Emotional experiences are often described in metaphoric language. A major question in linguistics and cognitive science is whether such metaphoric linguistic expressions reflect a deeper principle of cognition. Are abstract concepts structured by the embodied, sensorimotor domains that we use to describe them? This review presents the argument for conceptual metaphors of affect and summarizes recent findings from empirical studies. These findings show that, consistent with the conceptual metaphor account, the associations between affect and physical domains such as spatial position, (...) musical pitch, brightness, and size which are captured in linguistic metaphors also influence performance on attention, memory and judgment tasks. Despite this evidence, a number of concerns with metaphor as an account of affect representation are considered. (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion of two features of the everyday task environment. First, the everyday task environment is designed, and an important part of the design is the provision of explicit information to guide the individual in the adaptation of his activity. Second, some task environments are semi‐permanent. These two features of the task environment reveal some important characteristics in the psychology of the individual. When novelty occurs, expansion in the range of behavior of the individual is guided (...) by a process of internalization of information provided in the task environment by another. Because of the semi‐permanence of home task environments, there is pay‐off in organizing behavior in terms of the particulars of those environments. The body of this paper examines these ideas from the perspective of FLOABN. FLOABN is a computational cognitive model of an individual acquiring skill at using household and office devices. (shrink)

Conceptual features differ in how mentally tranformable they are. A robin that does not eat is harder to imagine than a robin that does not chirp. We argue that features are immutable to the extent that they are central in a network of dependency relations. The immutability of a feature reflects how much the internal structure of a concept depends on that feature; i.e., how much the feature contributes to the concept's coherence. Complementarily, mutability reflects the aspects in which a (...) concept is flexible. We show that features can be reliably ordered according to their mutability using tasks that require people to conceive of objects missing a feature, and that mutability (conceptual centrality) can be distinguished from category centrality and from diagnosticity and salience. We test a model of mutability based on asymmetric, unlabeled, pairwise dependency relations. With no free parameters, the model provides reasonable fits to data. Qualitative tests of the model show that mutability judgments are unaffected by the type of dependency relation and that dependency structure influences judgments of variability. (shrink)

Slurs are rhetorically insidious and theoretically interesting because they communicate something above and beyond the truth-conditional predication of group membership, something which typically though not always projects across 'blocking' constructions like negation, conditionals, and indirect quotation, and which is exceptionally resistant to direct challenge. I argue that neither pure expressivism nor straightforward truth-conditionalism can account for the sort of commitment that speakers undertake by using slurs. Instead, I claim, users of slurs endorse a denigrating perspective on the targeted group.

In this paper I argue that it is finally time to move beyond the Nagelian framework and to break new ground in thinking about epistemic reduction in biology. I will do so, not by simply repeating all the old objections that have been raised against Ernest Nagel’s classical model of theory reduction. Rather, I grant that a proponent of Nagel’s approach can handle several of these problems but that, nevertheless, Nagel’s general way of thinking about epistemic reduction in terms of (...) theories and their logical relations is entirely inadequate with respect to what is going on in actual biological research practice. (shrink)

The theory of mind debate has reached a “hybrid consensus” concerning the status of theory-theory and simulation-theory. Extant hybrid models either specify co-dependency and implementation relations, or distribute mentalizing tasks according to folk-psychological categories. By relying on a non-developmental framework these models fail to capture the central connection between simulation and theory. I propose a “dynamic” hybrid that is informed by recent work on the nature of similarity cognition. I claim that Gentner’s model of structure-mapping allows us to understand simulation (...) as a process in which psychological representations are aligned, causing the spontaneous abstraction of theoretical generalizations about the psychological domain. (shrink)

Given the fundamental role that concepts play in theories of cognition, philosophers and cognitive scientists have a common interest in concepts. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of controversy regarding what kinds of things concepts are, how they are structured, and how they are acquired. This chapter offers a detailed high-level overview and critical evaluation of the main theories of concepts and their motivations. Taking into account the various challenges that each theory faces, the chapter also presents a novel approach (...) to concepts that is organized around two ideas. The first is a pluralistic view of differing types of conceptual structure. The second is a model that treats concepts as atomic representations that are linked to various types of conceptual structures. (shrink)

