Autism and psychosis manifest private speech disruptions analogous to their diametrical opposition along the autism-psychosis continuum. Autism has naturally suppressed private speech with predictable structural deficits when it does surface; psychosis has overt but ineffectual private speech with similar structural deficits. These private speech oppositions are best understood in the context of the control processes of cognitive-computational architectures.

Leech et al.'s model proposes representing relations as primed transformations rather than as structured representations (explicit representations of relations and their roles dynamically bound to fillers). However, this renders the model unable to explain several developmental trends (including relational integration and all changes not attributable to growth in relational knowledge). We suggest looking to an alternative computational model that learns structured representations from examples.

According to the thesis of semantic underdetermination, most sentences of a natural language lack a definite semantic interpretation. This thesis supports an argument against the use of natural language as an instrument of thought, based on the premise that cognition requires a semantically precise and compositional instrument. In this paper we examine several ways to construe this argument, as well as possible ways out for the cognitive view of natural language in the introspectivist version defended by Carruthers. Finally, we sketch (...) a view of the role of language in thought as a specialized tool, showing how it avoids the consequences of semantic underdetermination. (shrink)

Quantum gravity is supposed to be the most fundamental theory, including a quantum theory of the metrical field (spacetime). However, it is not clear how a quantum theory of gravity could account for classical phenomena, including notably measurement outcomes. But all the evidence that we have for a physical theory is based on measurement outcomes. We consider this problem in the framework of canonical quantum gravity, pointing out a dilemma: all the available accounts that admit classical phenomena presuppose entities with (...) a well-defined spatio-temporal localization (“local beables” in John Bell's terms) as primitive. But there seems to be no possibility to include such primitives in canonical quantum gravity. However, if one does not do so, it is not clear how entities that are supposed to be ontologically prior to spacetime could give rise to entities that then are spatio-temporally localized. (shrink)

Here I will develop a naturalistic account of epistemic reflection and its significance for epistemology. I will first argue that thought, as opposed to mere information processing, requires a capacity for cognitive self-regulation. After discussing the basic capacities necessary for cognitive self-regulation of any kind, I will consider qualitatively different kinds of thought that can emerge when the basic capacities enable the creature to interiorize a form of social cooperation. First, I will discuss second-personal cooperation and the kind of thought (...) that emerges from its interiorization. Then, I will discuss third-personal cooperation and the kind of thought that emerges from its interiorization. We will see that epistemic reflection is the interiorized version of interpersonal argumentation, which is the epistemic component of third-personal cooperation. In developing this account, I will draw heavily on the work of Michael Tomasello and other cognitive scientists advocating the “social intentionality hypothesis”. However, I will show how work done in the defeasible reasoning tradition can provide us with a deeper explanation of some claims made by advocates of the social intentionality hypothesis. Additionally, we will see that work done on social intentionality can help us better understand the significance of knowledge and justification as understood by the defeasible reasoning tradition. We will see that the social intentionality hypothesis and the defeasible reasoning tradition are mutually illuminating. By drawing equally on both, I will provide a novel account of the foundations of knowledge. (shrink)

Magical thinking and behaviour have traditionally been viewed as immature, misleading alternatives to scientific thought that in children inevitably diminish with age. In adults, these inclinations have been labeled by psychologists largely as superstitions that feed on frustration, uncertainty, and the unpredictable nature of certain human activities. In Magic and the Mind, Eugene Subbotsky provides an overview of the mechanisms and development of magical thinking and beliefs throughout the life span while arguing that the role of this type of thought (...) in human development should be reconsidered. Rather than an impediment to scientific reasoning or a byproduct of cognitive development, in children magical thinking is an important and necessary complement to these processes, enhancing creativity at problem-solving and reinforcing coping strategies, among other benefits. In adults, magical thinking and beliefs perform important functions both for individuals (coping with unsolvable problems and stressful situations) and for society (enabling mass influence and promoting social harmony). Operating in realms not bound by physical causality, such as emotion, relationships, and suggestion, magical thinking is an ongoing, developing psychological mechanism that, Subbotsky argues, is integral in the contexts of politics, commercial advertising, and psychotherapy, and undergirds our construction and understanding of meaning in both mental and physical worlds. Magic and the Mind represents a unique contribution to our understanding of the importance of magical thinking, offering experimental evidence and conclusions never before collected in one source. It will be of interest to students and scholars of developmental psychology, as well as sociologists, anthropologists, and educators. (shrink)

