It has been argued that neural data are an especially sensitive kind of personal information that could be used to undermine the control we should have over access to our mental states, and therefore need a stronger legal protection than other kinds of personal data. The Morningside Group, a global consortium of interdisciplinary experts advocating for the ethical use of neurotechnology, suggests achieving this by treating legally ND as a body organ. Although the proposal is currently shaping ND-related policies, it (...) is not clear what its conceptual and legal basis is. Treating legally something as something else requires some kind of analogical reasoning, which is not provided by the authors of the proposal. In this paper, I will try to fill this gap by addressing ontological issues related to neurocognitive processes. The substantial differences between ND and body organs or organic tissue cast doubt on the idea that the former should be covered by bodily integrity. Crucially, ND are not constituted by organic material. Nevertheless, I argue that the ND of a subject s are analogous to neurocognitive properties of her brain. I claim that s’ ND are a ‘medium independent’ property that can be characterized as natural semantic personal information about her brain and that s’ brain not only instantiates this property but also has an exclusive ontological relationship with it: This information constitutes a domain that is unique to her neurocognitive architecture. (shrink)

Orienting biases for speech may provide a foundation for language development. Although human infants show a bias for listening to speech from birth, the relation of a speech bias to later language development has not been established. Here, we examine whether infants' attention to speech directly predicts expressive vocabulary. Infants listened to speech or non-speech in a preferential listening procedure. Results show that infants' attention to speech at 12 months significantly predicted expressive vocabulary at 18 months, while indices of general (...) development did not. No predictive relationships were found for infants' attention to non-speech, or overall attention to sounds, suggesting that the relationship between speech and expressive vocabulary was not a function of infants' general attentiveness. Potentially ancient evolutionary perceptual capacities such as biases for conspecific vocalizations may provide a foundation for proficiency in formal systems such language, much like the approximate number sense may provide a foundation for formal mathematics. (shrink)

Autism research is facing profound difficulties. The lack of clinically valuable translations from the biomedical and neurosciences, the variability and heterogeneity of the diagnostic category, and the lack of control over the ‘autism epidemic,’ are among the most urgent problems facing autism today. Instead of encouraging the prevailing tendency to intensify neurobiological research on the nature of autism, I argue for an exploration of alternative disease concepts. One conceivable alternative framework for understanding disease and those we have come to call (...) autistic, can be found in the work of neurologist Kurt Goldstein. His person-centered approach provides radically new ways to investigate and intervene with the behavior we are accustomed to explain by the elusive entity called autism. (shrink)

In this paper, I will attempt to follow Winnicott's thoughts on the intrinsic connection between symbolic play and the way we understand other minds. Phenomenological, conceptual and empirical difficulties in the account will be presented and taken into consideration. Winnicott's account proves to be a fruitful guide into the issue and can help us clarify impaired symbolic play in autism.

We model three examples of beliefs that agents may have about other agents’ beliefs, and provide motivation for this conceptualization from the theory of mind literature. We assume a modal logical framework for modelling degrees of belief by partially ordered preference relations. In this setting, we describe that agents believe that other agents do not distinguish among their beliefs (‘no preferences’), that agents believe that the beliefs of other agents are in part as their own (‘my preferences’), and the special (...) case that agents believe that the beliefs of other agents are exactly as their own (‘preference refinement’). This multi-agent belief interaction is frame characterizable. We provide examples for introspective agents. We investigate which of these forms of belief interaction are preserved under three common forms of belief revision. (shrink)

I raise three puzzles concerning self-deception: (i) a conceptual paradox, (ii) a dilemma about how to understand human cognitive evolution, and (iii) a tension between the fact of self-deception and Davidson’s interpretive view. I advance solutions to the first two and lay a groundwork for addressing the third. The capacity for self-deception, I argue, is a spandrel, in Gould’s and Lewontin’s sense, of other mental traits, i.e., a structural byproduct. The irony is that the mental traits of which self-deception is (...) a spandrel/byproduct are themselves rational. (shrink)