Understanding more about how the brain functionsshouldhelp us understand economic behaviour. But some would have us believe that it has done this already, and that insights from neuroscience have already provided insights in economics that we would not otherwise have. Much of this is just academic marketing hype, and to get down to substantive issues we need to identify that fluff for what it is. After we clear away the distractions, what is left? The answer is that a lot is (...) left, but it is still all potential. That is not a bad thing, or a reason to stop the effort, but it does point to the need for a serious reconsideration of what neuroeconomics is and what passes for explanation in this literature. I argue that neuroeconomics can be a valuable field, but not the way it is being developed and “sold” now. The same is true more generally of behavioural economics, which shares many of the methodological flaws of neuroeconomics. (shrink)

Intelligent systems are faced with the problem of securing a principled (ideally, veridical) relationship between the world and its internal representation. I propose a unified approach to visual representation, addressing both the needs of superordinate and basic-level categorization and of identification of specific instances of familiar categories. According to the proposed theory, a shape is represented by its similarity to a number of reference shapes, measured in a high-dimensional space of elementary features. This amounts to embedding the stimulus in a (...) low-dimensional proximal shape space. That space turns out to support representation of distal shape similarities which is veridical in the sense of Shepard's (1968) notion of second-order isomorphism (i.e., correspondence between distal and proximal similarities among shapes, rather than between distal shapes and their proximal representations). Furthermore, a general expression for similarity between two stimuli, based on comparisons to reference shapes, can be used to derive models of perceived similarity ranging from continuous, symmetric, and hierarchical, as in the multidimensional scaling models (Shepard, 1980), to discrete and non-hierarchical, as in the general contrast models (Tversky, 1977; Shepard and Arabie, 1979). (shrink)

In their book Cognitive Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Hanne Andersen, Peter Barker, and Xiang Chen reconstruct Kuhn’s account of conceptual structure and change, based on the dynamic frame model. I argue against their reconstruction of anomalies and of the no-overlap principle and propose a competing model, based on the similarity relation. First, I introduce the concept of psychological distance between objects, and then I show that the conceptual structure of a theory consists of a set of natural families, separated by (...) a significant empty space. I argue that, in such a conceptual structure, the ES condition, according to which the distance between natural families should be greater than the distance between any two objects belonging to the same natural family, is satisfied. Anomalous objects lead to the violation of this condition. I argue that in a conceptual structure satisfying the ES condition, a similarity relation could be defined, so that natural families would be similarity classes, satisfying the no-overlap principle. In a structure not satisfying this principle, such similarity classes could not be delimited. (shrink)

According to a widely held view epistemic justification is a normative notion. According to another widely held assumption, epistemic justification comes in degrees. Given that gradability requires a context-sensitivity that normativity seems to lack, these two assumptions stand in tension. Giving up the assumption of gradability of justification represents a lesser theoretical cost.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the semantics of metaphoric language in scientific contexts. According to the theory of metaphor advanced below, the benchmark of a metaphoric expression is the implicit transfer of semantic features across incongruous semantic fields. This transfer results in a conceptual variation of "meaning" in the receiving semantic field. Thus, the theory of metaphor rests on semantic field theory. Existing semantic approaches to metaphor are evaluated in Section 1. In Sections 2 and 3 an (...) alternative theory is introduced through an analysis of the mechanics of the feature transfer process followed by a discussion of some methodological cues for deciphering the metaphor's "meaning." As I explore in Section 4, this theory of metaphor explains how all metaphoric expressions are potentially literal depending on the general compliance of the community of speakers. Consequently, concept formation in scientific contexts is, in large measure, metaphoric. Finally, I argue in Section 5 that metaphoric concept formation is an essential aspect of scientific reasoning for the purpose of solving conceptual problems. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally inclined toward one of two opposite extremes when it comes to metaphor. On the one hand, partisans of metaphor have tended to believe that metaphors do something different in kind from literal utterances; it is a ‘heresy’, they think, either to deny that what metaphors do is genuinely cognitive, or to assume that it can be translated into literal terms. On the other hand, analytic philosophers have typically denied just this: they tend to assume that if metaphors (...) express any genuine content at all, then that content can in principle be paraphrased into literal terms. They often conclude on this basis that metaphor is theoretically dispensable, and so that it poses no special challenges and affords no distinctive insights for the philosophy of language and mind. (shrink)

