Learning

Formal representations drawn from rational choice theory have been used in a variety of ways to fruitfully model the way in which actual agents are approximately rational. This analysis requires bridging between ideal normative theory, in which the mechanisms, representations, and other such internal parts are in an important sense interchangeable, and descriptive psychological theory, in which understanding the internal workings of the agent is often the main goal of the entire inquiry. In this paper, I raise a problem brought (...) on by this gap: for almost every theory of approximate rationality, there will be an empirically indistinguishable alternative that individuates the parts of the agent in a significantly different way. (shrink)

Heyes’ book is an essential addition to the literature on human uniqueness. Her main claim is that the key human cognitive capacities are products of cultural rather than genetic evolution. Among these distinctively human capacities are causal understanding, episodic memory, imitation, mindreading, and normative thinking. According to Heyes, they emerged not by genetic mutation but by innovations in cognitive development. She calls these mechanisms ‘cognitive gadgets.’ This is perhaps one of the best and most comprehensive views of human cognitive evolution (...) advanced in recent years. (shrink)

The mind's basic task is to organize adaptive behaviour. I argue that necessary conditions to achieve this are acquiring a 'body-self', a differentiated perception, motor intuition, and motor control. The latter three can be learnied implicitly by crosswise comparing the perceived actual situation, the desired situation, the perceived result and the anticipated result.

A theory of learning for the future advocates the teaching of a preparedness to respond in a creative way to difference and otherness. This includes an ability to act imaginatively in situations of uncertainties. John Dewey’s pragmatism holds the key to such a learning theory his view of the continuous meetings of individuals and environments as experimental and playful. That pragmatism has not yet been acknowledged as a relevant learning theory for the future may be due to the immediate connotation (...) and the many interpretations associated with the term ‘experience’, which is at the heart of Dewey’s educational thinking. Dewey defi ned experience in a way that is not well understood within educational research, and in a way that is easily confused with the term ‘experiential learning’. The latter refers to the importance of participants’ ‘experiences’ derived from bodily actions and stored in memory as more or less tacit knowledge. (shrink)

The human mind is capable of entertaining an astounding range of thoughts. These thoughts are composed of concepts or ideas, which are the building blocks of thoughts. This book is about where all of these concepts come from and the psychological structures that ultimately account for their acquisition. We argue that the debate over the origins of concepts, known as the rationalism-empiricism debate, has been widely misunderstood—not just by its critics but also by researchers who have been active participants in (...) the debate. Part I fundamentally rethinks the foundations of the debate. Part II defends a rationalist view of the origins of concepts according to which many concepts across many conceptual domains are either innate or acquired via rationalist learning mechanisms. Our case is built around seven distinct arguments, which together form a large-scale inference to the best explanation argument for our account. Part III then defends this account against the most important empiricist objections and alternatives. Finally, Part IV argues against an extreme but highly influential rationalist view—Jerry Fodor’s infamous view that it is impossible to learn new concepts and his related radical concept nativism, which holds that essentially all lexical concepts are innate. Throughout the book, our discussion blends philosophical and theoretical reflection with consideration of a broad range of empirical work drawn from many different disciplines studying the mind, providing a thorough update to the rationalism-empiricism debate in philosophy and cognitive science and a major new rationalist account of the origins of concepts. [An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence]. (shrink)

This article provides a conceptual account of causal understanding by connecting current psychological research on time and causality with philosophical debates on the causal asymmetry. I argue that causal relations are viewed as asymmetric because they are understood in temporal terms. I investigate evidence from causal learning and reasoning in both children and adults: causal perception, the temporal priority principle, and the use of temporal cues for causal inference. While this account does not suffice for correct inferences of causal structure, (...) I show it to serve as a preliminary understanding of causal concepts as asymmetric, that later incorporates other types of evidence. This approach supplies causal models with an asymmetric concept of causation that underlies hypotheses about causal structure, as I will illustrate from the framework of the knowledge-based causal induction model. I further argue for an integrating perspective, showing how the understanding of causes as preceding their effects underlies both psychological models and philosophical debates over time and the causal asymmetry, particularly regarding problem cases such as simultaneous causation or backwards causation, and the conceptual connection between causation and action. (shrink)

First impressions suggest the following contrast between perception and memory: perception generates new beliefs and reasons, justification, or evidence for those beliefs; memory preserves old beliefs and reasons, justification, or evidence for those beliefs. In this paper, I argue that reflection on perceptual learning gives us reason to adopt an alternative picture on which perception plays both generative and preservative epistemic roles.

This is a piece written for interdisciplinary audiences and contains very little philosophy. It looks into whether, or in what sense, pains and pleasures are emotions.

