The comment addresses central issues of a "theory theory" approach as exemplified in Gopnik' and Goldman's BBS-articles. Gopnik, on the one hand, tries to demonstrate that empirical evidence from developmental psychology supports the view of a "theory theory" in which common sense beliefs are constructed to explain ourselves and others. Focusing the informational processing routes possibly involved we would like to argue that his main thesis (e.g. idea of intentionality as a cognitive construct) lacks support at least for two reasons: (...) one methodological and one structural. On the other hand, Goldman raises an important question when he is asking how people ascribe mental states to themselves. Reasons why Goldman's attempt to understand common sense mental representations by using an analogy from visual perception is problematic are discussed. The role which is attributed to a phenomenology is evaluated. (shrink)

The central mission of cognitive science is to reveal the real nature of the mind, however familiar or foreign that nature may be to naive preconceptions. The existence of naive conceptions is also important, however. Prescientific thought and language contain concepts of the mental, and these concepts deserve attention from cognitive science. Just as scientific psychology studies folk physics (McCloskey 1983, Hayes 1985), viz., the common understanding (or misunderstanding) of physical phenomena, so it must study folk psychology, the common understanding (...) of mental states. This subfield of scientific psychology is what I mean by the phrase 'the psychology of folk psychology'. (shrink)

Critics of the target article objected to our account of art appreciators' sensitivity to art-historical contexts and functions, the relations among the modes of artistic appreciation, and the weaknesses of aesthetic science. To rebut these objections and justify our program, we argue that the current neglect of sensitivity to art-historical contexts persists as a result of a pervasive aesthetic–artistic confound; we further specify our claim that basic exposure and the design stance are necessary conditions of artistic understanding; and we explain (...) why many experimental studies do not belong to a psycho-historical science of art. (shrink)

I take up three puzzles about our emotional and evaluative responses to fiction. First, how can we even have emotional responses to characters and events that we know not to exist, if emotions are as intimately connected to belief and action as they seem to be? One solution to this puzzle claims that we merely imagine having such emotional responses. But this raises the puzzle of why we would ever refuse to follow an author’s instructions to imagine such responses, since (...) we happily imagine many other implausible things. A natural response to this second puzzle is that our responses to fiction are real, and so can’t just be conjured up in response to an author’s demands. However, this simple response is inadequate, because we often respond differently to people and events in fiction than we would if we encountered them in real life. Solving these three puzzles in a consistent way requires the notion of a “perspective” on a fictional world. I sketch an account of this intuitive but frustratingly amorphous notion: perspectives are tools for organizing our thinking, which can in turn alter our emotional and evaluative responses. Cultivating a perspective can be illuminating, entertaining, or corrupting — or all three at once. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are two distinct kinds of senses, immediate senses and reflective senses. Immediate senses are what we are immediately aware of when we are in an intentional mental state, while reflective senses are what we understand of an intentional mental state's (putative) referent upon reflection. I suggest an account of immediate and reflective senses that is based on the phenomenal intentionality theory, a theory of intentionality in terms of phenomenal consciousness. My focus is on the immediate (...) and reflective senses of thoughts and the concepts they involve, but it also applies to other mental instances of intentionality. (shrink)

This paper draws on the notion of “objects of research” in psychology as clusters of phenomena (Feest in Philos Sci 84:1165–1176, 2017) to analyze the productive role of folk psychological concepts—and the operational definitions that arise from them—in the development of concepts in scientific psychology. Using the case study of similarity, I discuss the role of the folk psychological concept in the regimentation of different measures of similarity judgments. I propose that by giving rise to operational definitions that lead to (...) experimental dissociation on the one hand, and by providing the concept with unity on the other hand, the folk psychological concept generates a productive tension that facilitates empirical and theoretical development of the scientific concept. (shrink)