It is widely accepted that consciousness or, more generally, mental activity is in some way correlated to the behavior of the material brain. Since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness. Several approaches answering this question affirmatively, proposed in recent decades, will be surveyed. It will be pointed out that they make different epistemological assumptions, refer to different neurophysiological (...) levels of description, and use quantum theory in different ways. For each of the approaches discussed, problematic and promising features will be equally highlighted. (shrink)

Philosophers have often adopted a dismissive attitude toward metaphor. Hobbes (1651, ch. 8) advocated excluding metaphors from rational discourse because they “openly profess deceit,” while Locke (1690, Bk. 3, ch. 10) claimed that figurative uses of language serve only “to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats.” Later, logical positivists like Ayer and Carnap assumed that because metaphors like..

Advocates of dynamic systems have suggested that higher mental processes are based on continuous representations. In order to evaluate this claim, we first define the concept of representation, and rigorously distinguish between discrete representations and continuous representations. We also explore two important bases of representational content. Then, we present seven arguments that discrete representations are necessary for any system that must discriminate between two or more states. It follows that higher mental processes require discrete representations. We also argue that discrete (...) representations are more influenced by conceptual role than continuous representations. We end by arguing that the presence of discrete representations in cognitive systems entails that computationalism (i.e., the view that the mind is a computational device) is true, and that cognitive science should embrace representational pluralism. (shrink)

The possibility of spectrum inversion has been debated since it was raised by Locke and is still discussed because of its implications for functionalist theories of conscious experience . This paper provides a mathematical formulation of the question of spectrum inversion and proves that such inversions, and indeed bijective scramblings of color in general, are logically possible. Symmetries in the structure of color space are, for purposes of the proof, irrelevant. The proof entails that conscious experiences are not identical with (...) functional relations. It leaves open the empirical possibility that functional relations might, at least in part, be causally responsible for generating conscious experiences. Functionalists can propose causal accounts that meet the normal standards for scientific theories, including numerical precision and novel prediction; they cannot, however, claim that, because functional relationships and conscious experiences are identical, any attempt to construct such causal theories entails a category error. (shrink)

Perceptual similarity is one of the most fiercely debated topics in the philosophy and psychology of perception. The documented history of the issue spans all the way from Plato – who regarded similarity as a key factor for human perceptual experience and cognition – through to contemporary psychologists – who have tried to determine whether, and if so, how similarity relationships can be established between stimuli both within and across the senses. Recent research on cross-sensory associations, otherwise known as crossmodal (...) correspondences – that is, the existence of observable consensual associations, or mappings, between stimuli across different senses – represents an especially interesting field in which to study perceptual similarity. In fact, most accounts of crossmodal association that have been put forward in the literature to date evoke perceptual similarity as a key explanatory factor mediating the underlying association. At the same time, however, these various accounts raise several important theoretical questions concerning the very nature of similarity, with, for example, the sensory, affective, or cognitive underpinnings of similarity judgements remaining unclear. We attempt to shed light on these questions by examining the various accounts of crossmodal associations that have been put forward in the literature. Our suggestion is that perceptual similarity varies from being phenomenologically-based to conceptually-based. In particular, we propose that the nature of the associations underlying similarity judgements – whether these associations are phenomenologically-, structurally-, emotionally-, or conceptually-based – may be represented in a two-dimensional space with associative strength on one axis, and cognitive penetrability on the other. (shrink)

According to a widely held view epistemic justification is a normative notion. According to another widely held assumption, epistemic justification comes in degrees. Given that gradability requires a context-sensitivity that normativity seems to lack, these two assumptions stand in tension. Giving up the assumption of gradability of justification represents a lesser theoretical cost.