Organizational learning can be described as a transfer of individuals’ cognitive mental models to shared mental models. Employees, seeking the same colleagues for advice, are structurally equivalent, and the aim of the paper is to study if the concept can act as a conduit for organizational learning. It is argued that the mimicking of colleagues’ advice seeking structures will induce structural equivalence and transfer the accuracy of individuals’ cognitive mental models to shared mental models. Taking a dyadic level of analysis (...) authors revisit a classical case and present novel data analyses.The empirical results indicate that the mimicking of advice seeking structures can alter cognitive accuracy. It is discussed the findings’ implications for organization learning theory and practice, addressed the study’s limitations, and suggested avenues for future research. (shrink)

J. J. OʼDonnell is one those scholars whose learning is assumed rather than displayed. As a result, his brief approach to the long-terms effects of the computer revolution onreading and higher education feels like a bracing, sophisticated exchange of ideas. Like conversation, O'Donnellʼs thesis is not terribly unified or orderly. He often makessidetracks from his focus on high technology and literacy into explaining such interestingthings as how we choose our cultural ancestry instead of merely evolving out of it, the errors (...) of current education, and perhaps more than you ever wanted to know aboutother avatars of the word such as St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and Cassiodorus. Greatcover too. (shrink)

Walter S. Athearn's "An Introduction to the Study of the Mind" delves into the essence and functions of the human mind, exploring its immaterial, unitary, self-active, self-conscious, and abiding attributes. Athearn emphasizes the mind's immortality and constancy despite bodily changes, underscoring the importance of effective study habits and emotional management for cognitive efficiency. The work highlights the significant impact of early experiences on mental development and stresses the need for balanced growth in knowledge, appreciation, and conduct to prevent mental disorders. (...) Through insightful examples and practical guidance, Athearn provides a comprehensive framework for understanding the mind's role in shaping individual destiny and the importance of listening to the voice of conscience. (shrink)

It is widely presumed that intuitions about thought experiments can help overturn philosophical theories. It is also widely presumed, albeit implicitly, that if thought experiments play any epistemic role in overturning philosophical theories, it is via intuition. In this paper, I argue for a different, neglected epistemic role of philosophical thought experiments, that of improving some reasoner’s appreciation both of what a theory’s predictions consist in and of how those predictions tie to elements of the theory. I call this role (...) theory clarification. I show that theory clarification does not proceed via intuition, and I argue that it is only in conjunction with theory clarification that intuitions about thought experiments can help overturn philosophical theories. I close by sketching how a more radical view might be true, on which thought experiments help justify the rejection of philosophical theories exclusively by clarifying theories, not by any intuitions those thought experiments might generate. (shrink)

This work investigates one of the most widespread yet elusive ideas about our experience of art: the idea that there is something cognitively valuable in engaging with great artworks, or, in other words, that we learn from them. This claim and the age-old controversy that surrounds it are reconsidered in light of the psychological and neuroscientific literature on learning, in one of the first systematic efforts to bridge the gap between philosophical and scientific inquiries on the topic. The work has (...) five chapters. Chapter 1 lays down its conceptual bases: it explains what learning is taken to be in the current philosophical debate and it points out how Bayesian cognitive science (particularly in its predictive processing formulations) might be well-suited to capture the kind of learning involved in our engagement with the arts. The following chapters test this latter hypothesis with respect to particular art forms, namely literature and literary language (Chapter 2), narrative (Chapter 3), and visual art, music and motor activities (Chapter 4). The fine-grained discussions conducted in each of these areas will enable us to see that the relationship between art and learning is indeed fundamental and pervasive. The final chapter (Chapter 5) examines the consequences of this fact for our understanding of the role of art in our epistemic practices, its ultimate usefulness and value, and its place in the interdisciplinary study of the human mind. The upshot is a novel and wide-ranging picture, both philosophically informed and empirically sound, that bypasses many of the problems and dead ends of the current philosophical debate on the topic and captures the deep sense in which art and learning are interrelated. (shrink)