In this paper I home in on an ethical phenomenon that is powerfully elucidated by means of enactive resources but that has, to my knowledge, not yet been explicitly addressed in the literature. The phenomenon in question concerns what I will term the paradox of moral perception, which, to be clear, does not refer to a logical but to a phenomenological-practical paradoxicality. Specifically, I have in mind the seemingly contradictory phenomenon that perceiving persons as moral subjects is at once incredibly (...) easy and incredibly difficult; it is something we do nearly effortlessly and successfully all the time without giving it much thought and it is something that often requires effort and that we fail at all the time. As I will argue, enactivism offers distinctive resources for explaining the paradoxical nature of moral perception. These resources, moreover, bring out two important dimensions of ethical life that are frequently overlooked in contemporary ethical theory: namely the embodied and socio-technical environment-embedded dimensions of moral perception and moral visibility. As I make my argument, I will be connecting enactivism with insights from David Hume’s and Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy as well as insights from the field of Epistemic Injustice. As such, I aim to situate enactivism within the larger theoretical ethical landscape; showing connections with existing ethical theories and identifying some of the ways in which enactivism offers unique contributions to our understanding of ethical life. While doing so, I will furthermore introduce two forms of moral misperception: particular moral misperception and categorial moral misperception. (shrink)

Some examples suggest that religious credences respond to evidence. Other examples suggest they are wildly unresponsive. So the examples taken together suggest there is a puzzle about whether descriptive religious attitudes respond to evidence or not. I argue for a solution to this puzzle according to which religious credences are characteristically not responsive to evidence; that is, they do not tend to be extinguished by contrary evidence. And when they appear to be responsive, it is because the agents with those (...) credences are playing what I call The Evidence Game, which in fundamental ways resembles the games of make-believe described by Walton's theory of make-believe. (shrink)

This commentary focuses on the parts of psychological game theory dealing with preference, as illustrated by team reasoning, and supports the conclusion that these theoretical notions do not contribute above and beyond existing theory in understanding social interaction. In particular, psychology and games are already bridged by a comprehensive, formal, and inherently psychological theory, interdependence theory (Kelley & Thibaut 1978; Kelley et al. 2003), which has been demonstrated to account for a wide variety of social interaction phenomena.

Mindreading, simulation, empathy and central imagining are often used interchangeably in current analytic philosophy, and typically defined as imagining what the other wants and believes – to run these states “off-line.” By imagining the other’s beliefs and desires, one will come to understand and predict his emotional and behavioural reactions. Many have suggested that films may trigger engagement in the characters’ perspectives, and one finds similar use of these terms in film theory. Imagining the characters’ states – with emphasis on (...) mental states – has for example been labelled as central imagining (Choi 2005; Smith 1995), imagining from the inside (Smith 1997), and empathetic reenactment (Currie 1995). In a similar vein, understanding the meaning of a narrative event for a character is understood as empathy (Tan 1996). These accounts all point to ways in which the spectator understands the character and the situation the character is in. Nevertheless, one also finds a different use of the term empathy in film theory, namely as a matching feeling with the character. The emphasis here is not on understanding the character and the narrative situation, but on the emotional output of the process. Often automatic, hardwired affective matching mechanisms are emphasized. This matching feeling with the character has also been discussed as empathy (Grodal 1997; Plantinga 1999; Smith 1995). While all these authors discuss what makes a spectator experience aspects of a character’s state, they point to different kinds of character engagement, and discuss it using varying terms. There also seems to be disagreement as to how film may cue the spectator to engage in these different ways. Here I offer an integrative account of empathy, where all these processes are labelled as empathic. The differences and similarities between them are explored. I argue that, broadly speaking, there are two different kinds of film, each of which elicits its own kind of empathy. Nevertheless, the common core to these kinds of engagement in a character justifies us in calling them empathy. (shrink)