Recent work on the interpretation of counterfactual conditionals has paid much attention to the role of causal independencies. One influential idea from the theory of Causal Bayesian Networks is that counterfactual assumptions are made by intervention on variables, leaving all of their causal non-descendants unaffected. But intervention is not applicable across the board. For instance, backtracking counterfactuals, which involve reasoning from effects to causes, cannot proceed by intervention in the strict sense, for otherwise they would be equivalent to their consequents. (...) We discuss these and similar cases, focusing on two factors which play a role in determining whether and which causal parents of the manipulated variable are affected: Speakers' need for an explanation of the hypothesized state of affairs, and differences in the ‘resilience’ of beliefs that are independent of degrees of certainty. We describe the relevant theoretical notions in some detail and provide experimental evidence that these factors do indeed affect speakers' interpretation of counterfactuals. (shrink)

Evidence from aphasia is considered that leads to a distinction between abstract and concrete thought processes and hence for a distinction between rules and similarity. It is argued that perceptual classification is inherently a rule-following procedure and these rules are unable to be followed when a patient has difficulty with name comprehension and retrieval.

This paper presents a new response to the colour similarity argument, an argument that many people take to pose the greatest threat to colour physicalism. The colour similarity argument assumes that if colour physicalism is true, then colour similarities should be scrutable under standard physical descriptions of surface reflectance properties such as their spectral reflectance curves. Given this assumption, our evident failure to find such similarities at the reducing level seemingly proves fatal to colour physicalism. I argue that we should (...) dispense with this assumption, and thus endorse the inscrutability of colour similarity. This strategy is inspired by parallels between the colour similarity argument and the explanatory gap between mind and body made vivid by Jackson’s (1986) knowledge argument, and in particular by type-B physicalist responses to that argument. This inscrutability response is further motivated by cases in chemistry and biochemistry in which analogous scrutability theses fail to hold. Along the way, I present a challenge to standard formulations of the colour similarity argument based on the extreme context sensitivity of the similarity relation. Most presentations of the argument fail to control for such contextual variation, which raises the distinct possibility that the argument equivocates on the similarity relation across its premises. Although ultimately inconclusive, this context challenge forces a significant reformulation of the colour similarity argument, and highlights the need for much greater care in handling claims about colour similarity. (shrink)

Research from ethology and evolutionary biology indicates the following about the evolution of reasoning capacity. First, solving problems of social competition and cooperation have direct impact on survival rates and reproductive success. Second, the social structure that evolved from this pressure is the dominance hierarchy. Third, primates that live in large groups with complex dominance hierarchies also show greater neocortical development, and concomitantly greater cognitive capacity. These facts suggest that the necessity of reasoning effectively about dominance hierarchies left an indelible (...) mark on primate reasoning architectures, including that of humans. In order to survive in a dominance hierarchy, an individual must be capable of (a) making rank discriminations, (b) recognizing what is forbidden and what is permitted based one's rank, and (c) deciding whether to engage in or refriin from activities that will allow one to move up in rank. The first problem is closely tied to the capacity for transitive reasoning, while the second and third are intimately related to the capacity for deontic reasoning. I argue that the human capacity for these types of reasoning have evolutionary roots that reach deeper into our ancestral past than the emergence of the hominid line, and the operation of these evolutionarily primitive reasoning systems can be seen in the development of human reasoning and domain-specific effects in adult reasoning. (shrink)

This paper describes a theory that explains both the creativity and the efficiency of people's conceptual combination. In the constraint theory, conceptual combination is controlled by three constraints of diagnosticity, plausibility, and informativeness. The constraints derive from the pragmatics of communication as applied to compound phrases. The creativity of combination arises because the constraints can be satisfied in many different ways. The constraint theory yields an algorithmic model of the efficiency of combination. The C3 model admits the full creativity of (...) combination and yet efficiently settles on the best interpretation for a given phrase. The constraint theory explains many empirical regularities in conceptual combination, and makes various empirically verified predictions. In computer simulations of compound phrase interpretation, the C3 model has produced results in general agreement with people's responses to the same phrases. (shrink)

