The aim of this paper is to give an account of what it is to internalize a rule. I claim that internalization is the process of redistributing the burden of instruction from the teacher to the student. The process is complete when instruction is no longer needed, and the rule has reshaped perceptual classification of the circumstances in which it applies. Teaching a rule is the initiation of this process. We internalize rules by simulating instruction coming from someone else. Running (...) these simulations enables us to toggle between the perspective of the instructor and our own perspective. By doing this we coordinate our perspectives with that of the teacher. The account given here provides a deeper explanation of why internalizing a rule involves the dispositions and reactive attitudes proponents of Rule Consequentialism often say it does, why moral reflection is variably demanding, how intergenerational moral progress is made possible by our cognitive architectures, and why the adoption of a rule should be understood in terms of teaching that rule. (shrink)

Our manuscript addresses the foundational question of cognitive science: how do we know? Specifically, examination of the mathematics of acquiring mathematical knowledge revealed that knowing-within-mathematics is reflective of knowing-in-general. Based on the correspondence between ordinary cognition (involving physical stimuli, neural sensations, mental concepts, and conscious percepts) and mathematical knowing (involving objective particulars, measured properties, abstract theories, and concrete models), we put forward the functorial semantics of mathematical knowing as a formalization of cognition. Our investigation of the similarity between mathematics and (...) cognition led us to argue against the compartmentalization of scientific knowledge and ordinary cognition, and make a case for the understanding of the basic science of knowing in terms of functorial semantics. Recognizing functorial semantics as an elementary form of cognition can help advance cognitive science the way calculus helped in the advancement of physics. (shrink)

This paper studies the learnability of natural concepts in the context of the conceptual spaces framework. Previous work proposed that natural concepts are represented by the cells of optimally partitioned similarity spaces, where optimality was defined in terms of a number of constraints. Among these is the constraint that optimally partitioned similarity spaces result in easily learnable concepts. While there is evidence that systems of concepts generally regarded as natural satisfy a number of the proposed optimality constraints, the connection between (...) naturalness and learnability has been less well studied. To fill this gap, we conduct a computational study employing two standard models of concept learning. Applying these models to the learning of color concepts, we examine whether natural color concepts are more readily learned than nonnatural ones. Our findings warrant a positive answer to this question for both models employed, thus lending empirical support to the notion that learnability is a distinctive characteristic of natural concepts. (shrink)

Some philosophers search for the mark of the cognitive: a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions identifying all instances of cognition. They claim that the mark of the cognitive is needed to steer the development of cognitive science on the right path. Here, I argue that, at least at present, it cannot be provided. First (§2), I identify some of the factors motivating the search for a mark of the cognitive, each yielding a desideratum the mark is supposed (...) to satisfy (§2.1). I then (§2.2) highlight a number of tensions in the literature on the mark of the cognitive, suggesting they’re best resolved by distinguishing two distinct programs. The first program (§3) is that of identifying a mark of the cognitive capturing our everyday notion of cognition. I argue that such a program is bound to fail for a number of reasons: it is not clear whether such an everyday notion exists; and even if it existed, it would not be able to spell out individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for cognition; and even if it were able to spell them out, these conditions won’t satisfy the desiderata a mark of the cognitive should satisfy. The second program is that of identifying a mark of the cognitive spelling out a genuine scientific kind. But the current state of fragmentation of cognitive science, and the fact that it is splintered in a myriad of different research traditions, prevent us from identifying such a kind. And we have no reason to think that these various research traditions will converge, allowing us to identify a single mark. Or so, at least, I will argue in (§4). I then conclude the paper (§5) deflecting an intuitive objection, and exploring some of the consequences of the thesis I have defended. (shrink)

According to the so-called Classical Theory, concepts are mentally represented by individually necessary and jointly sufficient application conditions. One of the principal empirical objections against this view stems from evidence that people judge some instances of a concept to be more typical than others. In this paper we present and discuss four empirical studies that investigate the extent to which this ‘typicality effect’ holds for the concept of basic needs. Through multiple operationalizations of typicality, our studies yielded evidence for a (...) strong effect of this kind: Participants tended to recall the same core examples of the concept in a free-listing task. They judged some basic needs to be more typical than others. The items that were judged to be more typical were listed more frequently in the free-listing task. These items were listed earlier on in the free-listing task. Typical basic needs, as well as non needs, were classified faster than atypical basic needs in a reaction time study. These findings suggest that the concept of basic needs may have a non-classical structure. If so, the quest for a simple and robust intensional analysis of the concept may be futile. (shrink)

