Switch to: References

Add citations

You must login to add citations.
  1. (1 other version)Scripts and Social Cognition.Gen Eickers - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (54):1565-1587.
    To explain how social cognition normally serves us in real life, we need to ask which factors contribute to specific social interactions. Recent accounts, and mostly pluralistic models, have started incorporating contextual and social factors in explanations of social cognition. In this paper, I further motivate the importance of contextual and identity factors for social cognition. This paper presents scripts as an alternative resource in social cognition that can account for contextual and identity factors. Scripts are normative and context-sensitive knowledge (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Morgan’s Quaker gun and the species of belief.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2023 - Philosophical Perspectives 37 (1):119-144.
    In this article, I explore how researchers’ metaphysical commitments can be conducive—or unconducive—to progress in animal cognition research. The methodological dictum known as Morgan’s Canon exhorts comparative psychologists to countenance the least mentalistic fair interpretation of animal actions. This exhortation has frequently been misread as a blanket condemnation of mentalistic interpretations of animal behaviors that could be interpreted behavioristically. But Morgan meant to demand only that researchers refrain from accepting default interpretations of (apparent) actions until other fair interpretations have been (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Going Dennettian about Gricean communication.Ronald J. Planer - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    Grice’s analysis of human communication has proven to be highly influential among many philosophers and cognitive scientists, both past and present. At the same time, it has long been recognized that his analysis faces some difficult objections. In particular, a number of theorists have objected to the account Grice provides of the mental states and processes of those engaged in communication. For these theorists, communication as conceived of by Grice has seemed too mentally demanding and complex to be a good (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Scripts and Social Cognition.Gen Eickers - 2024 - Ergo 10 (54):1565-1587.
    To explain how social cognition normally serves us in real life, we need to ask which factors contribute to specific social interactions. Recent accounts, and mostly pluralistic models, have started incorporating contextual and social factors in explanations of social cognition. In this paper, I further motivate the importance of contextual and identity factors for social cognition. This paper presents scripts as an alternative resource in social cognition that can account for contextual and identity factors. Scripts are normative and context-sensitive knowledge (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Imagination as a generative source of justification.Kengo Miyazono & Uku Tooming - forthcoming - Noûs.
    One of the most exciting debates in philosophy of imagination in recent years has been over the epistemic use of imagination where imagination epistemically contributes to justifying beliefs and acquiring knowledge. This paper defends “generationism about imagination” according to which imagination is a generative source, rather than a preservative source, of justification. In other words, imagination generates new justification above and beyond prior justification provided by other sources. After clarifying the generation/preservation distinction (Section 2), we present an argument for generationism (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Character and Culture in Social Cognition.James Lloyd - 2022 - Dissertation, The University of Manchester
    We make character trait attributions to predict and explain others’ behaviour. How should we understand character trait attribution in context across the domains of philosophy, folk psychology, developmental psychology, and evolutionary psychology? For example, how does trait attribution relate to our ability to attribute mental states to others, to ‘mindread’? This thesis uses philosophical methods and empirical data to argue for character trait attribution as a practice dependent upon our ability to mindread, which develops as a product of natural selection (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • (1 other version)Persistent burglars and knocks on doors: Causal indispensability of knowing vindicated.Artūrs Https://Orcidorg Logins - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (4):1335-1357.
    The aim of the present article is to accomplish two things. The first is to show that given some further plausible assumptions, existing challenges to the indispensability of knowledge in causal explanation of action fail. The second is to elaborate an overlooked and distinct argument in favor of the causal efficacy of knowledge. In short, even if knowledge were dispensable in causal explanation of action, it is still indispensable in causal explanation of other mental attitudes and, in particular, some reactive (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • “Where’s Wally?” Identifying theory of mind in school-based social skills interventions.Aneyn M. O’Grady & Sonali Nag - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    This mini configurative review links theory of mind research with school-based social skills interventions to reframe theoretical understanding of ToM ability based on a conceptual mapping exercise. The review’s aim was to bridge areas of psychology and education concerned with social cognition. Research questions included: how do dependent variables in interventions designed to enhance child social-cognitive skills map onto ToM constructs empirically validated within psychology? In which ways do these mappings reframe conceptualization of ToM ability? Thirty-one studies on social-cognitive skill (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Attributing Psychological Predicates to Non-human Animals: Literalism and its Limits.Andrés Crelier - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (4):1309-1328.
