Collaborators generally coordinate their activities through communication, during which they readily negotiate a shared lexicon for activity-related objects. This social-pragmatic activity both recruits and affects cognitive and social-cognitive processes ranging from selective attention to perspective taking. We ask whether negotiating reference also facilitates category learning or might private verbalization yield comparable facilitation? Participants in three referential conditions learned to classify imaginary creatures according to combinations of functional features—nutritive and destructive—that implicitly defined four categories. Remote partners communicated in the Dialogue condition. (...) In the Monologue condition, participants recorded audio descriptions for their own later use. Controls worked silently. Dialogue yielded better category learning, with wider distribution of attention. Monologue offered no benefits over working silently. We conclude that negotiating reference compels collaborators to find communicable structure in their shared activity; this social-pragmatic constraint accelerates category learning and likely provides much of the benefit recently ascribed to learning labeled categories. (shrink)

Artykuł referuje poglądy amerykańskiego filozofa Daniela C. Dennetta, dotyczące językowego charakteru świadomości. W pierwszym kroku autor rekonstruuje Dennettowską strategię naturalizacji świadomości, pokazując, jak język umożliwia powstanie świadomości w toku ewolucji ludzi. Naturalizacja ta jest możliwa, wedle Dennetta, jedynie przy behawiorystycznym założeniu, zgodnie z którym świadomość jest ukrytym zachowaniem językowym. Autor pokazuje, jak Dennett przyswaja i przekształca pierwotne pomysły behawiorystów Meada, Skinnera i Jaynesa, wpisując je w ewolucyjny scenariusz. Inskrypcja ta prowadzi do konkretnych problemów, rozważanych w ostatniej części pracy: a) w (...) filozofii Dennetta występują właściwie dwie definicje świadomości: pierwsza głosi, że świadomość jest pewnego rodzaju zachowaniem językowym, druga natomiast, że jest wirtualną maszyną memetyczną; b) Dennett nie wyjaśnia zasady rozstrzygalności, która pokazywałaby, jak dana treść umysłu może zostać uświadomiona, zamiast tego podaje tylko metaforę rywalizacji, w której pewne zdarzenia w mózgu wygrywają z innymi; c) wpisanie możliwego scenariusza rozwoju świadomości w pejzaż ewolucji nie oznacza jeszcze, że teoria może zostać empirycznie sprawdzona. (shrink)

Many animals can be trained to perform novel tasks. People, too, can be trained, but sometime in early childhood people transition from being trainable to something qualitatively more powerful—being programmable. We argue that such programmability constitutes a leap in the way that organisms learn, interact, and transmit knowledge, and that what facilitates or enables this programmability is the learning and use of language. We then examine how language programs the mind and argue that it does so through the manipulation of (...) embodied, sensorimotor representations. The role language plays in controlling mental representations offers important insights for understanding its origin and evolution. (shrink)

Many animals can be trained to perform novel tasks. People, too, can be trained, but sometime in early childhood people transition from being trainable to something qualitatively more powerful—being programmable. We argue that such programmability constitutes a leap in the way that organisms learn, interact, and transmit knowledge, and that what facilitates or enables this programmability is the learning and use of language. We then examine how language programs the mind and argue that it does so through the manipulation of (...) embodied, sensorimotor representations. The role language plays in controlling mental representations offers important insights for understanding its origin and evolution. (shrink)

A dramatic problem facing the concept of the self is whether there is anything to make sense of. Despite the speculative view that there is an essential role for the perceiver in measurement, a physicalist view of reality currently seems to be ruling out the conditions of subjectivity required to keep the concept of the self. Eliminative materialism states this position explicitly. The doctrine holds that we have no objective grounds for attributing personhood to anyone, and can therefore dispense with (...) the concept. That implication would require us to dispense with many of the most basic commitments of our manifest or common sense image of the world. And it would require us to abandon, to maintain as an act of bad faith, or radically to adjust, virtually every significant basic commitment underlying the variety of traditions that have evolved historically from the (natural) platform of common sense. Daniel Dennett’s sympathies seem to be divided over this issue. He is reluctant to eliminate the most fundamental linguistic-conceptual-institutional commitments that have evolved from common sense. Yet, I will argue, the basis of his support for these, beneath the surface of his rhetoric, is a mirage. His view of persons and related (intentional) concepts is a case in point. In place of the eliminative materialist position, Dennett recommends that we regard the self as a highly useful “theorist’s fiction.” He adopts a similar epistemic stance toward intention, belief, mind, and so on. In this paper I aim to show that Dennett’s recommendation is based on a subtle version of the dualism of subject and object (or scheme and content), which he seems to agree that we should transcend. Against Dennett’s view of the self as a “theorist’s fiction,” I argue in favour of a version of Donald Davidson’s realist thesis that, once we properly appreciate the significance of abandoning this pervasive dualism, we can maintain the self and associated intentional items – belief, mind, and so on – within a thoroughly realist ontology. (shrink)