This thesis is intended to analyze a mental phenomenon widely neglected in current philosophical discussions: personal memories. The first part presents a general framework to better understand what personal memories are, how we access our personal past and what we access about our personal past. Chapter 1 introduces traditional theories of memory: direct realism and representationalism in their different versions, as well as some objections. I defend here a particular form of representationalism that is based on the distinction between content, (...) intentional object and ontological object. Chapter 2 explores the possible contents of our personal memories, which prove to be heterogeneous, whereas chapter 3 analyses their possible intentional objects, with a special focus on past events. The second part of the thesis explores an aspect of our personal memories that was omitted in the first part: the senses in which our personal past is apprehended as personal. Chapter 4 examines the way in which the “self” intervenes in the construction of our personal memories. Chapters 5 and 6 focus on the analysis of what seems to be the most subjective aspect of our memories, that is, the emotions and feelings of our past experiences. In these last two chapters, I analyze the different interactions that can take place between memories and emotions and defend the idea that there can be emotional memories that are reducible neither to a propositional memory nor an occurrent and present emotion. The overall intention of this thesis is twofold. First, I aim to show to the philosophical community that there is still a lot to be said and discussed about memory as a mental phenomenon. And second, I intend to emphasize the importance of bringing into the philosophical discussions about the mind ideas coming from different philosophical traditions as well as ideas and empirical data coming from scientific research. (shrink)

Classifying is a fundamental operation in the acquisition of knowledge. Taxonomic theory can help students of cognition, evolutionary psychology, ethology, anatomy, and sociobiology to avoid serious mistakes, both practical and theoretical. More positively, it helps in generating hypotheses useful to a wide range of disciplines. Composite wholes, such as species and societies, are “individuals” in the logical sense, and should not be treated as if they were classes. A group of analogous features is a natural kind, but a group of (...) homologous features is not. Imposing hypotheses justified only on the basis of nominalist, realist, phenomenalist, or conceptualist metaphysics upon the neurophysiology of organisms or upon the causes of behavior exemplifies the “psychologist's fallacy” of William James. Levels should be distinguished from their members and from classes of levels, and the ontological status of entities ranked at levels should be made clear. It is important not to confuse such categories as substance and process with one another. Several genetical terms, such as “gene” and chromosome,” are even more equivocal than has been realized. Discussions about units of selection, behavior, and thinking suffer from the ambiguity of a “unit of” an entity. An important source of misunderstanding about natural selection is the habit of treating it as an “agent”: in an important sense, natural selection does not “act” at all. (shrink)

Why are some words easier to learn than others? And what enables the eventual learning of the more difficult words? These questions were addressed for nouns using a paradigm in which adults were exposed to naturalistic maternal input that was manipulated to simulate access to several different information sources, both alone and in combination: observation of the extralinguistic contexts in which the target word was used, the words that co‐occurred with the target word, and the target word's syntactic context. Words (...) that were not accurately identified from observation alone were both abstract (e.g., music) and concrete (e.g., tail). Whether a noun could be learned from observation depended on whether it labeled a basic‐level object category (BLOC). However, the difference between BLOC labels and non‐BLOC labels was eliminated when observation was supplemented with linguistic context. Thus, although BLOC labels can be learned from observation alone, non‐BLOC labels require richer linguistic context. These findings support a model of vocabulary growth in which an important role is played by changes in the information to which learners have access. (shrink)

How do we form concepts like those of three, bicycle and red? According to Kant, we form them by carrying out acts of comparison, reflection and abstraction on information provided by the senses. Kant's answer raised numerous objections from philosophers and psychologists alike. "Kant e la formazione dei concetti" argues that Kant is able to rebut those objections. The book shows that, for Kant, it is possible to perceive objects without employing concepts; it explains how, given those perceptions, we can (...) form categories and empirical concepts; and it argues that theories like Kant's - abstractionist theories of concept formation - are more plausible than is often assumed. (shrink)

Productivity is a central concept in the study of language and language acquisition. As a test case for exploring the notion of productivity, we focus on the noun slots of verb frames, such as __want__, __see__, and __get__. We develop a novel combination of measures designed to assess both the flexibility and creativity of use in these slots. We do so using a rigorously controlled sample of child speech and child directed speech from three English-speaking children between the ages of (...) 2–3 years and their caregivers. We find different levels of creativity and flexibility between the adult and child samples for some measures, for some slots, and for some developmental periods. We discuss these differences in the context of verb frame semantics, conventionality versus creativity and child errors, and draw some tentative conclusions regarding developmental changes in children's early grammatical representations. (shrink)