    In this essay, I deal with the problem of the attribution of psychological predicates to non-human animals. The first section illustrates three research topics where it has become scientifically legitimate to explain the conduct of non-human animals by means of the attribution of psychological predicates. The second section discusses several philosophical objections to the legitimacy of such attributions provided by central thinkers from the last decades. I try to show that these objections —which are related among other questions to the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Ontogenetic steps of understanding beliefs: From practical to theoretical.Henrike Moll, Qianhui Ni & Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer - forthcoming - Philosophical Psychology.
    In this article, we postulate that belief understanding unfolds in two steps over ontogenetic time. We propose that belief understanding begins in interactive scenarios in which infants and toddlers respond directly and second-personally to the actions of a misinformed agent. This early understanding of beliefs is practical and grounded in the capacity for perspective-taking. Practical belief understanding guarantees effective interaction and communication with others who are acting on false assumptions. In a second step, children, at preschool age, acquire the capacity (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Introduction to Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches.Kristin Andrews, Shannon Spaulding & Evan Westra - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1685-1700.
    This introduction to the topical collection, Folk Psychology: Pluralistic Approaches reviews the origins and basic theoretical tenets of the framework of pluralistic folk psychology. It places special emphasis on pluralism about the variety folk psychological strategies that underlie behavioral prediction and explanation beyond belief-desire attribution, and on the diverse range of social goals that folk psychological reasoning supports beyond prediction and explanation. Pluralism is not presented as a single theory or model of social cognition, but rather as a big-tent research (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   9 citations  
  • Mindreading in conversation.Evan Westra & Jennifer Nagel - 2021 - Cognition 210 (C):104618.
    How is human social intelligence engaged in the course of ordinary conversation? Standard models of conversation hold that language production and comprehension are guided by constant, rapid inferences about what other agents have in mind. However, the idea that mindreading is a pervasive feature of conversation is challenged by a large body of evidence suggesting that mental state attribution is slow and taxing, at least when it deals with propositional attitudes such as beliefs. Belief attributions involve contents that are decoupled (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • Why is knowledge faster than (true) belief?Evan Westra - forthcoming - Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
    Phillips and colleagues convincingly argue that knowledge attribution is a faster, more automatic form of mindreading than belief attribution. However, they do not explain what it is about knowledge attribution that lends it this cognitive advantage. I suggest an explanation of the knowledge-attribution advantage that would also help to distinguish it from belief-based and minimalist alternatives.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • How children approach the false belief test: social development, pragmatics, and the assembly of Theory of Mind.Marco Fenici - 2020 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 21 (1):181-201.
    Evidence from the knowledge access task and the diverse belief task suggests that, before age four, children may find it difficult to attribute false beliefs to others, despite demonstrating a basic comprehension of the concept of belief. Challenging this view, this article assumes a sociopragmatic perspective on language to argue that even children younger than four may not understand at all the concept of belief but may nevertheless master naïvely the pragmatics of belief reports in specific conversational contexts. The proposal (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • (1 other version)The cultural evolution of mind-modelling.Richard Moore - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1751-1776.
    I argue that uniquely human forms of ‘Theory of Mind’ are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental states—and so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Vicarious representation: A new theory of social cognition.Bence Nanay - 2020 - Cognition 205 (C):104451.
    Theory of mind, the attribution of mental states to others is one form of social cognition. The aim of this paper is to highlight the importance of another, much simpler, form of social cognition, which I call vicarious representation. Vicarious representation is the attribution of other-centered properties to objects. This mental capacity is different from, and much simpler than, theory of mind as it does not imply the understanding (or representation) of the mental (or even perceptual) states of another agents. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • What Is Minimally Cooperative Behavior?Kirk Ludwig - 2020 - In Anika Fiebich (ed.), Minimal Cooperation and Shared Agency. Springer. pp. 9-40.
    Cooperation admits of degrees. When factory workers stage a slowdown, they do not cease to cooperate with management in the production of goods altogether, but they are not fully cooperative either. Full cooperation implies that participants in a joint action are committed to rendering appropriate contributions as needed toward their joint end so as to bring it about, consistently with the type of action and the generally agreed upon constraints within which they work, as efficiently as they can, where their (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • Are non-human primates Gricean? Intentional communication in language evolution.Lucas Battich - 2018 - Pulse: A History, Sociology and Philosophy of Science Journal 5:70-88.