Our interpretive resources enable us to make sense of, navigate, and communicate about our shared world. These resources not only carve the world up into categories, but also guide how we, individually and collectively, are oriented towards it. In this thesis, I examine how these resources, and the dispositions they guide, may be harmful. A vital kind of interpretive resources are frames, which equip us with unified perspectives on the world. Perspectives are suites of open-ended interpretive (inquisitive, attentional, inferential, evaluative, (...) and affective) dispositions. Frames thereby guide how we interpret, respond to, and navigate the world. I show that these perspectives are epistemically powerful and indispensable. I argue that flawed perspectives, and the distorting frames that produce them, are deeply pernicious and I examine their relationship to oppression. (shrink)

Science and fiction seem to lie at opposite ends of the cognitive-epistemic spectrum. The former is typically seen as the study of hard, real-world facts in a rigorous manner. The latter is treated as an instrument of play and recreation, dealing in figments of the imagination. Initial appearances notwithstanding, several central features of scientific modeling in fact suggest a close connection with the imagination and recent philosophers have developed detailed accounts of models that treat them, in one way or another, (...) as akin to fictions. This chapter will critically discuss the fictions approach as an epistemology of scientific modeling. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to propose a qualitative approach to the theory of conceptual spaces, in contrast to the usual metric framework. This requires qualitative notions of similarity, simple concepts, prototypes and conceptual categorisation. For this purpose, I will introduce three mathematical models for conceptual spaces. The first one is topological and has been proposed by Mormann. The other two are new and are based on atomistic orders and similarity relations. I will discuss how each of them deals (...) with the Design Principles proposed by Douven and Gärdenfors and with further Adequacy Conditions. Despite being apparently different, I will show that these three models are mathematically equivalent. Finally, I will address three objections to the present approach. The first one says that the qualitative notion of a prototype is a bad analogue of the metric one. The second one suggests that, in contrast to the Voronoi construction, the function qualitatively representing the conceptual categorisation process is arbitrary. The last one appeals to Goodman’s companionship and imperfect community problems to show that there is a flaw in defining simple concepts from similarity relations. (shrink)

Traditionally, the investigation of truth has been anchored in a priori reasoning. Cognitive science deviates from this tradition by adding empirical data on how people understand and use concepts. Building on psychophysics and machine learning methods, we introduce conceptual scaling, an approach to map people's understanding of abstract concepts. This approach, allows computing participant-specific conceptual maps from obtained ordinal comparison data, thereby quantifying perceived similarities among abstract concepts. Using this approach, we investigated individual's alignment with philosophical theories on truth and (...) the predictive capacity of conceptual maps. The obtained results indicated that, while people's understanding of truth is multifaceted and encapsulates notions of coherence and authenticity, alignment is best for the correspondence theory of truth. Furthermore, conceptual maps allowed predicting individual outcomes with an accuracy of roughly 70%. This research demonstrates that conceptual scaling offers accurate descriptions of individual's understanding of abstract concepts, behavioral predictions, and quantification of alignment with theoretical perspectives. (shrink)