The principal aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between intersubjectivity and grammar. We argue that intersubjectivity represents, on the one hand, a prerequisite for the development of language as a symbolic system, and therefore also for the development of grammar. Furthermore, we attempt to show that language, and especially grammar, codify intersubjectivity. That is to say, grammatical constructions represent the intersubjective interactions that situated agents maintain in different pragmatic contects. We call this phenomenon the meta-representational capacity of (...) language. Our main object of analysis is the development of the ditransitive construction in the Spanish language. The evolution of this construction makes it clear that there is an important correlation between the degree of complexity of the codified intersubjective interaction and grammatically obligatory nature and the prominence of the grammatical construction that codifies it: the greater the complexity, the greater its obligatoriness, and vice versa. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize Alvin Goldman's simulation theory of mindreading which involves the claim that the basic method of folk psychologically predicting behaviour is to form pretend beliefs and desires that reproduce the transitions between the mental states of others, in that way enabling to predict what the others are going to do. I argue that when it comes to simulating propositional attitudes it isn't clear whether pretend beliefs need to be invoked in order to explain relevant experimental results, (...) and whether pretend desires can be distinguished from 'real' ones as forming a separate kind of mental states. Since belief-desire model underlies the conception of pretend states in higher-level mindreading, dropping pretend attitudes from the picture isn't possible and, due to that, this model may be incoherent. Nevertheless, Goldman's theory could still survive because it includes an additional model of mindreading, but simulation is given much lesser role there. (shrink)

We argue that autism and psychosis spectrum disorders cannot be conceptualized as polar extremes of mentalizing ability. We raise two main objections: (1) the autistic-psychotic continuum, as conceptualized by the authors, excludes defining features of schizophrenia spectrum: negative symptoms, which correlate more strongly with mentalizing impairments; and (2) little evidence exists for a relationship between mentalizing ability and positive symptoms.

If reason is a real causal force,operative in some, but not all ofour cognition and conation, then itought to be possible to tell anaturalistic story that distinguishes themind which is moved byreason from the mind which is movedby forces other than reason.This essay proposes some steps towardthat end. I proceed by showingthat it is possible to reconcile certainemerging psychological ideasabout the causal powers of themind/brain with a venerablephilosophical vision of reason as the facultyof norms. My accountof reason is psychologistic, social, (...) and consistent with anevolutionary approach to mind. The account preserves thenormativity by deflating it. But I argue that onlysuch deflated normativity has any chance of beingmade naturalistically respectable. (shrink)

The fact that humans have a special relationship to each other insofar as they belong in the same species is often taken to be a morally relevant difference between humans and other animals, one which justifies a greater moral status for all humans, regardless of their individual capacities. I give some reasons why this kind of relationship is not an appropriate ground for differential treatment of humans and nonhumans. I then argue that even if relationships do matter morally species membership (...) cannot justify a difference in moral status. This has important implications because it removes one barrier to giving animals greater moral status. (shrink)

Although interesting, the hypotheses proposed by Phillips & Silverstein lack unifying structure both in specific mechanisms and in cited evidence. They provide little to support the notion that low-level sensory processing and high-level cognitive coordination share dynamic grouping by synchrony as a common processing mechanism. We suggest that more realistic large-scale modeling at multiple levels is needed to address these issues.

This article starts from the assumption that there are various innate contributions to our view of the world and explores the epistemological implications that follow from this. Specifically, it explores the idea that if certain components of our worldview have an evolutionary origin, this implies that these aspects accurately depict the world. The simple version of the argument for this conclusion is that if an aspect of mind is innate, it must be useful, and the most parsimonious explanation for its (...) usefulness is that it accurately depicts the world. There are a number of important criticisms of this argument. These include the idea that evolutionary justifications are circular, that evolved mental content and principles are not necessarily accurate, and that, if the argument is taken seriously, it has some highly dubious consequences. These criticisms necessitate various qualifications to the initial argument. Nonetheless, it is argued that, in some cases, important conclusions can be drawn about the world from an analysis of evolved contributions to our view of the world. An evolutionary approach cannot provide an ultimate justification for any belief; however, in certain circumstances, it supports the conclusion that a given belief is a reasonable first approximation. To the extent that innate content and principles pertain to topics in metaphysics, they can be viewed as a naturalistic source of metaphysical knowledge. (shrink)