    The field of language evolution has recently made Gricean pragmatics central to its task, particularly within comparative studies between human and non-human primate communication. The standard model of Gricean communication requires a set of complex cognitive abilities, such as belief attribution and understanding nested higher-order mental states. On this model, non-human primate communication is then of a radically different kind to ours. Moreover, the cognitive demands in the standard view are also too high for human infants, who nevertheless do engage (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Representing the Mind as Such in Infancy.Peter Carruthers - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (4):765-781.
    Tyler Burge claims in a recent high-profile publication that none of the existing evidence for mental-state attribution by children prior to the age of four or five really supports such a conclusion; and he makes this claim, not just for beliefs, but for mental states of all sorts. In its place, he offers an explanatory framework according to which infants and young children attribute mere information-registering states and teleologically-characterized motivational states, which are said to lack the defining properties of the (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • (1 other version)Theory of Mind, pragmatics and the brain.Ivan Enrici, Bruno G. Bara & Mauro Adenzato - 2019 - Pragmatics and Cognition 26 (1):5-38.
    Theory of Mind(ToM) is a neurocognitive system that allows the perceiver to attribute mental states, such as intentions, beliefs, or feelings, to others’ actions. The aim of the present work is to analyse the engagement of the ToM system in communication, in particular, in communicative intention processing. To this aim, we propose anIntention Processing Network(IPN) with its own principles and mechanisms, that is, a brain network differentially engaged according to the complex intertwining of the context, goal, and action involved. According (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Folk personality psychology: mindreading and mindshaping in trait attribution.Evan Westra - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8213-8232.
    Character-trait attribution is an important component of everyday social cognition that has until recently received insufficient attention in traditional accounts of folk psychology. In this paper, I consider how the case of character-trait attribution fits into the debate between mindreading-based and broadly ‘pluralistic’ approaches to folk psychology. Contrary to the arguments of some pluralists, I argue that the evidence on trait understanding does not show that it is a distinct, non-mentalistic mode of folk-psychological reasoning, but rather suggests that traits are (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Deictic Navigation Network: Linguistic Viewpoint Disturbances in Schizophrenia.Linde van Schuppen, Kobie van Krieken & José Sanders - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Seeing Seeing.Ben Phillips - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 102 (1):24-43.
    I argue that we can visually perceive others as seeing agents. I start by characterizing perceptual processes as those that are causally controlled by proximal stimuli. I then distinguish between various forms of visual perspective-taking, before presenting evidence that most of them come in perceptual varieties. In doing so, I clarify and defend the view that some forms of visual perspective-taking are “automatic”—a view that has been marshalled in support of dual-process accounts of mindreading.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Getting to know you: Accuracy and error in judgments of character.Evan Westra - 2019 - Mind and Language 35 (5):583-600.
    Character judgments play an important role in our everyday lives. However, decades of empirical research on trait attribution suggest that the cognitive processes that generate these judgments are prone to a number of biases and cognitive distortions. This gives rise to a skeptical worry about the epistemic foundations of everyday characterological beliefs that has deeply disturbing and alienating consequences. In this paper, I argue that this skeptical worry is misplaced: under the appropriate informational conditions, our everyday character-trait judgments are in (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • The Psychology of Epistemic Judgment.Jennifer Nagel & Jessica Wright - forthcoming - In Sarah K. Robins, John Symons & Paco Calvo (eds.), Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology, 2nd Edition.
    Human social intelligence includes a remarkable power to evaluate what people know and believe, and to assess the quality of well- or ill-formed beliefs. Epistemic evaluations emerge in a great variety of contexts, from moments of deliberate private reflection on tough theoretical questions, to casual social observations about what other people know and think. We seem to be able to draw systematic lines between knowledge and mere belief, to distinguish justified and unjustified beliefs, and to recognize some beliefs as delusional (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Free actions as a natural kind.Oisín Deery - 2021 - Synthese 198 (1):823-843.
    Do we have free will? Understanding free will as the ability to act freely, and free actions as exercises of this ability, I maintain that the default answer to this question is “yes.” I maintain that free actions are a natural kind, by relying on the influential idea that kinds are homeostatic property clusters. The resulting position builds on the view that agents are a natural kind and yields an attractive alternative to recent revisionist accounts of free action. My view (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  • Prediction Error Minimization as a Framework for Social Cognition Research.Leon de Bruin & John Michael - 2018 - Erkenntnis 86 (1):1-20.