This article reviews research on counterfactual, social, and temporal comparisons and proposes a Reflection and Evaluation Model (REM) as an organizing framework. At the heart of the model is the assertion that 2 psychologically distinct modes of mental simulation operate during comparative thinking: reflection, an experiential (“as if”) mode of thinking characterized by vividly simulating that information about the comparison standard is true of, or part of, the self; and evaluation, an evaluative mode of thinking characterized by the use of (...) information about the standard as a reference point against which to evaluate one’s present standing. Reflection occurs when information about the standard is included in one’s self-construal, and evaluation occurs when such information is excluded. The result of reflection is that standard–consistent cognitions about the self become highly accessible, thereby yielding affective assimilation; whereas the result of evaluation is that comparison information is used as a standard against which one’s present standing is evaluated, thereby yielding affective contrast. The resulting affect leads to either an increase or decrease in behavioral persistence as a function of the type of task with which one is engaged, and a combination of comparison-derived causal inferences and regulatory focus strategies direct one toward adopting specific future action plans. (shrink)

Over the past few decades, cognitive science has identified several forms of reasoning that make essential use of conceptual knowledge. Despite significant theoretical and empirical progress, there is still no unified framework for understanding how concepts are used in reasoning. This paper argues that the theory of conceptual spaces is capable of filling this gap. Our strategy is to demonstrate how various inference mechanisms which clearly rely on conceptual information—including similarity, typicality, and diagnosticity-based reasoning—can be modeled using principles derived from (...) conceptual spaces. Our first topic analyzes the role of expectations in inductive reasoning and their relation to the structure of our concepts. We examine the relationship between using generic expressions in natural language and common-sense reasoning as a second topic. We propose that the strength of a generic can be described by distances between properties and prototypes in conceptual spaces. Our third topic is category-based induction. We demonstrate that the theory of conceptual spaces can serve as a comprehensive model for this type of reasoning. The final topic is analogy. We review some proposals in this area, present a taxonomy of analogical relations, and show how to model them in terms of distances in conceptual spaces. We also briefly discuss the implications of the model for reasoning with concepts in artificial systems. (shrink)

In this paper, a novel experimental task is developed for testing the highly influential, but experimentally underexplored, possible worlds account of conditionals (Stalnaker, 1968; Lewis, 1973). In Experiment 1, this new task is used to test both indicative and subjunctive conditionals. For indicative conditionals, five competing truth tables are compared, including the previously untested, multi-dimensional possible worlds semantics of Bradley (2012). In Experiment 2, these results are replicated and it is shown that they cannot be accounted for by an alternative (...) hypothesis proposed by our reviewers. In Experiment 3, individual variation in truth assignments of indicative conditionals is investigated via Bayesian mixture models that classify participants as following one of several competing models. As a novelty of this study, it is found that a possible worlds semantics of Lewis and Stalnaker is capable of accounting for participants’ aggregate truth value assignments in this task. Applied to indicative conditionals, we show across three experiments, that the theory both captures participants’ truth values at the aggregate level (Experiments 1 and 2) and that it makes up the largest subgroup in the analysis of individual variation in our experimental paradigm (Experiment 3). (shrink)

One of the core insights from Eleanor Rosch’s work on categorization is that human categorization isn’t arbitrary. Instead, two psychological principles constrain possible systems of classification for all human cultures. According to these principles, the task of a category system is to provide maximum information with the least cognitive effort, and the perceived world provides us with structured rather than arbitrary features. In this paper, I show that Rosch's insights give us important resources for making progress on the 'feasibility question' (...) in conceptual engineering: the question of how we can implement conceptual engineering projects in ways that are practically feasible. Specifically, I show that one overlooked upshot of Rosch's work is that naming practices play an extremely important role in the construction of perceived similarities within and dissimilarities between categories, and, correspondingly, the dissemination of social stereotypes that serve as markers between different categories that are otherwise similar. Thus, naming practices will be a crucial constraint for the feasibility of certain ameliorative projects. (shrink)

Habilitation thesis in psychology. The book consists of a collection of reasoning studies. The experimental investigations will take us from people’s reasoning about probabilities, entailments, pragmatic factors, argumentation, and causality to morality. An overarching theme of the book is norm pluralism and individual differences in rationality research.