This monograph introduces a meta-framework for conducting interdisciplinary research in the science of emotion, as well as a framework for a particular kind of theory of emotion. It can also be understood as a “cross-over” book that introduces neophytes to some of the current discourse and major challenges for an interdisciplinary approach to the science of emotion, especially from a philosophical perspective. It also engages experts from across the disciplines who are interested in conducting an interdisciplinary approach to research and (...) theorizing in the science of emotion, and introduces to them some of the contemporary debates in the philosophy of emotion. It does so by providing a taxonomy of theories of emotion which allows one to understand the contemporary interdisciplinary discourse in the science of emotion as a debate between four fundamental types of theories of emotion—realism, instrumentalism, eliminative-realism, and eliminativism—and which can be found or potentially found across the disciplines, and by arguing for foundational principles which can unify, without consilience, these four kinds of approaches as perspectives about the same object of inquiry. It also covers a wide range of concerns, including the problem of skepticism in the science of emotion, the problem of the underdetermination of a theory by the evidence, the question of the place of ordinary intuitions and ordinary language for a science of emotion, the mind-body problem, the hard problem of consciousness, the meta-hard problem of consciousness, the problem of intentionality, questions about the rationality of emotions and whether emotions can be a vehicle for knowledge, and the debate between cognitive and noncognitive theories in the philosophy of emotion. (shrink)

Although our concepts of “Mama,” “milk,” and “mice” have much in common, the suggestion that they are identical in structure in the mind of the prelinguistic child is mistaken. Even infants think about objects as different from substances and appreciate the distinction between kinds (e.g., mice) and individuals (e.g., Mama). Such cognitive capacities exist in other animals as well, and have important adaptive consequences.

The current consensus is that most natural categories are not organized around strict definitions (a list of singly necessary and jointly sufficient features) but rather according to a family resemblance (FR) principle: Objects belong to the same category because they are similar to each other and dissimilar to objects in contrast categories. A number of computational models of category construction have been developed to provide an account of how and why people create FR categories (Anderson, 1990; Fisher, 1987). Surprisingly, however, (...) only a few experiments on category construction or free sorting have been run and they suggest that people do not sort examples by the FR principle. We report several new experiments and a two‐stage model for category construction. This model is contrasted with a variety of other models with respect to their ability to account for when FR sorting will and will not occur. The experiments serve to identify one basis for FR sorting and to support the two‐stage model. The distinctive property of the two‐stage model is that it assumes that people impose more structure than the examples support in the first stage and that the second stage adjusts for this difference between preferred and perceived structure. We speculate that people do not simply assimilate probabilistic structures but rather organize them in terms of discrete structures plus noise. (shrink)

LAS is a program that acquires augmented transition network (ATN) grammars. It requires as data sentences of the language and semantic network representatives of their meaning. In acquiring the ATN grammars, it induces the word classes of the language, the rules of formation for sentences, and the rules mapping sentences onto meaning. The induced ATN grammar can be used both for sentence generation and sentence comprehension. Critical to the performance of the program are assumptions that it makes about the relation (...) between sentence structure and surface structure (the graph deformation condition), about when word classes may be formed and when ATN networks may be merged, and about the structure of noun phrases. These assumptions seem to be good heuristics which are largely true for natural languages although they would not be true for many nonnatural languages. Provided these assumptions are satisfied LAS seems capable of learning any context‐free language. (shrink)

This article discusses the importance of social interaction for the development of the representations for symbolic communication. We suggest that there is no need to distinguish between different representational systems emerging at different stages of development. Instead, we propose that representations are rich right from the beginning of a child’s life, and that they are driven mainly by acting and interacting in the physical and social world. The more variety in a child’s interactional experience (i.e., synchrony, sequentiality, and prediction), the (...) more enriched and abstracted the representations become. We review literature providing evidence for the ways in which infants’ development toward symbolic communication benefits from repeated social (inter)action and consider some implications for computational approaches. (shrink)