This article explores how high-functioning children with autism navigate in the social world, specifically how they orient in the realm of norms and standards. In particular, this investigation focuses on rule violations episodes and sheds light on how these children account for their conduct and position themselves in the moral framework. This analysis shows that high-functioning children with autism can actively engage in discourse about norms and transgressions in an initiatory capacity, thereby displaying a mastery of social rules as a (...) guide for appropriate conduct and interpretation of others’ behavior. Furthermore, this article argues that these social skills are linked with the ability to operate with sequentially based understandings: Prior courses of action constitute for the autistic children the fundamental source for reaching an understanding of the normative mechanics of everyday life, and subsequently for constructing their own lines of conduct and themselves as moral agents. (shrink)

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind.

I examine the role of mutual gaze in social cognition. I start by discussing recent studies of joint visual attention in order to show that social cognition is operative in infancy prior to the emergence of theoretical skills required to make judgments about other people's states of mind. Such social cognition depends on the communicative potential inherent in human bodies. I proceed to examine this embodied social cognition in the context of Merleau-Ponty's views on vision. I expose some inner difficulties (...) within Merleau-Ponty's position as well as to point out the ways of resolving them by means of combined insights from developmental psychology and the analyses of self-other relations from philosophies of dialogue. (shrink)

The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension module, (...) with its own special principles and mechanisms. We show how such a metacommunicative module might have evolved, and what principles and mechanisms it might contain. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers and psychologists defending the embodied cognition research program have offered arguments against mindreading as a general model of our social understanding. The embodied cognition arguments are of two kinds: those that challenge the developmental picture of mindreading and those that challenge the alleged ubiquity of mindreading. Together, these two kinds of arguments, if successful, would present a serious challenge to the standard account of human social understanding. In this paper, I examine the strongest of these embodied cognition arguments (...) and argue that mindreading approaches can withstand the best of these arguments from embodied cognition. (shrink)

This article offers an anthropological perspective on autism, a condition at once neurological and social, which complements existing psychological accounts of the disorder, expanding the scope of inquiry from the interpersonal domain, in which autism has been predominantly examined, to the socio-cultural one. Persons with autism need to be viewed not only as individuals in relation to other individuals, but as members of social groups and communities who act, displaying both social competencies and difficulties, in relation to socially and culturally (...) ordered expectations of behavior. The article articulates a socio-cultural approach to perspective-taking in autism in three social domains: participating in conversational turn-taking and sequences; formulating situational scenarios; and interpreting socio-cultural meanings of indexical forms and behavior. Providing ethnographic data on the everyday lives of high-functioning children with autism and Asperger syndrome, the article outlines a cline of competence across the three domains, from most success in conversational turn-taking to least in inferring indexical meanings. Implications of these abilities and limitations are considered for theoretical approaches to society and culture, illuminating how members of social groups are at once shaped by, and are agents of, social life and cultural understanding. (shrink)

This article discusses some essential differences between the Cartesian and neo-Aristotelian conceptions of child development. It argues that we should prefer the neo-Aristotelian conception since it is capable of resolving the problems the Cartesian conception is confronted by. This is illustrated by discussing the neo-Aristotelian alternative to the Cartesian explanation of the development of volitional powers, and the neo-Aristotelian alternative to the Cartesian simulation theory and theory–theory account of the development of social cognition. The neo-Aristotelian conception is further elaborated by (...) discussing how it differs from both behaviorism and cognitive neuroscience. (shrink)