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a great impact on the life of every inhabitant of the planet. During 2020 and 2021 a significant amount of work on how the pandemic is being conceptualized and communicated has been done. Most work has focused on the role of metaphor in the construal of specific cognitive frames. In this paper, we turn to a similar but different conceptualization mechanism, i.e. simile. Drawing from recent socio-cognitive and discursive empirical approaches to similes, this paper focuses (...) on “target is like source” constructions in English and Spanish containing (corona)virus either as target or source of the simile. The analysis is based on 200 examples found in the digital media during the first wave of the pandemic in 2020. First, the constructions, conceptualizations and mappings are analyzed. Second, the relevant discourse features (genre type, relation to subjectivity, text location and structuring properties) are described. Finally, the cross-linguistic English-Spanish analysis shows that, despite the many coincidences in both datasets, there are different tendencies as for the use of culture-specific mappings and the genres where the similes occur in. The study aims at testing to what extent the general features characterizing similes also hold in the case of (corona)virus, both as source and as target. The corpus analysis contributes, in addition, to the emerging line of research on the use of figuration in the communication of the pandemic, as well as to the study of the discursive dimensions of similes in real settings. (shrink)

According to Satosi Watanabe's "theorem of the ugly duckling", the number of predicates satisfied by any two different particulars is a constant, which does not depend on the choice of the two particulars. If the number of predicates satisfied by two particulars is their number of properties in common, and the degree of resemblance between two particulars is a function of their number of properties in common, then it follows that the degree of resemblance between any two different particulars is (...) also constant, which is absurd. Avoiding this absurd conclusion requires questioning assumptions about infinity in the proof or interpretation of the theorem, adopting a sparse conception of properties, or denying degree of resemblance is a function of number of properties in common. After arguing against both the first two options, this paper argues for a version of the third which analyses degree of resemblance as a function of properties in common, but weighted by their degree of naturalness or importance. (shrink)

This thesis focuses on models of conceptual change in science and philosophy. In particular, I developed a new bootstrapping methodology for studying conceptual change, centered around the formalization of several popular models of conceptual change and the collective assessment of their improved formal versions via nine evaluative dimensions. Among the models of conceptual change treated in the thesis are Carnap’s explication, Lakatos’ concept-stretching, Toulmin’s conceptual populations, Waismann’s open texture, Mark Wilson’s patches and facades, Sneed’s structuralism, and Paul Thagard’s conceptual revolutions. (...) -/- In order to analyze and compare the conception of conceptual change provided by these different models, I rely on several historical reconstructions of episodes of scientific conceptual change. The historical episodes of scientific change that figure in this work include the emergence of the morphological concept of fish in biological taxonomies, the development of scientific conceptions of temperature, the Church-Turing thesis and related axiomatizations of effective calculability, the history of the concept of polyhedron in 17th and 18th century mathematics, Hamilton’s invention of the quaternions, the history of the pre-abstract group concepts in 18th and 19th century mathematics, the expansion of Newtonian mechanics to viscous fluids forces phenomena, and the chemical revolution. I will also present five different formal and informal improvements of four specific models of conceptual change. I will first present two different improvements of Carnapian explication, a formal and an informal one. My informal improvement of Carnapian explication will consist of a more fine-grained version of the procedure that adds an intermediate, third step to the two steps of Carnapian explication. I will show how this novel three-step version of explication is more suitable than its traditional two-step relative to handle complex cases of explications. My second, formal improvement of Carnapian explication will be a full explication of the concept of explication itself within the theory of conceptual spaces. By virtue of this formal improvement, the whole procedure of explication together with its application procedures and its pragmatic desiderata will be reconceptualized as a precise procedure involving topological and geometrical constraints inside the theory of conceptual spaces. My third improved model of conceptual change will consist of a formal explication of Darwinian models of conceptual change that will make vast use of Godfrey-Smith’s population-based Darwinism for targeting explicitly mathematical conceptual change. My fourth improvement will be dedicated instead to Wilson’s indeterminate model of conceptual change. I will show how Wilson’s very informal framework can be explicated within a modified version of the structuralist model-theoretic reconstructions of scientific theories. Finally, the fifth improved model of conceptual change will be a belief-revision-like logical framework that reconstructs Thagard’s model of conceptual revolution as specific revision and contraction operations that work on conceptual structures. -/- At the end of this work, a general conception of conceptual change in science and philosophy emerges, thanks to the combined action of the three layers of my methodology. This conception takes conceptual change to be a multi-faceted phenomenon centered around the dynamics of groups of concepts. According to this conception, concepts are best reconstructed as plastic and inter-subjective entities equipped with a non-trivial internal structure and subject to a certain degree of localized holism. Furthermore, conceptual dynamics can be judged from a weakly normative perspective, bound to be dependent on shared values and goals. Conceptual change is then best understood, according to this conception, as a ubiquitous phenomenon underlying all of our intellectual activities, from science to ordinary linguistic practices. As such, conceptual change does not pose any particular problem to value-laden notions of scientific progress, objectivity, and realism. At the same time, this conception prompts all our concept-driven intellectual activities, including philosophical and metaphilosophical reflections, to take into serious consideration the phenomenon of conceptual change. An important consequence of this conception, and of the analysis that generated it, is in fact that an adequate understanding of the dynamics of philosophical concepts is a prerequisite for analytic philosophy to develop a realistic and non-idealized depiction of itself and its activities. (shrink)