The main idea of this thesis is multi-descriptional physicalism. According to it, only physical entities are elements of our ontology, and there are different ways to describe them. Higher-level vocabularies (e.g., mental, neurological, biological) truly describe reality. Sentences about higher-level entities are made true by physical entities. Every chapter will develop multi-descriptional physicalism or defend it from objections. In chapter 1, I will propose a new conceptual reductive account that conceptually reduces higher-level entities to physical entities. This conceptual reductive account (...) combines resources from Heil’s truthmaker theory and either a priori physicalism or a posteriori physicalism. In chapter 2, I apply this conceptual reductive account to various debates. Physicalism, the multiple-realisability argument, the prototype theory of concepts, and truthmaker explanations will be discussed. In chapter 3, I will argue that a major aim of metaphysics should be to discover which entities are fundamental and explain why they suffice for the existence of derivative entities. In chapter 4, I will propose a new way to explain why sentences apparently about composite objects are true even though there are no composite objects. It combines resources from Cameron’s truthmaker theory and van Inwagen’s paraphrase strategy. In chapter 5, I will argue that the intuition that the mind and the body are very different does not show that the mind is distinct from the body. This intuition can be explained away by mentioning our dispositions to give non-physical explanations when we are ignorant of physical facts. In chapter 6, I will examine two arguments for the existence of a metaphysically independent level, and I will argue that only a modified version of one of them succeeds. I will argue that methodological principles support the view that there is a metaphysically independent level. (shrink)

Tenenbaum and Griffiths (2001) have proposed that their Bayesian model of generalisation unifies Shepard’s (1987) and Tversky’s (1977) similarity-based explanations of two distinct patterns of generalisation behaviours by reconciling them under a single coherent task analysis. I argue that this proposal needs refinement: instead of unifying the heterogeneous notion of psychological similarity, the Bayesian approach unifies generalisation by rendering the distinct patterns of behaviours informationally relevant. I suggest that generalisation as a Bayesian inference should be seen as a complement to, (...) instead of a replacement of, similarity-based explanations. Furthermore, I show that the unificatory powers of the Bayesian model of generalisation can contribute to the selection of one of these models of psychological similarity. (shrink)

In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences have us routinely infer what else is also true of the cases described. We consider how such routine inferences from polysemous words can generate zombie intuitions: intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias. Extending ‘evidentiary’ experimental philosophy, this paper examines whether the ‘zombie argument’ against materialism (...) is built on zombie intuitions. We examine the hypothesis that contextually defeated stereotypical inferences from the noun ‘zombie’ influence intuitions about ‘philosophical zombies’. We document framing effects (‘zombie’ vs ‘duplicate’) predicted by the hypothesis. Findings undermine intuitions about the conceivability of ‘philosophical zombies’ and address the philosophical ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Findings support a deflationary response: The impression that principled obstacles prevent scientific explanation of how physical processes give rise to conscious experience is generated by philosophical arguments that rely on epistemically deficient intuitions. (shrink)

This paper aims to reassess a notion in the works of the later Husserl that is both historically important and philosophically insightful, but remains understudied, namely, that of type. In opposition to a standard reading which treats Husserl’s type presentations as pre-conceptual habits, this paper argues that these representations are a specific kind of concept. More precisely, it shows that Husserl’s account of type presentations is akin to the contemporary prototype theory of concepts. This is historically important, since the predecessor (...) of the prototype theory is usually said to be Wittgenstein. From a philosophical standpoint, the paper shows that Husserl has an innovative account of the connection between type concepts and their extension. Contrary to the standard view of extensions as sets and thus sharp entities, Husserl develops a correlationalist theory of concepts, according to which, for the specific characteristics in the structure of a concept, there are corresponding characteristics in the arrangement of its members, and vice versa. According to this theory, while sharp concepts lead to sharp extensions, vague concepts such as (proto)type concepts lead to vague extensions. The paper presents this understanding of Husserl in detail and explains its philosophical significance. (shrink)

When we say that what two people feel for each other is 'true love,' we seem to be doing more than simply clarifying that it is in fact love they feel, as opposed to something else. That is, an experience or relationship might be a genuine or actual instance of love without necessarily being an instance of true love. But what criteria do people use to determine whether something counts as true love? This chapter explores three hypotheses. The first holds (...) that the ordinary concept of true love picks out love that is highly prototypical. The second, that it picks out love that is especially good or valuable. The third, that people distinguish between psychological states that are 'real' or not, and that it picks out love that is real. Two experiments provide evidence against the first hypothesis and in favor of the second and third. Implications for real-life disagreements about love are also discussed. (shrink)

Verb extension is a crucial gauge of the acquisition of verb meaning. In English, studies suggest that young children show conservative extension. An important test of whether an early conservative extension is a general phenomenon or a function of the input language is made possible by Chinese, a language in which verbs are more frequent and acquired earlier. This study tested whether 3-year-old Chinese children extended a group of familiar verbs that specify various ways tocarryobjects. Shown videos that portrayed typical, (...) mid-typical, or atypical carrying actions (as verified by Chinese adults), children were asked to judge whether they were examples of specific Chinese carry verbs. Children’s verb extensions were mostly limited to typical exemplars, suggesting that an early conservative extension may be universal. Furthermore, extension breadth was related to the onset of verb production: verbs acquired earlier elicited more extension judgments than those acquired later. (shrink)