The kinship theory of genomic imprinting predicts that imprinted genes affect parent–child and child–child interactions. During prenatal and neonatal stages, patrigenes promote selfish and matrigenes altruistic behavior. Models predict that this imprinted gene expression pattern is reversed starting with the juvenile stage. This article explores possible effects of imprinted genes on nonverbal and simple and complex linguistic behaviors before and after the reversal. A hypothesis is discussed that is based on the observation language evolved as a new form of communicative (...) behavior. Inclusive fitness theory is used for explaining how and why new forms of communicative behaviors evolved as an extension of behaviors and gestures displayed by our predecessors. The hypothesis is elaborated through discussing a scenario of early language evolution. This scenario is used for explaining early stages in child development and for discussing possible effects of patrigenes and matrigenes on the development of children’s communicative behaviors. (shrink)

Badcock and Crespi have advanced the hypothesis that autism and schizophrenia are caused by imbalanced imprinting in the brain. They argue that an imbalance between the effects of paternally and maternally expressed genes on brain development results in either an extreme paternal (autism) or maternal brain (schizophrenia). In this paper their conceptual model is discussed and criticized since it presupposes an incoherent distinction between observable physical and hidden mental phenomena. An alternative model is discussed that may be more fruitful for (...) investigating the possible role of imprinted genes in the development of social behaviour. The development of crying and reactive crying and behaviours necessary for collaborative action are discussed as a promising research area for understanding the effects of imprinted genes. (shrink)

In this paper I assess the extent to which Daniel Dennett’s Intentional Stance Theory fits into the overall proposal for a programme on naturalizing mental content outlined by Daniel Hutto and Glenda Satne in this issue. I argue that in order to fit the proposal, two changes need to be made: the reality of intentional states should not be grounded in the reality of behavioral patterns but in the ascription-independent status of Ur-intentionality that is the at the root of all (...) intentionality, including content-involving intentonality. This is tricky since Ur-intentionality resembles ‘original intentionality’, which is a notion Dennett rejects, and the ascription-dependent status of content-involving intentionality should be kept intact. adopting the intentional stance is possible only as part of socio-cultural practices, which implies that this is an exclusively human capacity. I also argue that both changes to the theory are feasible and should be considered improvements relative to the original position developed by Dennett. (shrink)

Abstract ?Theory of Mind? (ToM) is widely held to be ubiquitous in our navigation of the social world. Recently this standard view has been contested by phenomenologists and enactivists. Proponents of the ubiquity of ToM, however, accept and effectively neutralize the intuitions behind their arguments by arguing that ToM is mostly sub-personal. This paper proposes a similar move on behalf of the phenomenologists and enactivists: it offers a novel explanation of the intuition that ToM is ubiquitous that is compatible with (...) the rejection of this ubiquity. According to this explanation, we use ToM-talk primarily to model and thereby reconstruct non-mentalizing social-cognitive processes in order to explain our assessment of the behaviour of others. The intuition that ToM is ubiquitous is the result of mistaking the model for the real thing. This explanation is argued to be more complete than the ?ToM-ist? explanation of the intuition that ToM is not ubiquitous. (shrink)

Barresi & Moore's account predicts that infants deprived of visual input will be delayed in achieving social understanding, a hypothesis that receives some support from studies of language use. by blind children. It is proposed that recently developed false belief and appearance/reality tasks be used to explore this issue further. Three possibly distracting conceptual issues are also discussed.

