a culture characterised by emotional consistency (USA). This cultural difference in cognitive representation was fully mediated by individual differences in cross-situational consistency levels. (shrink)

In various contexts and for various reasons, writers often define cognitive processes and architectures as those involving representational states and structures. Similarly, cognitive theories are also often delineated as those that invoke representations. In this paper, I present several reasons for rejecting this way of demarcating the cognitive. Some of the reasons against defining cognition in representational terms are that doing so needlessly restricts our theorizing, it undermines the empirical status of the representational theory of mind, and (...) it encourages wildly deflationary and explanatorily vacuous conceptions of representation. After criticizing this outlook, I sketch alternative ways we might try to capture what is distinctive about cognition and cognitive theorizing. (shrink)

Most infant cognitive studies use visual fixation time as the measure of interest. There are, however, some serious methodological and theoretical concerns regarding what these studies reveal about infant cognition and how their results ought to be interpreted. We propose a Bayesian modeling framework which helps address these concerns. This framework allows us to more precisely formulate hypotheses about infants’ cognitive representations, formalize “linking hypotheses” that relate infants’ visual fixation behavior with stimulus complexity, and better determine what questions (...) a given experiment can and cannot answer. (shrink)

In this paper, we defend a novel, multidimensional account of representational unification, which we distinguish from integration. The dimensions of unity are simplicity, generality and scope, non-monstrosity, and systematization. In our account, unification is a graded property. The account is used to investigate the issue of how research traditions contribute to representational unification, focusing on embodied cognition in cognitive science. Embodied cognition contributes to unification even if it fails to offer a grand unification of cognitive science. The study (...) of this failure shows that unification, contrary to what defenders of mechanistic explanation claim, is an important mechanistic virtue of research traditions. (shrink)