    The main aim of this article is to give an assessment of prediction error minimization as a unifying theoretical framework for the study of social cognition. We show how this framework can be used to synthesize and systematically relate existing data from social cognition research, and explain how it introduces new constraints for further research. We discuss PEM in relation to other theoretical frameworks of social cognition, and identify the main challenges that this approach to social cognition will need to (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Interacting Timescales in Perspective-Taking.Rick Dale, Alexia Galati, Camila Alviar, Pablo Contreras Kallens, Adolfo G. Ramirez-Aristizabal, Maryam Tabatabaeian & David W. Vinson - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9:320582.
    Through theoretical discussion, literature review, and a computational model, this paper poses a challenge to the notion that perspective-taking involves a fixed architecture in which particular processes have priority. For example, some research suggests that egocentric perspectives can arise more quickly, with other perspectives (such as of task partners) emerging only secondarily. This theoretical dichotomy–between fast egocentric and slow other-centric processes–is challenged here. We propose a general view of perspective-taking as an emergent phenomenon governed by the interplay among cognitive mechanisms (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  • (4 other versions)Philosophy and theory of artificial intelligence 2017.Vincent C. Müller (ed.) - 2017 - Berlin: Springer.
    This book reports on the results of the third edition of the premier conference in the field of philosophy of artificial intelligence, PT-AI 2017, held on November 4 - 5, 2017 at the University of Leeds, UK. It covers: advanced knowledge on key AI concepts, including complexity, computation, creativity, embodiment, representation and superintelligence; cutting-edge ethical issues, such as the AI impact on human dignity and society, responsibilities and rights of machines, as well as AI threats to humanity and AI safety; (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Theory of Mind and Non-Human Intelligence.Brandon Tinklenberg - 2016 - Shakelford, T.K. And V.A.Weekes-Shakelford (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer.
    Comparative cognition researchers have long been interested in the nature of nonhuman animal social capacities. One capacity has received prolonged attention: mindreading, or “theory of mind” as it’s also called, is often seen to be the ability to attribute mental states to others in the service of predicting and explaining behavior. This attention is garnered in no small measure from interest into what accounts for the distinctive features of human social cognition and what are the evolutionary origins of those features. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • The evolution and development of visual perspective taking.Ben Phillips - 2018 - Mind and Language 34 (2):183-204.
    I outline three conceptions of seeing that a creature might possess: ‘the headlamp conception,’ which involves an understanding of the causal connections between gazing at an object, certain mental states, and behavior; ‘the stage lights conception,’ which involves an understanding of the selective nature of visual attention; and seeing-as. I argue that infants and various nonhumans possess the headlamp conception. There is also evidence that chimpanzees and 3-year-old children have some grasp of seeing-as. However, due to a dearth of studies, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Are there signature limits in early theory of mind?Ella Fizke, Stephen A. Butterfill, Lea van de Loo, Eva Reindl & Hannes Rakoczy - 2017 - Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 162:209-224.
    Current theory-of-mind research faces the challenge of reconciling two sets of seemingly incompatible findings: Whereas children come to solve explicit verbal false belief tasks from around 4years of age, recent studies with various less explicit measures such as looking time, anticipatory looking, and spontaneous behavior suggest that even infants can succeed on some FB tasks. In response to this tension, two-systems theories propose to distinguish between an early-developing system, tracking simple forms of mental states, and a later-developing system, based on (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  • Social cognition, mindreading and narratives. A cognitive semiotics perspective on narrative practices from early mindreading to Autism Spectrum Disorder.Claudio Paolucci - 2019 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (2):375-400.
    Understanding social cognition referring to narratives without relying on mindreading skills has been the main aim of the Narrative Practice Hypothesis proposed by Daniel Hutto and Shaun Gallagher. In this paper, I offer a semiotic reformulation of the NPH, expanding the notion of narrative beyond its conventional common-sense understanding and claiming that the kind of social cognition that operates in implicit false belief task competency is developed out of the narrative logic of interaction. I will try to show how experience (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Beliefs as inner causes: the (lack of) evidence.Devin Sanchez Curry - 2018 - Philosophical Psychology 31 (6):850-877.