This article discusses recent naturalistic theories of religion from the viewpoint of how the deal with the issue of the origins of religion. It will be argued that the theories can be divided according to if they view religion as being an adaptation or not, on the other hand, and if they consider it to be mostly natural or cultural on the other. On the basis of this discussion, it is suggested that a cognitive mechanism referred to here as the (...) narrative drive seem to have a fundamental role to play in the formation of religious beliefs and, thus, in the origins of religion. (shrink)

This study draws upon naturalistic ethnographic data to expand current understandings regarding the socio-communicative capabilities and challenges of children with autism spectrum disorders in mid-childhood. Affording a view of the children’s spontaneous interactions within naturally occurring family and community settings, the study explores a range of discursive resources utilized by the children to accomplish socially reciprocal positive politeness practices in tandem with others. Emphasizing contextualized deployment of politeness forms in interaction, the practice-based conception developed here construes positive politeness as a (...) discursive process encompassing both socio-cultural and interpersonal knowledge/skills; and contributes to a perspective in which social and communicative realms are conceptualized as integrated domains of functioning. (shrink)

Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature DAVID BULLER Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005 564 pages, ISBN: 0262025795 (hbk); $37.00.

The moral nature of humanity has been debated and discussed by philosophers, theologians, and others for centuries. Only recently have neuroscientists and neuropsychologists joined the conversation by publishing a number of studies using newer brain scanning techniques directed at regions of the brain related to social behavior. Is it possible to relate particular brain structures and functions to the behavior of people, deemed evil, who violate all the tenets of proper behavior laid down by ancient and holy texts, prohibiting lying, (...) cheating, stealing, and murder? Is it possible that the recently discovered “mirror neurons” in the brain are the basis for empathy and that deficits in these brain cells lead to severe difficulty in relating socially to other people, including parents and siblings? What do we make of reports that the fusiform face area in the temporal lobe of the brain is specialized for the perception of faces and that defects in this region are seen regularly in individuals who are psychopathic. (shrink)

The debate concerning the role of intuitions in philosophy has been characterized by a fundamental disagreement between two main camps. The first, the autonomists, hold that, due to the use in philosophical investigation of appeals to intuition, most of the central questions of philosophy can in principle be answered by philosophical investigation and argument without relying on the sciences. The second, the naturalists, deny the possibility of a priori knowledge and are skeptical of the role of intuition in providing evidence (...) in philosophical inquiry. In spite of the seemingly stark and deep disagreement between the autonomist and the naturalist, in this paper I will attempt to suggest that there is a way to mount a partial defense of intuition-based philosophical practice on naturalist grounds. As will be seen, doing so will require a number of concessions that will satisfy few autonomists while simultaneously disappointing those naturalists who might have thought that all notions of the a priori had been successfully laid to rest. However, I will argue that the account proposed here will preserve those features of traditional philosophical practice that matter most and better explain the history of successes and failures of that practice, thus answering the worries of the autonomist, and that the rejection of the No A Priori Thesis attendant with the account presented here is indeed demanded by the current theories of our best scientific understanding of the mind, thus pacifying the rabid naturalistic critic of any version of apriorism. (shrink)

Theory of Mind (ToM, also referred to as mentalising; Fonagy, 1991; Frith & Frith, 2006) was coined by primatologists, Premack and Woodruff (1978) and adapted in developmental psychology to refer t...

Since the publication of Fodor's (1983) The Modularity of Mind, there have been quite a few discussions of cognitive modularity among cognitive scientists. Generally, in those discussions, modularity means a property of specialized cognitive processes or a domain-specific body of information. In actuality, scholars understand modularity in many different ways. Different characterizations of modularity and modules were proposed and discussed, but they created misunderstanding and confusion. In this article, I classified and analyzed different approaches to modularity and argued for the (...) unity of modularity. Modularity is a multidimensional property consisting of features from several dimensions specifying different aspects of cognition. Among those, there are core features of modularity, and these core features form a cross-dimensional unity. Despite the diverse and liberal characterizations, modularity contributes to cognitive science because of the unity of the core features. (shrink)

Peter Strawson holds that on a proper conception of personhood, the problem of Other Minds does not arise. I suggest that the viability of his proposal depends on a particular account of person perception. I argue that neither the theory theory nor the simulation theory of mindreading constitutes a suitable basis for this account. I then go on to defend Peter Hobson's notion of 'feeling perception' as an intersubjectivist alternative that, if properly developed, delivers a basis for a viable account (...) of person perception. In developing that alternative, I draw on John Campbell's suggestion that self-understanding is constituted, in part, by an understanding of oneself as a cause of many events. (shrink)