Explanation is a central concept in human psychology. Drawing upon philosophical theories of explanation, psychologists have recently begun to examine the relationship between explanation, probability and causality. Our study advances this growing literature in the intersection of psychology and philosophy of science by systematically investigating how judgments of explanatory power are affected by the prior credibility of a potential explanation, the causal framing used to describe the explanation, the generalizability of the explanation, and its statistical relevance for the evidence. Collectively, (...) the results of our five experiments support the hypothesis that the prior credibility of a causal explanation plays a central role in explanatory reasoning: first, because of the presence of strong main effects on judgments of explanatory power, and second, because of the gate-keeping role it has for other factors. Highly credible explanations were not susceptible to causal framing effects. Instead, highly credible hypotheses were sensitive to the effects of factors which are usually considered relevant from a normative point of view: the generalizability of an explanation, and its statistical relevance for the evidence. These results advance current literature in the philosophy and psychology of explanation in three ways. First, they yield a more nuanced understanding of the determinants of judgments of explanatory power, and the interaction between these factors. Second, they illuminate the close relationship between prior beliefs and explanatory power. Third, they clarify the relationship between abductive and probabilistic reasoning. (shrink)

Some regularities enjoy only an attenuated existence in a body of training data. These are regularities whose statistical visibility depends on some systematic recoding of the data. The space of possible recodings is, however, infinitely large – it is the space of applicable Turing machines. As a result, mappings that pivot on such attenuated regularities cannot, in general, be found by brute-force search. The class of problems that present such mappings we call the class of “type-2 problems.” Type-1 problems, by (...) contrast, present tractable problems of search insofar as the relevant regularities can be found by sampling the input data as originally coded. Type-2 problems, we suggest, present neither rare nor pathological cases. They are rife in biologically realistic settings and in domains ranging from simple animat behaviors to language acquisition. Not only are such problems rife – they are standardly solved! This presents a puzzle. How, given the statistical intractability of these type-2 cases, does nature turn the trick? One answer, which we do not pursue, is to suppose that evolution gifts us with exactly the right set of recoding biases so as to reduce specific type-2 problems to type-1 mappings. Such a heavy-duty nativism is no doubt sometimes plausible. But we believe there are other, more general mechanisms also at work. Such mechanisms provide general strategies for managing problems of type-2 complexity. Several such mechanisms are investigated. At the heart of each is a fundamental ploy – namely, the maximal exploitation of states of representation already achieved by prior, simpler learning so as to reduce the amount of subsequent computational search. Such exploitation both characterizes and helps make unitary sense of a diverse range of mechanisms. These include simple incremental learning, modular connectionism, and the developmental hypothesis of “representational redescription”. In addition, the most distinctive features of human cognition – language and culture – may themselves be viewed as adaptations enabling this representation/computation trade-off to be pursued on an even grander scale. (shrink)

We propose that human reasoning relies on an inherence heuristic, an implicit cognitive process that leads people to explain observed patterns (e.g., girls wear pink) in terms of the inherent features of their constituents (e.g., pink is an inherently feminine color). We then demonstrate how this proposed heuristic can provide a unified account for a broad set of findings spanning areas of research that might at first appear unrelated (e.g., system justification, nominal realism, is–ought errors in moral reasoning). By revealing (...) the deep commonalities among the diverse phenomena that fall under its scope, our account is able to generate new insights into these phenomena, as well as new empirical predictions. A second main goal of this paper, aside from introducing the inherence heuristic, is to articulate the proposal that the heuristic serves as a foundation for the development of psychological essentialism. More specifically, we propose that essentialism—which is the common belief that natural and social categories are underlain by hidden, causally powerful “essences”—emerges over the first few years of life as an elaboration of the earlier, and more open-ended, intuitions supplied by the inherence heuristic. In the final part of the paper, we distinguish our proposal from competing accounts (e.g., Strevens' K-laws) and clarify the relationship between the inherence heuristic and related cognitive tendencies (e.g., the correspondence bias). In sum, this paper illuminates a basic cognitive process that emerges early in life and is likely to have profound effects on many aspects of human psychology. (shrink)

The inherence heuristic is a cognitive process that supplies quick and effortless explanations for a wide variety of observations. Due in part to biases in memory retrieval, this heuristic tends to overproduce explanations that appeal to the inherent features of the entities in the observations being explained. In this response, we use the commentators' input to clarify, refine, and expand the inherence heuristic model. The end result is a piece that complements the target article, amplifying its theoretical contribution.