    Many psychologists studying lay belief attribution and behavior explanation cite Donald Davidson in support of their assumption that people construe beliefs as inner causes. But Davidson’s influential argument is unsound; there are no objective grounds for the intuition that the folk construe beliefs as inner causes that produce behavior. Indeed, recent experimental work by Ian Apperly, Bertram Malle, Henry Wellman, and Tania Lombrozo provides an empirical framework that accords well with Gilbert Ryle’s alternative thesis that the folk construe beliefs as (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   13 citations  
  • On deflationary accounts of human action understanding.Emma Borg - 2018 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (3):503-522.
    A common deflationary tendency has emerged recently in both philosophical accounts and comparative animal studies concerned with how subjects understand the actions of others. The suggestion emerging from both arenas is that the default mechanism for understanding action involves only a sensitivity to the observable, behavioural (non-mental) features of a situation. This kind of ‘smart behaviour reading’ thus suggests that, typically, predicting or explaining the behaviour of conspecifics does not require seeing the other through the lens of mental state attribution. (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  • Children exhibit different performance patterns in explicit and implicit theory of mind tasks.Nese Oktay-Gür, Alexandra Schulz & Hannes Rakoczy - 2018 - Cognition 173 (C):60-74.
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • (2 other versions)Social intelligence: How to integrate research? A mechanistic perspective.Marcin Miłkowski - 2019 - AI and Society 34 (4):735-744.
    Is there a field of social intelligence? Many various disciplines approach the subject and it may only seem natural to suppose that different fields of study aim at explaining different phenomena; in other words, there is no special field of study of social intelligence. In this paper, I argue for an opposite claim. Namely, there is a way to integrate research on social intelligence, as long as one accepts the mechanistic account to explanation. Mechanistic integration of different explanations, however, comes (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  • Factive and nonfactive mental state attribution.Jennifer Nagel - 2017 - Mind and Language 32 (5):525-544.
    Factive mental states, such as knowing or being aware, can only link an agent to the truth; by contrast, nonfactive states, such as believing or thinking, can link an agent to either truths or falsehoods. Researchers of mental state attribution often draw a sharp line between the capacity to attribute accurate states of mind and the capacity to attribute inaccurate or “reality-incongruent” states of mind, such as false belief. This article argues that the contrast that really matters for mental state (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   32 citations  
  • Understanding others, reciprocity, and self-consciousness.Katja Crone - 2018 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 17 (2):267-278.
    The article explores the basic conceptual relationship between social cognition, intersubjectivity and self-consciousness. A much-debated recent approach to social cognition, the so-called interaction theory, is the view that the ability to perceive, understand and interpret the behavior of others relies on interaction in the sense of mutual coordination of the embodied agents involved. It will be shown that this notion of reciprocity is too weak in order to fully account for social understanding. It will be argued that the idea of (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  • Pragmatic Development and the False Belief Task.Evan Westra - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2):235-257.
    Nativists about theory of mind have typically explained why children below the age of four fail the false belief task by appealing to the demands that these tasks place on children’s developing executive abilities. However, this appeal to executive functioning cannot explain a wide range of evidence showing that social and linguistic factors also affect when children pass this task. In this paper, I present a revised nativist proposal about theory of mind development that is able to accommodate these findings, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  • Spontaneous mindreading: a problem for the two-systems account.Evan Westra - 2017 - Synthese 194 (11):4559-4581.
    According to the two-systems account of mindreading, our mature perspective-taking abilities are subserved by two distinct mindreading systems: a fast but inflexible, “implicit” system, and a flexible but slow “explicit” one. However, the currently available evidence on adult perspective-taking does not support this account. Specifically, both Level-1 and Level-2 perspective-taking show a combination of efficiency and flexibility that is deeply inconsistent with the two-systems architecture. This inconsistency also turns out to have serious consequences for the two-systems framework as a whole, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Mental Files in Development: Dual Naming, False Belief, Identity and Intensionality.Josef Perner & Brian Leahy - 2016 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 7 (2):491-508.
    We use mental files to present an analysis of children's developing understanding of identity in alternative naming tasks and belief. The core assumption is that younger children below the age of about 4 years create different files for an object depending on how the object is individuated. They can anchor them to the same object, hence think of the same object whether they think of it as a rabbit or as an animal. However, the claim is, they cannot yet link (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  • Gricean Communication and Cognitive Development.Richard Moore - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (267):pqw049.