The question of what is shared in joint action has been discussed mainly with reference to the notion of collective intentionality. The problem of how to account for intentional states that are shared between two or more jointly engaged creatures is particularly relevant for actions that involve distal intentions. Yet there is another important kind of joint action, which so far has received less interest, at least by philosophers. This kind of action can be described in terms of a shared (...) motor engagement of two or more creatures with their surroundings. In this paper, I address the question of what is shared in such motor engagements. I suggest that joint motor actions come off through sharing particular kinds of feelings. In order to flesh out what it means to share feelings, I introduce the notion of ‘cross-creature embodiment’—the idea that a certain type of embodied mental event is constitutively tied to the body state of another, perceptually present creature in broadly the same way in which it is tied to the experiencing creature’s own. I end by suggesting that this notion makes available a new, albeit tentative, interpretation of recent neuroscientific evidence. (shrink)

RésuméFred Dretske a développé, à titre de composante de sa théorie de la conscience, une théorie de I'introspection. Celle-ciprésente une plausibilityé indépendante, elle résiste à des objections qui affectent nombre d'autres théories et elle suggère des liens très féconds dans plusieurs domaines de la science cognitive. La version qu'en donne Dretske est restreinte à la connaissance introspective des états perceptuels. Mon objectif ici est d'étendre la théorie à tous les états mentaux. Le mécanisme qui est fondamental dans cette approche est (...) celui de la «conscience déplacée», c'est-à-dire le fait d'en venir à connaître quelque chose via l'expérience consciente que nous avons de quelque chose d'autre. Nous atteignons la connaissance introspective par l'application à notre propre expérience consciente du monde (et de nos corps) de la connaissance que nous avons de ce qui est de l'ordre du mental. (shrink)

Motivated by accounts of concept use in autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) and a computational model of weak central coherence (O'Loughlin and Thagard, 2000) we examined comprehension and production vocabulary in typically-developing children and those with ASD and Down syndrome (DS). Controlling for frequency, familiarity, length and imageability, Colorado Meaningfulness played a hitherto unremarked role in the vocabularies of children with ASD. High Colorado Meaningful words were underrepresented in the comprehension vocabularies of 2- to 12-year-olds with ASD. The Colorado Meaningfulness of (...) a word is a measure of how many words can be associated with it. Situations in which high Colorado Meaningfulness words are encountered are typically highly variable, and words with High Colorado Meaningfulness often involve extensive use of context. Our data suggest that the number of contexts in which a particular word can appear has a role in determining vocabulary in ASD. This suggestion is consistent with the weak central coherence theory of autism. (shrink)

Expanding the debate about empathy with human beings, animals, or fictional characters to include human-robot relationships, this paper proposes two different perspectives from which to assess the scope and limits of empathy with robots: the first is epistemological, while the second is normative. The epistemological approach helps us to clarify whether we can empathize with artificial intelligence or, more precisely, with social robots. The main puzzle here concerns, among other things, exactly what it is that we empathize with if robots (...) do not have emotions or beliefs, since they do not have a consciousness in an elaborate sense. However, by comparing robots with fictional characters, the paper shows that we can still empathize with robots and that many of the existing accounts of empathy and mindreading are compatible with such a view. By so doing, the paper focuses on the significance of perspective-taking and claims that we also ascribe to robots something like a perspectival experience. The normative approach examines the moral impact of empathizing with robots. In this regard, the paper critically discusses three possible responses: strategic, anti-barbarizational, and pragmatist. The latter position is defended by stressing that we are increasingly compelled to interact with robots in a shared world and that to take robots into our moral consideration should be seen as an integral part of our self- and other-understanding. (shrink)