Definitions may seem marginal to the sociological enterprise but can be very useful; however, they can also lead to serious errors. Examples of both are given in this article. Different types of definitions are presented, and their relevance for sociology is highlighted. A stipulative definition, for example, is very useful in sociology, as opposed to lexical and ostensive definitions. The definition of a concept that is used in a sociological analysis has to be sociological in nature, and the concept cannot (...) have the same meaning as it has in everyday language. Additional items to bear in mind when a definition is put together are discussed, including some tips on how to proceed that come from political science (Sartori, Collier, Goertz). A definition can also be very helpful in the research process itself by indicating which are the important aspects of some phenomenon to focus on (Weber, Blumer). On the negative side, a term that is not properly defined may lead to misunderstandings as well as to a false sense of agreement with other uses of the term. (shrink)

While the past century of neuroscientific research has brought considerable progress in defining the boundaries of the human cerebral cortex, there are cases in which the demarcation of one area from another remains fuzzy. Despite the existence of clearly demarcated areas, examples of gradual transitions between areas are known since early cytoarchitectonic studies. Since multi-modal anatomical approaches and functional connectivity studies brought renewed attention to the topic, a better understanding of the theoretical and methodological implications of fuzzy boundaries in brain (...) science can be conceptually useful. This article provides a preliminary conceptual framework to understand this problem by applying philosophical theories of vagueness to three levels of neuroanatomical research. For the first two levels (cytoarchitectonics and fMRI studies), vagueness will be distinguished from other forms of uncertainty, such as imprecise measurement or ambiguous causal sources of activation. The article proceeds to discuss the implications of these levels for the anatomical study of connectivity between cortical areas. There, vagueness gets imported into connectivity studies since the network structure is dependent on the parcellation scheme and thresholds have to be used to delineate functional boundaries. Functional connectivity may introduce an additional form of vagueness, as it is an organizational principle of the brain. The article concludes by discussing what steps are appropriate to define areal boundaries more precisely. (shrink)

Philosophical enquiry stands to benefit from the inclusion of methods from the digital humanities to study language use. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities have the potential to contribute to both conceptual analysis and intuition-based enquiry, two important approaches in contemporary philosophy. Empirical studies using the methods of the digital humanities can also provide valuable metaphilosophical insights into the nature of philosophical methods themselves. The use of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy should be expected to (...) follow a similar trajectory to another attempt to introduce empirical methods in philosophy. Experimental philosophers use empirical methods from the cognitive sciences to bear on philosophical questions. At first, we should expect the main contribution of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy to be at the metaphilosophical level. Then, given the right impetus and support, we are optimistic that methods from the digital humanities can make important and sustained contributions to first-order philosophical enquiry. This chapter gives two case studies of recent studies in which methods from the digital humanities are used to address metaphilosophical questions about the use of the word ‘intuition’ and the methods of philosophy and physics. It gives three examples of contemporary first-order philosophical debates to which methods fromthe digital humanities could make an important contribution in epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. The chapter discusses some methodological challenges and limitations which are of particular importance when considering the application of methods from the digital humanities in philosophy, including concerns about the demographic representativeness of widely available corpora. (shrink)

Slurs have been standardly assumed to bear a very direct, very distinctive semantic relationship to what philosophers have called “neutral counterpart” terms. I argue that this is mistaken: the general relationship between paradigmatic slurs and their “neutral counterparts” should be assumed to be the same one that obtains between ‘chick flick’ and ‘romantic comedy’, as well a huge number of other more prosaic pairs of derogatory and “less derogatory” expressions. The most plausible general relationship between these latter expressions — and (...) thus, I argue, between paradigmatic slurs and “neutral counterpart” terms — is one of overlap in presumed extension, grounded in overlap in associated stereotypes. The resulting framework has the advantages of being simple, unified, and, unlike its orthodox rivals, neatly accommodating of a much wider range of data than has previously been considered. More importantly, it positions us to better understand, identify, and confront the insidious mechanisms of ordinary bigotry. (shrink)

Discusses the conditions of possibility for intercultural and comparative philosophy, and for crosscultural communication at large. This innovative book explores the preconditions necessary for intercultural and comparative philosophy. Philosophical practices that involve at least two different traditions with no common heritage and whose languages have very different grammatical structure, such as Indo-Germanic languages and classical Chinese, are a particular focus. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel look at the necessary and not-so-necessary conditions of possibility of interpretation, comparison, and other forms (...) of interaction and how we can speak of similarities and differences in this context. The authors posit that it is necessary to dissolve the question of universalism versus relativism by replacing the ideal language paradigm with a paradigm of family resemblances and that it is not necessary to share a common language to engage in comparison. Numerous case studies are presented, including many comparisons of Western and Chinese concepts. (shrink)

This chapter introduces and discusses the concepts of necessary and sufficient conditions.

The goal of inquiry in this essay is to ascertain to what extent the Principle of Compositionality – the thesis that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meaning of its parts and its mode of composition – can be justifiably imposed as a constraint on semantic theories, and thereby provide information about what meanings are. Apart from the introduction and the concluding chapter the thesis is divided into five chapters addressing different questions pertaining to the overarching (...) goal of inquiry. Chapter Two is an attempt to determine whether the Principle of Compositionality is a trivial principle. It is argued that this is not the case in the context of providing the semantics of natural languages since it is an open question whether the best theories that respect available syntactic and semantic data are compositional. Chapter Three and Chapter Four ask whether there are reasons to think that the Principle of Compositionality is true. It is argued that the three most commonly cited reasons for thinking that correct semantic theories must be compositional – Linguistic Creativity, Productivity and Systematicity – in fact only give us reasons to think that the meaning of complex expressions depend on the meanings of their parts and their modes of composition, but not that the meaning of complex expressions depend ONLY on those factors. Chapter Five asks whether there are any reasons to think that the Principle of Compositionality is false. It is argued that all the phenomena that have been suggested entail non-compositionality are in fact compatible with some versions of compositionality. Even if this conclusion is reached in this chapter, the conclusion of the previous two chapters entails that we are not justified in imposing the Principle of Compositionality as an adequacy constraint on Semantic theories. Chapter Six explores the ways in which information about what meanings are can be derived by imposing constraints on semantic theories. It is argued that the distinction emphasized in Chapter Three and Chapter Four between depending on and depending ONLY on is of critical importance. It is demonstrated that the informative potential of the Principle of Compositionality goes far beyond that of the principle we are in fact justified in imposing on semantic theories. So not only is it the case that we cannot learn anything about meanings from the justified imposition of the Principle of Compositionality – since we cannot justifiably impose it as a constraint on semantic theories – what we could have learned from it had we been justified in imposing it is very different from what we can learn from the principle that we are justified in imposing. (shrink)

The ability to understand and communicate about the actions of others is a fundamental aspect of our daily activity. How can we talk about what others are doing? What qualities do different actions have such that they cause us to see them as being different or similar? What is the connection between what we see and the development of concepts and words or expressions for the things that we see? To what extent can two different people see and talk about (...) the same things? Is there a common basis for our perception, and is there then a common basis for the concepts we form and the way in which the concepts become lexicalized in language? The broad purpose of this thesis is to relate aspects of perception, categorization and language to action recognition and conceptualization. This is achieved by empirically demonstrating a prototype structure for action categories and by revealing the effect this structure has on language via the semantic organization of verbs for natural actions. The results also show that implicit access to categorical information can affect the perceptual processing of basic actions. These findings indicate that our understanding of human actions is guided by the activation of high level information in the form of dynamic action templates or prototypes. More specifically, the first two empirical studies investigate the relation between perception and the hierarchical structure of action categories, i.e., subordinate, basic, and superordinate level action categories. Subjects generated lists of verbs based on perceptual criteria. Analyses based on multidimensional scaling showed a significant correlation for the semantic organization of a subset of the verbs for English and Swedish speaking subjects. Two additional experiments were performed in order to further determine the extent to which action categories exhibit graded structure, which would indicate the existence of prototypes for action categories. The results from typicality ratings and category verification showed that typicality judgments reliably predict category verification times for instances of different actions. Finally, the results from a repetition priming paradigm suggest that high level information about the categorical differences between actions can be implicitly activated and facilitates the later visual processing of displays of biological motion. This facilitation occurs for upright displays, but appears to be lacking for displays that are shown upside down. These results show that the implicit activation of information about action categories can play a critical role in the perception of human actions. (shrink)

Shepard’s (1987) universal law of generalisation (ULG) illustrates that an invariant gradient of generalisation across species and across stimuli conditions can be obtained by mapping the probability of a generalisation response onto the representations of similarity between individual stimuli. Tenenbaum and Griffiths (2001) Bayesian account of generalisation expands ULG towards generalisation from multiple examples. Though the Bayesian model starts from Shepard’s account it refrains from any commitment to the notion of psychological similarity to explain categorisation. This chapter presents the conceptual (...) spaces theory (Gärdenfors 2000, 2014) as a mediator between Shepard’s and Tenenbaum & Griffiths’ conflicting views on the role of psychological similarity for a successful model of categorisation. It suggests that the conceptual spaces theory can help to improve the Bayesian model while finding an explanatory role for psychological similarity. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been increasing discussion of whether philosophy actually makes progress. This discussion has been prompted, in no small part, by the depth and persistence of disagreement among philosophers on virtually every major theoretical issue in the field. In this paper, I examine the role that the Method of Cases – the widespread philosophical method of testing and revising theories by comparing their verdicts against our intuitions in particular cases – plays in creating and sustaining theoretical disagreements (...) in philosophy. Drawing on work from cognitive psychology, I argue that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the structure of the theories that philosophers seek to construct using the MoC and the structure of the concepts on which our case-specific intuitions are based. This incompatibility renders MoC-based philosophical theorizing unable ever to succeed by the very standards of adequacy that it sets for itself. And this, in turn, helps to explain the depth and persistence of theoretical disagreements – and, in certain ways, the lack of progress – in the many areas of philosophy where the MoC plays an important role. (shrink)

Researchers have debated whether there is a relationship between a statement’s truth-value and whether it counts as a lie. One view is that a statement being objectively false is essential to whether it counts as a lie; the opposing view is that a statement’s objective truth-value is inessential to whether it counts as a lie. We report five behavioral experiments that use a novel range of behavioral measures to address this issue. In each case, we found evidence of a relationship. (...) A statement’s truth-value affects how quickly people judge whether it is a lie. When people consider the matter carefully and are told that they might need to justify their answer, they are more likely to categorize a statement as a lie when it is false than when it is true. When given options that inhibit perspective-taking, people tend to not categorize deceptively motivated statements as lies when they are true, even though they still categorize them as lies when they are false. Categorizing a speaker as “lying” leads people to strongly infer that the speaker’s statement is false. People are more likely to spontaneously categorize a statement as a lie when it is false than when it is true. We discuss four different interpretations of relevant findings to date. At present, the best supported interpretation might be that the ordinary lying concept is a prototype concept, with falsity being a centrally important element of the prototypical lie. (shrink)

A response to a recent critique by Cem Bozşahin of the theory of syntactic semantics as it applies to Helen Keller, and some applications of the theory to the philosophy of computer science.

As it emerged from philosophical analyses and cognitive research, most concepts exhibit typicality effects, and resist to the efforts of defining them in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. This holds also in the case of many medical concepts. This is a problem for the design of computer science ontologies, since knowledge representation formalisms commonly adopted in this field do not allow for the representation of concepts in terms of typical traits. However, the need of representing concepts in terms of (...) typical traits concerns almost every domain of real world knowledge, including medical domains. In particular, in this article we take into account the domain of mental disorders, starting from the DSM-5 descriptions of some specific mental disorders. On this respect, we favor a hybrid approach to the representation of psychiatric concepts, in which ontology oriented formalisms are combined to a geometric representation of knowledge based on conceptual spaces. (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)

Conceptual engineering means to provide a method to assess and improve our concepts working as cognitive devices. But conceptual engineering still lacks an account of what concepts are (as cognitive devices) and of what engineering is (in the case of cognition). And without such prior understanding of its subject matter, or so it is claimed here, conceptual engineering is bound to remain useless, merely operating as a piecemeal approach, with no overall grip on its target domain. The purpose of this (...) programmatic paper is to overcome this knowledge gap by providing some guidelines for developing the theories of concepts and of cognition that will ground the systematic unified framework needed to effectively implement conceptual engineering as a widely applicable method for the cognitive optimization of our conceptual devices. (shrink)

Gleitman and Trueswell’s “The easy words” forms a pair with their earlier paper, “Hard words,” completing a circle in which the authors ask how “easy” words (e.g., concrete nouns) are learned. They take up the hypothesis of “cross‐situational learning,” and argue that accumulating observations actually hinders learning if the mechanism requires holding all exemplars in memory over time. They present an alternative hypothesis, “Propose but Verify,” wherein people use one‐trial learning to confirm or disconfirm their current hypothesis—a mechanism distinctly different (...) from cross‐situational learning. (shrink)

We argue that one important aspect of the “cognitive neuroscience revolution” identified by Boone and Piccinini :1509–1534. doi: 10.1007/s11229-015-0783-4, 2015) is a dramatic shift away from thinking of cognitive representations as arbitrary symbols towards thinking of them as icons that replicate structural characteristics of their targets. We argue that this shift has been driven both “from below” and “from above”—that is, from a greater appreciation of what mechanistic explanation of information-processing systems involves, and from a greater appreciation of the problems (...) solved by bio-cognitive systems, chiefly regulation and prediction. We illustrate these arguments by reference to examples from cognitive neuroscience, principally representational similarity analysis and the emergence of dynamical models as a central postulate in neurocognitive research. (shrink)

Health and disease are core concepts in health care and have attracted substantial interest and controversy. In recent and interesting contributions to the debate it has been argued that the challenges with the concept of disease can be resolved by a prototype concept of disease. As a robin is a more prototypical of a bird than a penguin, some diseases are more prototypical than others. If disease is a prototype concept, it would change nosology, but also health care and the (...) study of health and disease. However, the statement that “disease is a prototype concept” forms an empirically testable hypothesis. Therefore, this study aims to test the hypothesis that health professionals have a prototype concept of disease. Two hundred twenty-three health care professionals in Norway were invited to participate in a survey where they were asked to rank a wide range of diseases according to how typical they considered them to be as diseases. Results were analysed with descriptive statistics. The response rate was 90%. Lung cancer, leukemia, colon cancer, myocardial infarction, and AIDS are the diseases ranged to be most typical, while homosexuality, pregnancy, drapetomania, dissidence, and nostalgia are considered to be the least typical diseases. The results also show that the answers to how typical various diseases are vary greatly, even amongst a relatively homogenous group of health professionals. This study falsifies the hypothesis that disease is a prototype concept for health professionals. This has implications for the debate on core concepts for health care. If health professionals do not have a prototype concept of disease, it is unlikely that there is a prototype concept of disease in general. Consequently, nosologies should not be based on prototypes. (shrink)

A standard view in contemporary philosophy is that belief is involuntary, either as a matter of conceptual necessity or as a contingent fact of human psychology. We present seven experiments on patterns in ordinary folk-psychological judgments about belief. The results provide strong evidence that voluntary belief is conceptually possible and, granted minimal charitable assumptions about folk-psychological competence, provide some evidence that voluntary belief is psychologically possible. We also consider two hypotheses in an attempt to understand why many philosophers have been (...) tempted to view belief as involuntary: that belief is a prototype concept and that belief is a dual character concept. Altogether, our findings contribute to longstanding philosophical debates about the relationship between the will and the intellect, while also advancing scientific understanding of important social judgments. (shrink)

Ben-Yami presents Wittgenstein’s explicit criticism of the Platonic identification of an explanation with a definition and the alternative forms of explanation he employed. He then discusses a few predecessors of Wittgenstein’s criticisms and the Fregean background against which he wrote. Next, the idea of family resemblance is introduced, and objections answered. Wittgenstein’s endorsement of vagueness and the indeterminacy of sense are presented, as well as the open texture of concepts. Common misunderstandings are addressed along the way. Wittgenstein’s ideas, as is (...) then shown, have far-reaching implications for knowledge of meaning and the nature of logic, and with them to the nature of the philosophical project and its possible achievements. (shrink)

The present century has seen renewed interest in characterizing cognition, the object of inquiry of the cognitive sciences. In this paper, I describe the problem of cognition—the absence of a positive characterization of cognition despite a felt need for one. It is widely recognized that the problem is motivated by decades of controversy among cognitive scientists over foundational questions, such as whether non-neural parts of the body or environment can realize cognitive processes, or whether plants and microbes have cognitive processes. (...) The dominant strategy for addressing the problem of cognition is to seek a dichotomous criterion that vindicates some set of controversial claims. However, I argue that the problem of cognition is also motivated by ongoing conceptual development in cognitive science, and I describe four benefits that a characterization of cognition could confer. Given these benefits, I recommend an alternative criterion of success, ecumenical extensional adequacy, on which the aim is to describe the variation in expert judgments rather than to correct this variation by taking sides in sectarian disputes. I argue that if we had an ecumenical solution to the problem of cognition, we would have achieved much of what we should want from a “mark of the cognitive”. (shrink)

Practically all theories of iconicity are denunciations of its subject matter (for example, those of Goodman, Bierman and the early Eco). My own theory of iconicity was developed in order to save a particular kind of iconicity, pictoriality, from such criticism. In this interest, I distinguished pure iconicity, iconic ground, and iconic sign, on one hand, and primary and secondary iconic signs, on the other hand. Since then, however, several things have happened. The conceptual tools that I created to explain (...) pictoriality have been shown by others to be relevant to linguistic iconicity. On the other hand, semioticians with points of departure different from mine have identified mimicry as it is commonly found in the animal world as a species of iconicity. In the evolutionary semiotics of Deacon, iconicity is referred to in such a general way that it seems to be emptied of all content, while in the variety invented by Donald the term mimesis is used for a particular phase in the evolution of iconic meaning. The aim of this article is to consider to what extent the extension of iconicity theory to new domains will necessitate the development of new models. (shrink)

Concepto es una palabra que refiere a un constructo problemático en la psicología cognitiva y en la filosofía de la mente, el cual indistintamente refiere a cierto tipo de representaciones mentales, a entidades extramentales e incluso a habilidades psicológicas. Lo cierto es que las teorías de conceptos emblemáticas al interior de la filosofía y la psicología, como la Teoría Clásica de conceptos (entendidos como definiciones aristotélicas), o como la Teoría de Prototipos de Rosch (entendidos como estructuras estadísticas de datos), no (...) logran dar cuenta de fenómenos tales como la productividad, la sistematicidad y la composicionalidad del pensamiento humano. Se analizarán los requisitos que una buena teoría psicológica sobre los conceptos debe satisfacer, y se presentará un breve esbozo de la Teoría de Sistemas de Símbolos Perceptuales de Lawrence Barsalou. (shrink)

Six experiments investigated variables predicted to influence subjects’ tendency to classify items by a single property instead of overall similarity, following the paradigm of Norenzayan et al., who found that European Americans tended to give more “logical” rule-based responses. However, in five experiments with Mechanical Turk subjects and undergraduates at an American university, we found a consistent preference for similarity-based responding. A sixth experiment with Korean undergraduates revealed an effect of instructions, also reported by Norenzayan et al., in which classification (...) instructions led to majority rule-based responding but similarity instructions led to overall similarity grouping. Our American subjects showed no such difference and used similarity more overall. We conclude that Americans do not have a preference for rule responding in classification and discuss the differences between tasks that reliably show strong rule or unidimensional preferences in contrast to this classification paradigm. (shrink)

People’s beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both people’s representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., the ideal). Four studies suggest that people’s notion of normality incorporates both of these types of norms. In particular, people’s representations of what is (...) normal were found to be influenced both by what they believed to be descriptively average and by what they believed to be prescriptively ideal. This is shown across three domains: people’s use of the word ‘‘normal” (Study 1), their use of gradable adjectives (Study 2), and their judgments of concept prototypicality (Study 3). A final study investigated the learning of normality for a novel category, showing that people actively combine statistical and prescriptive information they have learned into an undifferentiated notion of what is normal (Study 4). Taken together, these findings may help to explain how moral norms impact the acquisition of normality and, conversely, how normality impacts the acquisition of moral norms. (shrink)

This work is an investigation into philosophical method and rational argument in moral philosophy. It makes an original contribution to human understanding, by taking some of the tools and techniques that Gordon Baker identifies in the later work of Wittgenstein, and using them as a way of fending for oneself in an area of philosophy that neither Baker, nor Wittgenstein, wrote on. More specifically, a discussion of some different aspects of the contemporary literature on Dancy’s moral particularism is used as (...) a vehicle for illustrating how Baker’s therapeutic conception of philosophy offers alternative possibilities for how we can do philosophy, and what counts as rational argument in moral philosophy. I maintain that, by considering some indicative ways in which Baker’s therapeutic approach to philosophy can dissolve, rather than solve, the kinds of perplexities found in the existing literature on Dancy’s moral particularism, we can liberate ourselves from the traditional/theoretical view of how we ought to do philosophy, and an understanding of rational argument in moral philosophy, to which we need not be committed. (shrink)

The notion of conceptual space, proposed by Gärdenfors as a framework for the representation of concepts and knowledge, has been highly influential over the last decade or so. One of the main theses involved in this approach is that the conceptual regions associated with properties, concepts, verbs, etc. are convex. The aim of this paper is to show that such a constraint—that of the convexity of the geometry of conceptual regions—is problematic; both from a theoretical perspective and with regard to (...) the inner workings of the theory itself. On the one hand, all the arguments provided in favor of the convexity of conceptual regions rest on controversial assumptions. Additionally, his argument in support of a Euclidean metric, based on the integral character of conceptual dimensions, is weak, and under non-Euclidean metrics the structure of regions may be non-convex. Furthermore, even if the metric were Euclidean, the convexity constraint could be not satisfied if concepts were differentially weighted. On the other hand, Gärdenfors’ convexity constraint is brought into question by the own inner workings of conceptual spaces because: some of the allegedly convex properties of concepts are not convex; the conceptual regions resulting from the combination of convex properties can be non-convex; convex regions may co-vary in non-convex ways; and his definition of verbs is incompatible with a definition of properties in terms of convex regions. Therefore, the mandatory character of the convexity requirement for regions in a conceptual space theory should be reconsidered. (shrink)

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 (...) psychology. Despite the ubiquity of causal reasoning, textbooks of cognitive psychology have neglected this growing field. The goal of The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning is to fill this gap. The handbook brings together the leading researchers in the field of causal reasoning and offers state-of-the-art presentations of theories and research. It provides introductions of competing theories of causal reasoning, and discusses its role in various cognitive functions and domains. The final section presents research from neighboring fields. 1. Causal Reasoning: An Introduction Michael R. Waldmann Part I: Theories of Causal Cognition 2. Associative Accounts of Causal Cognition Mike E. Le Pelley, Oren Griffiths, and Tom Beesley 3. Rules of Causal Judgment: Mapping Statistical Information Onto Causal Beliefs José C. Perales, Andrés Catena, Antonio Cándido, and Antonio Maldonado 4. The Inferential Reasoning Theory of Causal Learning: Toward a Multi- Process Propositional Account Yannick Boddez, Jan De Houwer, and Tom Beckers 5. Causal Invariance as an Essential Constraint for Creating a Causal Representation of the World: Generalizing the Invariance of Causal Power Patricia W. Cheng and Hongjing Lu 6. The Acquisition and Use of Causal Structure Knowledge Benjamin Margolin Rottman 7. Formalizing Prior Knowledge in Causal Induction Thomas L. Griffiths 8. Causal Mechanisms Samuel G. B. Johnson and Woo-kyoung Ahn 9. Force Dynamics and Causation Phillip Wolff and Robert Thorstad 10. Mental Models and Causation P. N. Johnson- Laird and Sangeet S. Khemlani 11. Pseudocontingencies Klaus Fiedler and Florian Kutzner 12. Singular Causation David Danks 13. Cognitive Neuroscience of Causal Reasoning Joachim T. Operskalski and Aron K. Barbey Part II: Basic Cognitive Functions 14. Visual Impressions of Causality Peter White 15. Goal-Directed Actions Bernhard Hommel 16. Planning and Control Magda Osman 17. Reinforcement Learning and Causal Models Samuel J. Gershman 18. Causation and the Probability of Causal Conditionals David E. Over 19. Causal Models and Conditional Reasoning Mike Oaksford and Nick Chater 20. Concepts as Causal Models: Categorization Bob Rehder 21. Concepts as Causal Models: Induction Bob Rehder 22. Causal Explanation Tania Lombrozo and Nadya Vasilyeva 23. Diagnostic Reasoning Björn Meder and Ralf Mayrhofer 24. Inferring Causal Relations by Analogy Keith J. Holyoak and Hee-Seung Lee 25. Causal Argument Ulrike Hahn, Roland Bluhm, and Frank Zenker 26. Causality in Decision- Making York Hagmayer and Philip M. Fernbach Part III: Domains of Causal Reasoning 27. Intuitive Theories Tobias Gerstenberg and Joshua B. Tenenbaum 28. Space, Time, and Causality Marc J. Buehner 29. Causation in Legal and Moral Reasoning David A. Lagnado and Tobias Gerstenberg 30. The Role of Causal Knowledge in Reasoning About Mental Disorders Woo-kyoung Ahn, Nancy S. Kim, and Matthew S. Lebowitz 31. Causality and Causal Reasoning in Natural Language Torgrim Solstad and Oliver Bott 32. Social Attribution and Explanation Denis Hilton Part IV: Development, Phylogeny, and Culture 33. The Development of Causal Reasoning Paul Muentener and Elizabeth Bonawitz 34. Causal Reasoning in Non-Human Animals Christian Schloegl and Julia Fischer 35. Causal Cognition and Culture Andrea Bender, Sieghard Beller, and Douglas L. Medin. (shrink)

This review discusses recent work on foundational questions about concepts. The first of these questions is whether concepts are context-independent bodies of knowledge, or context-dependent constructs, created on the fly. The second question is whether concepts are abstract, amodal representations, or whether they are embedded within the sensory-motor system. I discuss these two questions in light of empirical data from psychology and neuroscience, as well as theoretical considerations, and examine their implications for theories of concepts.

The operationalization of scienti?c notions is instrumental in enabling experimental evidence to bear on scienti?c propositions. Conceptual change should thus translate into operationalization change. This article describes some important experimental works in the psychology of concepts since the beginning of the twentieth century. It is argued that since the early days of this ?eld, psy- chologists.

The species problem is often described as the abundance of conflicting definitions of _species_, such as the biological species concept and phylogenetic species concepts. But biologists understand the notion of species in a non-definitional as well as a definitional way. In this article I argue that when they understand _species_ without a definition in their mind, their understanding is often mediated by the notion of _good species_, or prototypical species, as the idea of ``prototype'' is explicated in cognitive psychology. This (...) distinction helps us make sense of several puzzling phenomena regarding biologists' dealing with species, such as the fact that in everyday research biologists often behave as if the species problem is solved, while they should be fully aware that it is not. I also briefly discuss implications of this finding, including that some extant attempts to answer what the nature of species is have an inadequate assumption about how the notion of species is represented in biologists' minds. (shrink)

Coreferentialism refers to the common assumption in the literature that slurs and descriptors are coreferential expressions with precisely the same extension. For instance, Vallee recently writes that “If S is an ethnic slur in language L, then there is a non-derogatory expression G in L such that G and S have the same extension”. The non-derogatory expression G is commonly considered the nonpejorative correlate of the slur expression S and it is widely thought that every S has a coreferring G (...) that possesses precisely the same extension. Yet here I argue against this widespread assumption by first briefly introducing what slurs are and then considering four sources of supporting evidence showing that slurs and descriptors are in fact not coreferential expressions with precisely the same extension. I argue that since slurs and descriptors differ in their extension they thereby differ in their meaning or content also. This article additionally introduces the notion of a conceptual anchor in order to adequately account for the relationship between slurs and descriptors actually evidenced in the empirical data, and further considers the inadequacy of common dictionary definitions of slurs. This article therefore contributes to the literature on slurs by demonstrating that previous accounts operating on the assumption that slurs and descriptors are coreferential expressions with the same extension, and that they thereby have the same meaning or content, are inconsistent with empirical data and that an alternative account in accord with Croom better fits the facts concerning their actual meaning and use. (shrink)

I here critique the application of the traditional, similarity-based account of natural kinds to debates in psychology. A challenge to such accounts of kindhood—familiar from the study of biological species—is a metaphysical phenomenon that I call ‘transitional gradation’: the systematic progression of slightly modified transitional forms between related candidate kinds. Where such gradation proliferates, it renders the selection of similarity criteria for kinds arbitrary. Reflection on general features of learning—especially on the gradual revision of concepts throughout the acquisition of expertise—shows (...) that even the strongest candidates for similarity-based kinds in psychology exhibit systematic transitional gradation. As a result, philosophers of psychology should abandon discussion of kindhood, or explore non-similarity based accounts. (shrink)