High school students are in the stage of Adolescence and it is the time for developing independence. Typically, adolescents exercise their independence by questioning and sometimes by breaking rules. Parents and teachers must play a major role in supporting & influencing the children positively by their ethical & appropriate approaches. Teachers in school as well as parent at home, often wonder how to disciple a child and to mould their behaviour so to bring up the child with virtues. Although some (...) children truly have challenging behaviours regardless of what strategies to try, many children just need to have the adults in their lives make changes in the way they react, respond, or interact with them. It is also a great responsibility of the teacher in school to have positive approach towards students. If not there are possibilities in change of behaviour among students & leads to several problems. For example, frequent episodes of fighting, scholastic backwardness, substance abuse; antisocial or institutional activities, destructive behaviour and change in attitude in students are much more significant than isolated episodes of the same activities. Other warning signs include deterioration of performance at school and running away from home. This research paper’s aim is the teacher-students relationship and its impact on the behaviour of High school students. The objectives are to know the teachers attitudes both positive and negative towards students and its impact to bring positive as well as negative behaviour change in the students. The study has reported that students are often facing emotional problems by the negative approach of the teachers. It is recommended that to create awareness among teachers in the school for the smooth handling the children with the positive approaches. 50 high school students; 25 girls and 25 boys were taken and interview schedule is used. Both the primary and secondary methods are used and the study is descriptive in nature. (shrink)

Suppose that you are at a live jazz show. The drummer begins a solo. You see the cymbal jolt and you hear the clang. But in addition seeing the cymbal jolt and hearing the clang, you are also aware that the jolt and the clang are part of the same event. Casey O’Callaghan (forthcoming) calls this awareness “intermodal feature binding awareness.” Psychologists have long assumed that multimodal perceptions such as this one are the result of a subpersonal feature binding mechanism (...) (see Vatakis and Spence, 2007, Kubovy and Schutz, 2010, Pourtois et al., 2000, and Navarra et al., 2012). I present new evidence against this. I argue that there is no automatic feature binding mechanism that couples features like the jolt and the clang together. Instead, when you experience the jolt and the clang as part of the same event, this is the result of an associative learning process. The cymbal’s jolt and the clang are best understood as a single learned perceptual unit, rather than as automatically bound. I outline the specific learning process in perception called “unitization,” whereby we come to “chunk” the world into multimodal units. Unitization has never before been applied to multimodal cases. Yet I argue that this learning process can do the same work that intermodal binding would do, and that this issue has important philosophical implications. Specifically, whether we take multimodal cases to involve a binding mechanism or an associative process will have impact on philosophical issues from Molyneux’s question to the question of how active or passive we consider perception to be. (shrink)

People cannot contemplate a proposition without believing that proposition. A model of belief fixation is sketched and used to explain hitherto disparate, recalcitrant, and somewhat mysterious psychological phenomena and philosophical paradoxes. Toward this end I also contend that our intuitive understanding of the workings of introspection is mistaken. In particular, I argue that propositional attitudes are beyond the grasp of our introspective capacities. We learn about our beliefs from observing our behavior, not from introspecting our stock beliefs. -/- The model (...) of belief fixation offered in the dissertation poses a novel dilemma for theories of rationality. One might have thought that the ability to contemplate ideas while withholding assent is a necessary condition on rationality. In short, it seems that rational creatures shouldn‘t just form their beliefs based on whatever they happen to think. However, it seems that we are creatures that automatically and reflexively form our beliefs based on whatever propositions we happen to consider. Thus, either the rational requirement that states that we must have evidence for our beliefs must be jettisoned or we must accept the conclusion that we are necessarily irrational. (shrink)

Mathematical thinking skills are very important in mathematics, both to learn math or as learning goals. Thinking skills can be seen from the description given answers in solving mathematical problems faced. Mathematical thinking skills can be seen from the types, levels, and process. Proportionally questions given to students at universities in Indonesia (semester I, III, V, and VII). These questions are a matter of description that belong to the higher-level thinking. Students choose 5 of 8 given problem. Qualitatively, the answers (...) were analyzed by descriptive to see the tendency to think mathematically used in completing the test. The results show that students tend to choose the issues relating to the calculation. They are more use cases, examples and not an example, to evaluate the conjecture and prove to belong to the numeric argumentation. Used mathematical thinking students are very personal (intelligence, interest, and experience), and the situation (problems encountered). Thus, the level of half of the students are not guaranteed and shows the level of mathematical thinking. (shrink)

In LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited, Jerry Fodor argues that concept learning of any kind—even for complex concepts—is simply impossible. In order to avoid the conclusion that all concepts, primitive and complex, are innate, he argues that concept acquisition depends on purely noncognitive biological processes. In this paper, we show (1) that Fodor fails to establish that concept learning is impossible, (2) that his own biological account of concept acquisition is unworkable, and (3) that there are in fact (...) many promising general models for explaining how concepts are learned. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop a novel account of concept acquisition for an atomistic theory of concepts. Conceptual atomism is rarely explored in cognitive science because of the feeling that atomistic treatments of concepts are inherently nativistic. My model illustrates, on the contrary, that atomism does not preclude the learning of a concept.