Generic statements (e.g., “Birds lay eggs”) express generalizations about categories. In this paper, we hypothesized that there is a paradoxical asymmetry at the core of generic meaning, such that these sentences have extremely strong implications but require little evidence to be judged true. Four experiments confirmed the hypothesized asymmetry: Participants interpreted novel generics such as “Lorches have purple feathers” as referring to nearly all lorches, but they judged the same novel generics to be true given a wide range of prevalence (...) levels (e.g., even when only 10% or 30% of lorches had purple feathers). A second hypothesis, also confirmed by the results, was that novel generic sentences about dangerous or distinctive properties would be more acceptable than generic sentences that were similar but did not have these connotations. In addition to clarifying important aspects of generics’ meaning, these findings are applicable to a range of real-world processes such as stereotyping and political discourse. (shrink)

The present paper analyzes the self‐generated explanations (from talk‐aloud protocols) that “Good” and “Poor” students produce while studying worked‐out examples of mechanics problems, and their subsequent reliance on examples during problem solving. We find that “Good” students learn with understanding: They generate many explanations which refine and expand the conditions for the action parts of the example solutions, and relate these actions to principles in the text. These self‐explanations are guided by accurate monitoring of their own understanding and misunderstanding. Such (...) learning results in example‐independent knowledge and in a better understanding of the principles presented in the text. “Poor” students do not generate sufficient self‐explanations, monitor their learning inaccurately, and subsequently rely heavily on examples. We then discuss the role of self‐explanations in facilitating problem solving, as well as the adequacy of current AI models of explanation‐based learning to account for these psychological findings. (shrink)

The present paper analyzes the self‐generated explanations (from talk‐aloud protocols) that “Good” and “Poor” students produce while studying worked‐out examples of mechanics problems, and their subsequent reliance on examples during problem solving. We find that “Good” students learn with understanding: They generate many explanations which refine and expand the conditions for the action parts of the example solutions, and relate these actions to principles in the text. These self‐explanations are guided by accurate monitoring of their own understanding and misunderstanding. Such (...) learning results in example‐independent knowledge and in a better understanding of the principles presented in the text. “Poor” students do not generate sufficient self‐explanations, monitor their learning inaccurately, and subsequently rely heavily on examples. We then discuss the role of self‐explanations in facilitating problem solving, as well as the adequacy of current AI models of explanation‐based learning to account for these psychological findings. (shrink)

In Section 5 of his interesting article, Goldman suggests that the consideration of imaginary cases can be valuable in the analysis of our psychological concepts. In particular, he argues that we can imagine a system that is isomorphic to us under any functional description, but which lacks qualitative mental states, such as pains and color sensations. Whether or not such a being is empirically possible, it certainly seems to be logically possible, or conceptually coherent. Goldman argues from this possibility to (...) the conclusion that our concepts of qualitative mental states cannot be analyzed entirely in functional terms. (shrink)

Forty years of experimentation on class inclusion and its probabilistic relatives have led to inconsistent results and conclusions about human reasoning. Recent research on the conjunction "fallacy" recapitulates this history. In contrast to previous results, we found that a majority of participants adhere to class inclusion in the classic Linda problem. We outline a theoretical framework that attributes the contradictory results to differences in statistical sophistication and to differences in response mode-whether participants are asked for probability estimates or ranks-and propose (...) two precise cognitive algorithms for ranking probabilities. Our framework allows us to make novel predictions about when and why people adhere to class inclusion. Evidence obtained in several studies supports these predictions and demonstrates that the proposed ranking algorithms can account for about three-quarters of participants' inferences in the Linda problem. (shrink)

Knobe's laudable conclusion that we make sense of our social world based on moral considerations requires a development account of human thought and a theoretical framework. We outline a view that such a moral framework must be rooted in social interaction.

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ”framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ”complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically (...) powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force. (shrink)