Autistic-spectrum conditions and psychotic-spectrum conditions (mainly schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depression) represent two major suites of disorders of human cognition, affect, and behavior that involve altered development and function of the social brain. We describe evidence that a large set of phenotypic traits exhibit diametrically opposite phenotypes in autistic-spectrum versus psychotic-spectrum conditions, with a focus on schizophrenia. This suite of traits is inter-correlated, in that autism involves a general pattern of constrained overgrowth, whereas schizophrenia involves undergrowth. These disorders also (...) exhibit diametric patterns for traits related to social brain development, including aspects of gaze, agency, social cognition, local versus global processing, language, and behavior. Social cognition is thus underdeveloped in autistic-spectrum conditions and hyper-developed on the psychotic spectrum.;>We propose and evaluate a novel hypothesis that may help to explain these diametric phenotypes: that the development of these two sets of conditions is mediated in part by alterations of genomic imprinting. Evidence regarding the genetic, physiological, neurological, and psychological underpinnings of psychotic-spectrum conditions supports the hypothesis that the etiologies of these conditions involve biases towards increased relative effects from imprinted genes with maternal expression, which engender a general pattern of undergrowth. By contrast, autistic-spectrum conditions appear to involve increased relative bias towards effects of paternally expressed genes, which mediate overgrowth. This hypothesis provides a simple yet comprehensive theory, grounded in evolutionary biology and genetics, for understanding the causes and phenotypes of autistic-spectrum and psychotic-spectrum conditions. (shrink)

This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is _de facto_ the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include (...) the view that language is necessary for the acquisition of many human concepts, and the view that language can serve to scaffold human thought processes. The paper also discusses the thesis that language may be the medium of _conscious_ propositional thinking, but argues that this cannot be its most fundamental cognitive role. The idea is then proposed that natural language is the medium for non-domain-specific thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive ‘quasi-modules’). Recent experimental evidence in support of this idea is reviewed, and the implications of the idea are discussed, especially for our conception of the architecture of human cognition. Finally, some further kinds of evidence which might serve to corroborate or refute the hypothesis are mentioned. The overall goal of the paper is to review a wide variety of accounts of the cognitive function of natural language, integrating a number of different kinds of evidence and theoretical consideration in order to propose and elaborate the most plausible candidate. (shrink)

Despite its strengths, Leech et al.'s model fails to address the important benefits that derive from self-explanation and task feedback in analogical reasoning development. These components encourage explicit, self-reflective processes that do not necessarily link to knowledge accretion. We wonder, therefore, what mechanisms can be included within a connectionist framework to model self-reflective involvement and its beneficial consequences.

This article examines some of the phenomenological features in Lev Vygotsky’s mature psychological theory, especially in Thinking and Speech and The Current Crisis in Psychology. It traces the complex literary and philosophical influences in 1920s Moscow on Vygotsky’s thought, through Gustav Shpet’s seminars on Husserl and the inner form of the word, Chelpanov’s seminars on phenomenology, Bakhtin’s theory of the production of inner speech, and the theoretical insights of the early Gestalt psychologists. It begins with an exposition of two central (...) Husserlian schemas: part-whole theory and the thesis of the naïve standpoint, both of which Vygotsky was clearly familiar with. This is followed by an account of the reception of phenomenology in early Soviet Russia. The article’s central sections are concerned with a careful unpacking and critique of Vygotsky’s employment of Husserlian method and analysis in his later doctrine of the ‘inner plane of speech’, his use of part-whole theory, and his identification of Husserl’s position with an untenable version of idealism. The article closes with the contention that Vygotsky misrepresents the phenomenological analysis of meaning formation and appropriates basic Husserlian conceptual terms in his elaboration of the ‘inner form of the word’; but Vygotsky does so in such a way that he enriches our descriptive access to the individual development of humans’ dynamic use of language. (shrink)

A critical aspect of much human behaviour is the generation and regulation of sequential activities. Such behaviour is seen in both naturalistic settings such as routine action and language production and laboratory tasks such as serial recall and many reaction time experiments. There are a variety of computational mechanisms that may support the generation and regulation of sequential behaviours, ranging from those underlying Turing machines to those employed by recurrent connectionist networks. This paper surveys a range of such mechanisms, together (...) with a range of empirical phenomena related to human sequential behaviour. It is argued that the empirical phenomena pose difficulties for most sequencing mechanisms, but that converging evidence from behavioural flexibility, error data arising from when the system is stressed or when it is damaged following brain injury, and between-trial effects in reaction time tasks, point to a hybrid symbolic activation-based mechanism for the generation and regulation of sequential behaviour. Some implications of this view for the nature of mental computation are highlighted. (shrink)

Within the framework of an interdisciplinary project on epistemic strategies in text and talk, this article examines such strategies in a secondary school textbook on social science. After a summary of current insights into the theory of knowledge in philosophy, psychology and linguistics, it is shown how discourse presupposes and expresses knowledge, with special emphasis on discourse processing and learning from text and its applications in education. The specific aim of this article is to study in some detail how exactly (...) ‘new’ knowledge is formulated in pedagogical discourse, and how ‘old’ knowledge is presupposed in a lesson on migration. We thus are able to describe the categories of, and the functional relations between, old and new knowledge, as discursive manifestations of underlying cognitive strategies of teaching and learning. It was also observed that in textbooks what is purported to be presented as knowledge often has an ideological basis. (shrink)