    On standard readings of Grice, Gricean communication requires (a) possession of a concept of belief, (b) the ability to make complex inferences about others’ goal-directed behaviour, and (c) the ability to entertain fourth order meta-representations. To the extent that these abilities are pre-requisites of Gricean communication they are inconsistent with the view that Gricean communication could play a role in their development. In this paper, I argue that a class of ‘minimally Gricean acts’ satisfy the intentional structure described by Grice, (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   24 citations  
  • The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning.Michael Waldmann (ed.) - 2017 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Causal reasoning is one of our most central cognitive competencies, enabling us to adapt to our world. Causal knowledge allows us to predict future events, or diagnose the causes of observed facts. We plan actions and solve problems using knowledge about cause-effect relations. Without our ability to discover and empirically test causal theories, we would not have made progress in various empirical sciences. In the past decades, the important role of causal knowledge has been discovered in many areas of cognitive (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  • Mental files and belief: A cognitive theory of how children represent belief and its intensionality.Josef Perner, Michael Huemer & Brian Leahy - 2015 - Cognition 145 (C):77-88.
    We provide a cognitive analysis of how children represent belief using mental files. We explain why children who pass the false belief test are not aware of the intensionality of belief. Fifty-one 3½- to 7-year old children were familiarized with a dual object, e.g., a ball that rattles and is described as a rattle. They observed how a puppet agent witnessed the ball being put into box 1. In the agent’s absence the ball was taken from box 1, the child (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  • An Account of Boeschian Cooperative Behaviour.Olle Blomberg - 1st ed. 2015 - In Catrin Misselhorn (ed.), Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems. Springer Verlag.
    Philosophical accounts of joint action are often prefaced by the observation that there are two different senses in which several agents can intentionally perform an action Φ, such as go for a walk or capture the prey. The agents might intentionally Φ together, as a collective, or they might intentionally Φ in parallel, where Φ is distributively assigned to the agents, considered as a set of individuals. The accounts are supposed to characterise what is distinctive about activities in which several (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Is Collective Agency a Coherent Idea? Considerations from the Enactive Theory of Agency.Mog Stapleton & Tom Froese - 1st ed. 2015 - In Catrin Misselhorn (ed.), Collective Agency and Cooperation in Natural and Artificial Systems. Springer Verlag. pp. 219-236.
    Whether collective agency is a coherent concept depends on the theory of agency that we choose to adopt. We argue that the enactive theory of agency developed by Barandiaran, Di Paolo and Rohde (2009) provides a principled way of grounding agency in biological organisms. However the importance of biological embodiment for the enactive approach might lead one to be skeptical as to whether artificial systems or collectives of individuals could instantiate genuine agency. To explore this issue we contrast the concept (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   5 citations  
  • Dennett’s Strategy for Naturalizing Intentionality: an Innovative Play at Second Base.Tadeusz Wieslaw Zawidzki - 2015 - Philosophia 43 (3):593-609.
    I briefly review the three basic strategies for naturalizing intentionality discussed by Haugeland 4:383–427, 1990, and Hutto and Satne, recounting their deficits. Then, I focus on Dennett’s version of what Haugeland calls the “second-base … neo-behaviorist” strategy. After briefly explaining Dennett’s proposal, I defend it against four common objections: circularity, relativity, under-specified rationality, and failure to track robustly natural facts. I conclude by recounting the advantages of Dennettian neo-behaviorism over the neo-Cartesian and neo-pragmatist alternatives, as well as Hutto and Satne’s (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  • Mindreading in adults: evaluating two-systems views.Peter Carruthers - 2017 - Synthese 194 (3):673-688.
    A number of convergent recent findings with adults have been interpreted as evidence of the existence of two distinct systems for mindreading that draw on separate conceptual resources: one that is fast, automatic, and inflexible; and one that is slower, controlled, and flexible. The present article argues that these findings admit of a more parsimonious explanation. This is that there is a single set of concepts made available by a mindreading system that operates automatically where it can, but which frequently (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  • Attention to the speaker. The conscious assessment of utterance interpretations in working memory.Marco Mazzone - 2013 - Language and Communication 33:106-114.
    The role of conscious attention in language processing has been scarcely considered, despite the wide-spread assumption that verbal utterances manage to attract and manipulate the addressee’s attention. Here I claim that this assumption is to be understood not as a figure of speech but instead in terms of attentional processes proper. This hypothesis can explain a fact that has been noticed by supporters of Relevance Theory in pragmatics: the special role played by speaker-related information in utterance interpretation. I argue that (...)
    Download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations