There is disagreement in the literature about the exact nature of the phenomenon of empathy. There are emotional, cognitive, and conditioning views, applying in varying degrees across species. An adequate description of the ultimate and proximate mechanism can integrate these views. Proximately, the perception of an object's state activates the subject's corresponding representations, which in turn activate somatic and autonomic responses. This mechanism supports basic behaviors that are crucial for the reproductive success of animals living in groups. The Perception-Action Model, (...) together with an understanding of how representations change with experience, can explain the major empirical effects in the literature. It can also predict a variety of empathy disorders. The interaction between the PAM and prefrontal functioning can also explain different levels of empathy across species and age groups. This view can advance our evolutionary understanding of empathy beyond inclusive fitness and reciprocal altruism and can explain different levels of empathy across individuals, species, stages of development, and situations. Key Words: altruism; cognitive empathy ; comparative; emotion; emotional contagion; empathy ; evolution; human; perception-action; perspective taking. (shrink)

Preston & de Waal are understandably cautious in applying their model to autism. They emphasise multiple cognitive impairments in autism, including prefrontal-executive, cerebellar-attention, and amygdala-emotion recognition deficits. Further empirical examination of imitation ability in autism may reveal deficits in the neural and cognitive basis of perception-action mapping that have a specific relation to the empathic deficit.

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.

At the phenomenal level, consciousness can be described as a singular, unified field of recursive self-awareness, consistently coherent in a particualr way; that of a subject located both spatially and temporally in an egocentrically-extended domain, such that conscious self-awareness is explicitly characterized by I-ness, now-ness and here-ness. The psychological mechanism underwriting this spatiotemporal self-locatedness and its recursive processing style involves an evolutionary elaboration of the basic orientative reference frame which consistently structures ongoing spatiotemporal self-location computations as i-here-now. Cognition computes action-output (...) in the midst of ongoing movement, and consequently requires a constant self-locating spatiotemporal reference frame as basis for these computations. Over time, constant evolutionary pressures for energy efficiency have encouraged both the proliferation of anticipative feedforward processing mechansims, and the elaboration, at the apex of the sensorimotor processing hierarchy, of self-activating, highly attenuated recursively-feedforward circuitry processing the basic orientational schema independent of external action output. As the primary reference frame of active waking cognition, this recursive i-here-now processing generates a zone of subjective self-awareness in terms of which it feels like something to be oneself here and now. This is consciousness. (shrink)

We propose a theory for modeling concepts that uses the state-context-property theory (SCOP), a generalization of the quantum formalism, whose basic notions are states, contexts and properties. This theory enables us to incorporate context into the mathematical structure used to describe a concept, and thereby model how context influences the typicality of a single exemplar and the applicability of a single property of a concept. We introduce the notion `state of a concept' to account for this contextual influence, and show (...) that the structure of the set of contexts and of the set of properties of a concept is a complete orthocomplemented lattice. The structural study in this article is a preparation for a numerical mathematical theory of concepts in the Hilbert space of quantum mechanics that allows the description of the combination of concepts. (shrink)

We argue that concepts from the social sciences can be as natural as those from physics and chemistry, thereby answering in the positive the question of whether social metaphysics is or can be substantive. The argument takes as a starting point Douven & Gärdenfors’ (Mind & Language, 35, 313–334 2020) optimality account of natural concepts, according to which natural concepts are represented by the cells of an optimally partitioned similarity space. While the account applies straightforwardly to perceptual concepts, it does (...) not apply as straightforwardly to more abstract concepts, such as many scientific concepts. We propose an extension of Douven and Gärdenfors’ optimality account that pertains to scientific concepts as well. The proposal reuses ideas from Lewis’ Best Systems Account of laws of nature, but rather than invoking natural concepts (as Lewis does) defines natural scientific concepts as those that figure in the or a best systematization of the totality of facts. On this proposal, there is nothing especially different between concepts from the natural sciences and those from the social sciences. (shrink)

Identity labels like “woman”, “Black,” “mother,” and “evangelical” are pervasive in both political and personal life, and in both formal and informal classification and communication. They are also widely thought to undermine agency by essentializing groups, flattening individual distinctiveness, and enforcing discrimination. While we take these worries to be well-founded, we argue that they result from a particular practice of using labels to rigidly label others. We identify an alternative practice of playful self-labelling, and argue that it can function as (...) a tool for combating oppression by expressing and enhancing individual and collective agency. (shrink)

A stereotype is a belief or claim that a group of people has a particular feature. Stereotypes are expressed by sentences that have the form of generic statements, like “Canadians are nice.” Recent work on generics lends new life to understanding generics as statements involving probabilities. I argue that generics (and thus sentences expressing stereotypes) can take one of several forms involving conditional probabilities, and these probabilities have what I call a naturalness requirement. This is the natural probability theory of (...) stereotypes. Each of the two components of the theory entails a family of fallacies that contributes to the spurious reinforcement of stereotypes: inferential slippage within and between the different generic forms, and inferential slippage from facts about frequencies of group traits to beliefs about natural propensities or dispositions of groups. Empirical research suggests that we often commit these fallacies. Moreover, this theory can referee a vitriolic debate between some psychologists, who hold that stereotypes are always false and stereotyping is always wrong, and other psychologists, who hold that stereotypes are often accurate and stereotyping is often reasonable. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to see how mental and language representations are unique from a video-game perspective, using two main criteria. First, I will posit that the level of being both an interactive work of fiction and a self-involving interactive fiction belongs to a fuzzy interval and that some works – and, therefore, some video games – are more immersive than others. Second, I will observe how propositions tie the player’s representations of the real world and the game (...) world. Starting from psychological theories of pretense in children’s make-believe games, I will then expand Nichols and Stich’s cognitive theory of pretense to include an extra layer related to the game world, i.e., player-specific representations that govern player-specific propositions. The representations dealing with the work world are the socially shared ones, while the possible-world representations, dealing with most of the game world, are player-specific and tied to unique language use. (shrink)

Did you ever wonder why you are sometimes too tired to watch a film, and would rather watch some TV show? And then, you might end up watching five or six hours and binge watch an entire season, and yet feel too tired to commit yourself to a single 2-hour film piece. The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, I will try to investigate whether there are any ontological differences in the form of a film or a television show. (...) Second, I will try to connect the newest neurological and psychological research regarding binging and attention span and see how seriality influences our brains. I will use the recent neurological findings to try to answer the question of why it seems easier to watch the same number of episodes rather than a single movie. Third, I will use David Lynch's and Mark Frost's third season of Twin Peaks as an example illustrating the blurry borders between a television show and a film, while contrasting it to the binge-watching phenomenon. (shrink)

The term “altruism” is used in many ways. In this thesis, I discuss altruism as a motivation, which is an influential notion in philosophy and the social sciences. Questions about the nature and the possibility of altruistic motivation have inspired much debate, both in academia and in everyday conversations. How can we know when we are truly altruistic and when we are merely helping others as a means to some egoistic goal? Are humans even capable of genuine altruistic motivation or (...) are we always egoistic deep down? Before answering questions like these, however, we need to ask a more fundamental question: how should we define altruistic motivation? The standard account of altruistic motivation in the literature defines it as an ultimate desire to increase the welfare of others. The central claim I will argue for in this thesis is that this standard account is intrinsically flawed and should be abandoned. -/- The problem with the standard account of altruistic motivation, in short, is its reliance on the notion of “ultimate desire”, which is a limited and unfruitful way of conceptualizing altruistic motivation. The criticism I propose is based on an interdisciplinary analysis of many aspects of the standard account, discussing its philosophical basis, its use in scientific research, its historical development, and its relation to common sense and morality. -/- This thesis is divided into four parts, each composed of two chapters. Part I presents the many technical accounts of altruism present in the scientific literature, distinguishing the standard account of altruistic motivation from alternative accounts of altruism. I discuss the hypotheses of psychological altruism, which states that some of our ultimate desires aim to increase the welfare of others, and psychological egoism, which states that all of our ultimate desires are egoistic. In this first part, I discuss some of the central philosophical concepts underlying the standard account of altruistic motivation, showing their implications for the debate about psychological altruism. -/- Part II discusses the main arguments for the existence of altruistic motivation. I argue that the main arguments in the scientific literature fail in making a defense of psychological altruism and that the definition of altruistic motivation makes the solution to the debate on psychological altruism virtually impossible. I conclude that the standard account makes altruistic motivation an unverifiable and unfruitful notion for scientific research. -/- Part III discusses the history of altruism and egoism, focusing particularly on early modern philosophy. I argue that the modern accounts of altruism and egoism diverge from the contemporary standard account of altruistic motivation. Reading the debates in modern philosophy through the lens of psychological altruism and psychological egoism oversimplifies and impoverishes the modern debate. I argue that the standard account also fails in representing the original use of “altruism”, proposed by Auguste Comte. In this third part, I show how the use of the standard account of altruistic motivation cannot be based on its historical foundations. -/- Finally, Part IV addresses the normative character of altruism and discusses some alternative ways of conceptualizing altruism. I argue that the standard account of altruistic motivation does not reflect the ordinary use of the term “altruism” and fails in accounting for its normative character. As an alternative, I propose an alternative account of altruism, virtue altruism. I claim that this account better reflects the ordinary intuitions about altruism, accommodates the descriptive and normative dimensions of altruism, is at home with most of the historical accounts of altruism, and may promote the active promotion of altruistic actions. (shrink)

The central aim of astrobiology is to study origins, evolution and distribution of life in the universe, combining data from various disciplines. However, I will argue that from a philosophical standpoint, astrobiology requires the affirmation of astrophilosophy. Fry (2015) claims that philosophical presuppositions guiding science are general, for example, we hold the notion that natural laws necessarily hold at the whole universe at large, and on the basis of the universal applicability of natural laws, the astrobiological research is conducted. Jakosky (...) (2000) mentions that finding any life elsewhere that had an origin independent of that on Earth would be philosophically profound. Kolb (2005) covers various definitions of life and establishes thought experiments about the survival of life in the Solar System. Most of the (scarce) research has dealt with specific philosophical topics in astrobiology, instead of seeing it as a new philosophical discipline or perhaps a new subdiscipline for each of the classical philosophical disciplines. -/- Persson (2013) has made a step towards this by systematizing the most important philosophical questions in astrobiology, along with Dunér (2013) emphasizing its importance for ethics, epistemology, semiotics and linguistics, and cognition. Persson mentions that the justification of resources is a question of ethics, but I would also like to add political philosophy, since not only is there a question of preference over "earthly manners" but also fair distribution of costs and the concept of ownership of the new worlds. The question of a new definition of life is another one, that I would argue holds one of the central places in metaphysics. Persson mentions various definitions of life and that such a discussion is important for both biology and philosophy, a notion I would like to add to by stating that the question of finding another life is also an ontological question, giving us either categorical similarity or dissimilarity, and establishing a new kind, which is of metaphysical importance. Persson also establishes the importance of is it possible to know whether we are alone or not, a question I would like to tie to the modern epistemological questions of possibility of knowledge (cf. Cassam, 2007). Persson also connects astrobiology with ethical questions such as biocentrism or colonization, which also might be tied to philosophy of mind, and philosophy of politics and culture respectively. -/- One major step forward was established recently by Dick (2020), focusing on a new discipline combining astronomy, cosmology, and astrobiology, in which there is a focus on the nature of reasoning, the problematic nature of evidence, the influence of metaphysical preconceptions, the epistemological status of these disciplines, the role of technology, and the mutual interaction between these disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to see how the creation of astrophilosophy could better emphasize the role of philosophy today, and would it behave as a side-by-side major philosophical discipline or a complement to the current philosophical disciplines, for example, bringing new light into metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, or philosophy of mind. In the first case, we would make a metaphysical difference between human-related problems and other possible kinds, and in the second case, we would have to incorporate current astrobiological questions into modern philosophical dialogue, establishing, for example, metaphysics and epistemology of life, or, a possibility to incorporate non-human life into epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology. This goes hand to hand with Dunér's (2013) points of seeing the philosophy of astrobiology as both a type of individual and collective self-understanding, and conceptual analysis. That way, using astrophilosophical novelties, we can improve not only our current philosophical intuitions, but also expand the territory of philosophical subdisciplines to become more universal. -/- . (shrink)

The appearance in 1945 of the idea of the open texture of empirical concepts, which anticipated Friedrich Waismann’s thesis of a many-level-structure of language, led to a re-evaluation of “context”. It widens the sense of context that we are accustomed to mentioning as being Wittgenstein’s conception of meaning in his later philosophy. The new idea Waismann brought into the landscape is how to “clarify the context”, which is in a way a very non-Wittgensteinian question as well as an “explanation of (...) context”, where open texture plays a key role. But despite the amount of literature about open texture, this idea of Waismann is still not properly understood. Open texture must be situated as an obstacle to exhaustiveness of definition for internal reasons not only because of unforeseen conditions that could always arise in the future, but also by virtue of an a priori aspect of the texture of concepts. Thus, the main goal of this paper is to propose an interpretation of open texture as an immanent property of a concept, that is, as something that is underlying its nature. (shrink)

Genera, typically hand-in-hand with their branching species, are essential elements of vocabulary-based information constructs, in particular scientific taxonomies. Should they also feature in formal ontologies, the highest of such constructs? I argue in this article that the answer is “Yes” and that the question posed in its title also has a Yes-answer: The way medieval ontologists sliced up the world into genera does matter to formal ontology. More specifically, the way Dietrich of Freiberg, a Latin scholastic, conceived and applied strictly (...) generic criteria to slice up the world into its entities can provide some guidelines to the field of formal ontology with respect to not only its contents, but also its scope. In particular, Dietrich's information criterion plays here a central role. (shrink)

The current paper expands on previous work done on the influence of learners’ language and preexisting knowledge on understanding physics terminology by exploring the concept of ACCELERATION in Arabic and English. The study attempts to answer two questions: (1) what are the similarities and differences between the polysemy of Arabic تَسَارُع (tasāruʿ) (acceleration) and the polysemy of English acceleration, and (2) to what extent do prototypes and factors motivating the conceptualization of تَسَارُع (tasāruʿ) and the conceptualization of acceleration converge or (...) diverge? To this end, Arabic and English dictionaries and corpora, the ArabiCorpus (Arabic Corpus Search Tool) and the British National Corpus (BNC), were employed. The dictionaries were surveyed to explore the various meanings of تَسَارُع (tasāruʿ) and acceleration, while the ArabiCorpus and the BNC were employed to investigate the senses and to identify the most frequent collocates and so the prototypes of these terms. The meaning extension of the terms is examined on the basis of the cognitive mechanisms which appear in the corpora. Theoretically, the paper is informed by the prototype theory (Rosch, 1973; 1975), image schemas (Johnson, 1987), and conceptual metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980/2003). The results show that تَسَارُع (tasāruʿ) (acceleration) and acceleration generally overlap in terms of polysemy, prototype, and images schemas as well as conceptual metaphor that organize the conceptualization of these terms. It was also found that both Arab and English speakers mix ACCELERATION up with SPEED and so misunderstand them in a scientific setting. The present findings have several implications for science curriculum design, education, and research on universal and culture-specific properties of language. (shrink)

Poetry is the most complex and intricate of human language used across all languages and cultures. Its relation to the worlds of human experience has perplexed writers and readers for centuries, as has the question of evaluation and judgment: what makes a poem "work" and endure. The Poem as Icon focuses on the art of poetry to explore its nature and function: not interpretation but experience; not what poetry means but what it does. Using both historic and contemporary approaches of (...) embodied cognition from various disciplines, Margaret Freeman argues that a poem's success lies in its ability to become an icon of the felt "being" of reality. Freeman explains how the features of semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect work to make a poem an icon, with detailed examples from various poets. By analyzing the ways poetry provides insights into the workings of human cognition, Freeman claims that taste, beauty, and pleasure in the arts are simply products of the aesthetic faculty, and not the aesthetic faculty itself. The aesthetic faculty, she argues, should be understood as the science of human perception, and therefore constitutive of the cognitive processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment. (shrink)

A leading philosopher takes a mind-bending journey through virtual worlds, illuminating the nature of reality and our place within it. Virtual reality is genuine reality; that's the central thesis of Reality+. In a highly original work of "technophilosophy," David J. Chalmers gives a compelling analysis of our technological future. He argues that virtual worlds are not second-class worlds, and that we can live a meaningful life in virtual reality. We may even be in a virtual world already. Along the way, (...) Chalmers conducts a grand tour of big ideas in philosophy and science. He uses virtual reality technology to offer a new perspective on long-established philosophical questions. How do we know that there's an external world? Is there a god? What is the nature of reality? What's the relation between mind and body? How can we lead a good life? All of these questions are illuminated or transformed by Chalmers' mind-bending analysis. Studded with illustrations that bring philosophical issues to life, Reality+ is a major statement that will shape discussion of philosophy, science, and technology for years to come. (shrink)

Machery and Weiskopf argue that the kind concept is a natural kind if and only if it plays an explanatory role in cognitive scientific explanations. In this paper, we argue against this explanationist approach to determining the natural kind-hood of concept. We first demonstrate that hybrid, pluralist, and eliminativist theories of concepts afford the kind concept different explanatory roles. Then, we argue that we cannot decide between hybrid, pluralist, and eliminativist theories of concepts, because each endorses a different, but equally (...) viable, specification of the explananda of cognitive science. It follows that an explanationist approach to determining the natural kind-hood of concept fails, because there is no consensus about whether or not concept should be afforded an explanatory role in our best cognitive scientific explanations. We conclude by considering what our critique of explanationism could imply for further discussions about the explanatory role of concepts in cognitive science. (shrink)

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-021-09793-2.

The generality problem is commonly considered to be a critical difficulty for reliabilism. In this paper, we present a dynamical perspective on the problem in the spirit of naturalized epistemology. According to this outlook, it is worth investigating how token belief-forming processes instantiate specific types in the biological agent’s cognitive architecture and background experience, consisting in the process of attractor-guided neural activation. While our discussion of the generality problem assigns “scientific types” to token processes, it represents a unified account in (...) the sense that it incorporates contextual and common sense features emphasized by other authors. (shrink)

We present a case study of grammatical constructions and how their function in a single language can be captured through semantic and syntactic classification. Since 2016 an on-going joint project of UiT The Arctic University of Norway and the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow has been collecting and analyzing multiword grammatical constructions of Russian. The main product is the Russian Constructicon, which, with over two thousand two hundred constructions, is arguably the largest openly available constructicon resource (...) for any language. The combination of this large size with depth of analysis, containing both syntactic and semantic tags, makes it possible to view the interrelation of constructions as families and to discover trends in their behavior. Our annotation includes 53 semantic tags of varying frequency, with three tags that are by far more frequent than all the rest, accounting for 30% of the entire inventory of the Russian Constructicon. These three semantic types are Assessment, Attitude, and Intensity, all of which convey a speaker’s evaluation of a topic, in contrast to most of the other tags. Assessment and Attitude constructions are investigated in greater detail in this article. Secondary semantic tags reveal that negative evaluation among these two semantic types is more than twice as frequent as positive evaluation. Examples of negative evaluations are: for Assessment VP tak sebe, as in Na pianino ja igraju tak sebe “I play the piano so-so [lit. thus self]”; for Attitude s PronPers-Gen xvatit/xvatilo, as in S menja xvatit “I’m fed up [lit. from me enough].” In terms of syntax, the most frequent syntactic types of constructions in the Russian Constructicon are clausal constructions [constituting an independent clause like s PronPers-Gen xvatit/xvatilo ] and constructions with the anchor in the role of adverbial modifier. Our semantic and syntactic classification of this large body of Russian constructions makes it possible to postulate patterns of grammatical constructions constituting a radial category with central and peripheral types. Classification of large numbers of constructions reveals systematic relations that structure the grammar of a language. (shrink)

Gender is perhaps the most pervasive, fundamental, and universally accepted way we separate and categorize human beings. Yet in recent years, U.S. courts and administrative state agencies have confronted a growing challenge from individuals demanding to have their gender reclassified. Transgender people create a profound category crisis for social institutions built on the idea that biological sex is both immutable and dichotomous. During the past four decades, the central legal question shifted from how to allocate specific individuals to categories to (...) the permeability of gender categories themselves. This analysis of 38 judicial gender determinations provides a glimpse of the literal construction of the gender order and of the ways institutions gender individuals. It also provides powerful evidence that cultural anxieties about reproduction and the heterosexual, conjugal family underscore institutional efforts to manage the uncertainty of postmodern gender identities. (shrink)

“Conceptual analysis” is a misnomer—it refers, but it does not refer to a method or practice that involves the analysis of concepts. Once this is recognized, many of the main arguments for skepticism about conceptual analysis can be answered, since many of these arguments falsely assume that conceptual analyses target concepts. The present paper defends conceptual analysis from skepticism about its viability and, positively, presents an argument for viewing conceptual analyses as targeting philosophical phenomena, not our concepts of these phenomena.

The principle of compositionality claims that the content of a complex concept is determined by its constituent concepts and the way in which they are composed. However, for prototype concepts this principle is often too rigid. Blurring the division between conceptual composition and belief update has therefore been suggested. Inspired by this idea, we develop a normative account of how belief revision and meaning composition should interact in modifications such as “red apple” or “pet hamster”. We do this by combining (...) the well-known selective modification model :485–527 1988) with the rules of Bayesian belief update. Moreover, we relate this model to systems of defeasible reasoning as discussed in the field of artificial intelligence. (shrink)

This dissertation focuses on teleology and functions in biology. More precisely, it focuses on the scientific legitimacy of teleofunctional attributions and explanations in biology. It belongs to a multi-faceted debate that can be traced back to at least the 1970s. One aspect of the debate concerns the naturalization of functions. Most authors try to reduce, translate or explain functions and teleology in terms of efficient causes so that they find their place in the framework of the natural sciences. Our approach (...) here is radically different, as we question the premise that teleological explanations are disguised causal explanations. On the contrary, we defend that they are acceptable in natural sciences and in biology in particular. We challenge the idea that teleological explanations are immature causal explanations, as well as the idea that teleology and functions are some sort of intentional explanations. We therefore reject the accusations of anthropomorphism, vitalism and finalism. On the contrary, we defend that teleology, causality and intentionality correspond to different, autonomous and complementary modes of representation of the outside world. -/- ———[FRANÇAIS]——— -/- Ce travail de thèse porte sur la téléologie et les fonctions en biologie. Plus précisément, il porte sur la légitimité scientifique des attributions et des explications téléofonctionnelles en biologie. Il s’inscrit dans le cadre d’un débat à plusieurs facettes que l’on peut faire remonter au moins jusqu’aux années 1970 et qui est encore très actif aujourd’hui. L’un des aspects du débat porte sur la naturalisation des fonctions, c’est-à-dire sur la manière de les réduire, de les traduire ou de les expliciter en termes de causes efficientes de sorte qu’elles trouvent leur place dans le cadre des sciences de la nature. Notre approche ici est radicalement différente, car nous remettons en question la prémisse selon laquelle les explications téléologiques seraient des explications causales déguisées. Nous défendons au contraire qu’elles sont acceptables en tant que telles aussi bien de façon générale que dans le domaine scientifique et en particulier en biologie. De façon générale, nous remettons en question l’idée selon laquelle la pensée téléologique serait une pensée causale immature, ainsi que sa dépendance présumée vis-à-vis de la psychologie, c’est-à-dire de l’intentionnalité. Nous rejetons donc les accusations d’anthropomorphisme, de vitalisme et de finalisme formulées contre elle. Nous défendons au contraire que la téléologie, la causalité et l’intentionnalité correspondent à des modes différents, autonomes et complémentaires de représentation du monde extérieur. (shrink)

Fugue and chaos are used in their contemporary meaning. Elements of the fugue, albeit a ‎small number of universals, will be demonstrated in the area of visual and verbal colors. ‎Chaos dominates the internet, fashion, and everyday life. The visual and verbal colors are ‎differentiated and their communicative potential is indicated alongside the diachronic changes. The prototypes of colors are the interface between visual and verbal colors.‎.

Cimpian et al. observed that we accept generic statements of the form ‘Gs are f’ on relatively weak evidence, but that if we are unfamiliar with group G and we learn a generic statement about it, we still treat it inferentially in a much stronger way: all Gs are f. This paper makes use of notions like ‘representativeness’, ‘contingency’ and ‘relative difference’ from psychology to provide a uniform semantics of generics that explains why people accept generics based on weak evidence. (...) The spirit of the approach has much in common with Leslie’s cognition-based ideas about generics, but the semantics will be grounded on a strengthening of Cohen’s relative readings of generic sentences. In contrast to Leslie and Cohen, we propose a uniform semantic analysis of generics. The basic intuition is that a generic of the form ‘Gs are f’ is true because f is typical for G, which means that f is valuably associated with G. We will make use of Kahneman and Tversky’s Heuristics and Biases approach, according to which people tend to confuse questions about probability with questions about representativeness, to explain pragmatically why people treat many generic statements inferentially in a much stronger way. (shrink)

Resumo: Com o objetivo de compreender os processos de identificação do sujeito em alguns funcionamentos discursivos dos vlogs, no YouTube, este trabalho analisa o modo como o contraponto entre a eficácia imaginária e o jogo significante na história produz o reconhecimento de lugares e poderes do dizer no desconhecimento constitutivo de sua relação com o Interdiscurso, nas condições de produção específicas do digital. Os recortes delimitados são: as designações equívocas de vlogueiro, youtuber e criador; a produção da autoria na imbricação (...) de diferentes materialidades, a composição autoral que lhe é própria; e a discursividade que sustenta os enunciados “Eu sou eu mesmo” e “Broadcast yourself”. A análise do material aponta para compreensões que dizem respeito da relação da forma-sujeito do Capital com a discursividade dos objetos paradoxais em sua formulação e circulação digital. Abstract: Aiming to understand subject identification processes in some Youtube vlogs' discursive functioning, this work analyses how the counterpoint between the imaginary impact and the significant role in history produces the acknowledgement of places and powers of saying in the constitutive unawareness of its relation to the Interdiscourse, taking the particular production conditions of digitality. The cutout of this research is: the equivocal designations vlogueiro, youtuber and criador; the authorship production in the encounter of different materialities, the authorial composition which is proper to them; and the discursivity that supports the following utterances: "Eu sou eu mesmo" ["I am myself"] and "Broadcast yourself". The analysis indicates comprehensions that concern Capital subject-form's relation to the discursivity of paradoxical objects in digital formulation and circulation. (shrink)

In the last decades, experimental philosophers have introduced the notion that conceptual analysis could use empirical evidence to back some of its claims. This opens up the possibility for the development of a corpus-based conceptual analysis. However, progress in this direction is contingent on the development of a proper account of concepts and corpus-based conceptual analysis itself that can be leveraged on textual data. In this essay, I address this problem through the question of similarity: how do we evaluate similarity (...) between two concepts, as similarity relates to identity? After a survey of prominent conceptual analysis methods, I propose a cursory account of corpus-based conceptual analysis. Then I formulate the question of similarity, and argue for an account that is functionalist in Millikan's (1984) sense. In this process, I propose a new account of concept that bases itself on millikanian teleosemantics in order to account for concepts' contribution in discourse. I then illustrate its fruitfulness by showing how it enables accounts of concept presence detection in textual data, both automatically and by a human judge. (shrink)

Psychological empirical research has shown that human choice behavior often violates the assumptions of classical rational choice models. In the last few decades a new research field has emerged which aims to account for the observed choice behavior by resorting to the concepts and mathematical techniques developed in the realm of quantum physics, such as the “mental state vector” defined in a Hilbert space and the interference of quantum probability. This article is a short introduction to the quantum-like approach to (...) the description of cognitive processes. I argue that the mathematical apparatus of quantum physics can account for the observed violations of classical logic and can help develop effective models of psychological and cognitive phenomena. This is illustrated through the so-called conjunction and disjunction fallacies by providing an alternative interpretation of the results of Linda test and Hawaii test. No-fallacy configurations are made possible in the quantum-like approach by sequential modeling of mental states transitions. (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)

In this article, we defend two claims about the precautionary principle. The first is that there is no ‘core’ precautionary principle that unifies all its different versions. It is more plausible to think of the different versions as being related to each other by way of family resemblances. So although precautionary principle x may have much in common with precautionary principle y, and y with z, there is no set of necessary and sufficient conditions that unify all versions of the (...) principle. Our second claim is that it is sometimes appropriate to think of the precautionary principle as a midlevel principle in the sense proposed by Beauchamp and Childress in their Principles of Biomedical Ethics, i.e. as a non-rigid moral principle. We argue that if the precautionary principle is conceived as a non-rigid principle that needs to be balanced against other principles before a moral verdict can be reached, then this enables us to address some standard objections to the principle. (shrink)

The diagnosis of psychopathic personality disorder has salience for forensic clinical practice. It influences decisions regarding risk, treatability and sentencing, indeed, in certain jurisdictions it serves as an aggravating factor that increases the likelihood of a capital sentence. The concatenation of symptom that is associated with modern conceptions of the disorder can be discerned in early writings, including the book of Psalms. Despite its forensic clinical importance and historical pedigree the concept remains elusive and controverted. In this paper I describe (...) an attempt to map the concept of psychopathic personality disorder—the Comprehensive Assessment of Psychopathic Personality (CAPP). I outline the processes used to create the concept map; I summarise evidence in support of the content validity of the map and describe different operations designed to operationalise the construct. It is only when conceptual clarity is achieved that valid operations and measures can be created. I end with a plea for more carefully considered application of statistical methods; applications that better fit the theoretical questions being posed. (shrink)

Conceptual spaces have become an increasingly popular modeling tool in cognitive psychology. The core idea of the conceptual spaces approach is that concepts can be represented as regions in similarity spaces. While it is generally acknowledged that not every region in such a space represents a natural concept, it is still an open question what distinguishes those regions that represent natural concepts from those that do not. The central claim of this paper is that natural concepts are represented by the (...) cells of an optimally designed similarity space. (shrink)

These studies examined naming and free-sorting behavior by informants speaking a wide range of languages, from both industrialized and traditional cultures. Groups of informants, whose color vocabularies varied from 5 to 12 basic terms, were given an unconstrained color grouping task to investigate whether there are systematic differences between cultures in grouping behavior that mirror linguistic differences and, if there are not, what underlying principles might explain any universal tendencies. Despite large differences in color vocabulary, there were substantial similarities in (...) grouping behavior across language groups, and substantial within-language variation across informants. It seems that all informants group stimuli based on some criterion of perceptual similarity, but those with large color vocabularies are more likely to group stimuli in line with their basic color terms. The data are best accounted for by a hybrid system that combines a universal principle of grouping by similarity with culture-specific category salience. (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)

People believe that perception is reliable and that what they perceive reflects objective reality. On this view, we perceive a red circle because there is something out there that is a red circle. It is also commonly believed that perceptual reliability is threatened if what we see is allowed to be influenced by what we know or expect. I argue that although human perception is often highly consistent and stable, it is difficult to evaluate its reliability because when it comes (...) to perception, it is unclear how one could establish a fact of the matter. An alternative to thinking of perception as being in the business of truth, is thinking of it as being in the business of transducing sensory energy into a form useful for guiding adaptive behavior. On this position, perception ought to be richly influenced by some types of knowledge insofar as this knowledge can aid in the construction of useful representations from sensory input. (shrink)

The semantically ambiguous nature of the sign and aspects of non-classicality of elementary matter as described by quantum theory show remarkable coherent analogy. We focus on how the ambiguous nature of the image, text and art work bears functional resemblance to the dynamics of contextuality, entanglement, superposition, collapse and decoherence as these phenomena are known in quantum theory. These quantumlike properties in linguistic signs have previously been identified in formal descritions of e.g. concept combinations and mental lexicon representations and have (...) been reported on in the literature. In this approach the informationalized, communicated, mediatized conceptual configuration—of e.g. the art work—in the personal reflected mind behaves like a quantum state function in a higher dimensional complex space, in which it is time and again contextually collapsed and further cognitively entangled. The observer–consumer of signs becomes the empowered ‘produmer’ creating the cognitive outcome of the interaction, while loosing most of any ‘classical givenness’ of the sign. These quantum-like descriptions are now developed here in four example aesthetic signs; the installation Mist room by Ann Veronica Janssens, the installation Sections of a happy moment by David Claerbout, the photograph The Falling Man by Richard Drew and the documentary Huicholes. The Last Peyote Guardians by Vilchez and Stefani. Our present work develops further the use of a previously developed quantum model for concept representation in natural language. In our present approach of the aesthetic sign, we extend to individual—idiosyncratic—observer contexts instead of socially shared group contexts, and as such also include multiple idiosyncratic creation of meaning and experience. This irreducible superposition emerges as the core feature of the aesthetic sign and is most critically embedded in the ‘no-interpretation’ interpretation of the documentary signal. (shrink)

Back when researchers thought about the various forms that color vision could take, the focus was primarily on the retinal mechanisms. Since that time, research on human color vision has shifted from an interest in retinal mechanisms to cortical color processing. This has allowed color research to provide insight into questions that are not limited to early vision but extend to cognition. Direct cortical connections from higher-level areas to lower-level areas have been found throughout the brain. One of the classic (...) questions in cognitive science is whether perception is influenced, and if so to what extent, by cognition and whether a clear distinction can be drawn between perception and cognition. Since perception is seen as providing justification for our beliefs about properties in the external world, these questions also have metaphysical and epistemological significance. The aim of this paper is to highlight some of the areas where research on color perception can shed new light on questions in the cognitive sciences. A further aim of the paper is to raise some questions about color research that are in dire need of further reflection and investigation. (shrink)

Wayne D. Christensen and Cliff A. Hooker.

The paper presents color as a case study for the analysis of phenomena that pertain to several levels of reality and are typically framed by different sciences and disciplines. Color, in fact, is studied by physics, biology, phenomenology, and esthetics, among others. Our thesis is that color is a different entity for each level of reality, and that for this reason color generates different observables in the epistemologies of the different sciences. By analyzing color as a paradigmatic case of an (...) entity naturally spreading over different levels of reality, the paper raises the question as to whether making explicit the usually implicit ontological assumptions embedded within the different observables exploited by the different sciences may eventually clarify some of the difficulties of developing a comprehensive theory of color. (shrink)

The idea that concepts play a significant role in some perceptions is widespread but everybody seems to differ as to where to draw the line. Some researchers say that the difference between direct and indirect, concept driven acts of perception manifests itself whenever we perceive abstract or general properties. Others point at second order properties or causal properties. I call this inability to precisely differentiate between acts of direct and indirect perception “The Division Problem”. Furthermore there is always a question (...) as to how widespread indirect perceptions are. Can we attribute them to prelingual cognitive systems? I call this second problem “The Distribution Problem”. -/- The main aim of the paper is providing a solution to both problems by proposing a naturalistic explication of the notion of “concept”. -/- I propose to identify the role concepts were supposed to play in perception with a mechanism of “soft detection”. Unlike hard detectors which react to a specific target in virtue of their constitution and placement in the system, soft detectors are understood as dynamic categorization devices enabling the cognitive system to selectively react to an undetectable property via flexible exploitation of data from hard detectors. -/- I conclude by showing how the notion of soft detection retains some of the aspects traditionally attributed to concepts and how does it differ from similar accounts known from contemporary literature. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reconcile two claims that have long been thought to be incompatible: that we compositionally determine the meaning of complex expressions from the meaning of their parts, and that prototypes are components of the meaning of lexical terms such as fish, red, and gun. Hypotheses and are independently plausible, but most researchers think that reconciling them is a difficult, if not hopeless task. In particular, most linguists and philosophers agree that is not negotiable; so (...) they tend to reject. Recently, there have been some attempts to reconcile these claims, but they all adopt an implausibly weak notion of compositionality. Furthermore, parties to this debate tend to fall into a problematic way of individuating prototypes that is too externalistic. In contrast, I propose that we can reconcile and if we adopt, instead, an internalist and pluralist conception of prototypes and a context-sensitive but strong notion of compositionality. I argue that each of this proposals is independently plausible, and that, when taken together, provide the basis for a satisfactory account of prototype compositionality. (shrink)

In this chapter, I critically examine two of the main approaches to colour categorization in cognitive science: the perceptual salience theory and linguistic relativism. I then turn to reviewing several decades of psychological research on colour categorical perception (CP). A careful assessment of relevant findings suggests that most of the experimental effects that have been understood in terms of CP actually fall on the cognition side of the perception-cognition divide: they are effects of colour language, for example, on memory or (...) decision-making. (shrink)