Whilst the topic of representations is one of the key topics in philosophy of mind, it has only occasionally been noted that representations and representational features may be gradual. Apart from vague allusions, little has been said on what representational gradation amounts to and why it could be explanatorily useful. The aim of this paper is to provide a novel take on gradation of representational features within the neuroscientific framework of predictive processing. More specifically, we provide a gradual account of (...) two features of structural representations: structural similarity and decoupling. We argue that structural similarity can be analysed in terms of two dimensions: number of preserved relations and state space granularity. Both dimensions can take on different values and hence render structural similarity gradual. We further argue that decoupling is gradual in two ways. First, we show that different brain areas are involved in decoupled cognitive processes to a greater or lesser degree depending on the cause (internal or external) of their activity. Second, and more importantly, we show that the degree of decoupling can be further regulated in some brain areas through precision weighting of prediction error. We lastly argue that gradation of decoupling (via precision weighting) and gradation of structural similarity (via state space granularity) are conducive to behavioural success. (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)

Computational complexity is a discipline of computer science and mathematics which classifies computational problems depending on their inherent difficulty, i.e. categorizes algorithms according to their performance, and relates these classes to each other. P problems are a class of computational problems that can be solved in polynomial time using a deterministic Turing machine while solutions to NP problems can be verified in polynomial time, but we still do not know whether they can be solved in polynomial time as well. A (...) solution for the so-called NP-complete problems will also be a solution for any other such problems. Its artificial-intelligence analogue is the class of AI-complete problems, for which a complete mathematical formalization still does not exist. In this chapter we will focus on analysing computational classes to better understand possible formalizations of AI-complete problems, and to see whether a universal algorithm, such as a Turing test, could exist for all AI-complete problems. In order to better observe how modern computer science tries to deal with computational complexity issues, we present several different deep-learning strategies involving optimization methods to see that the inability to exactly solve a problem from a higher order computational class does not mean there is not a satisfactory solution using state-of-the-art machine-learning techniques. Such methods are compared to philosophical issues and psychological research regarding human abilities of solving analogous NP-complete problems, to fortify the claim that we do not need to have an exact and correct way of solving AI-complete problems to nevertheless possibly achieve the notion of strong AI. (shrink)

What the Sorites has to tell us is a simple truth regarding our categories. It appears to saddle us with something other than a simple truth—something worse, a contradiction or a problem or a paradox—only when we insist on viewing it through a discrete logic of categories. Discrete categories and discrete logic are for robots. We aren’t robots, and the simple truth is that we don’t handle categories in the way any discrete logic would demand. For us non-robots, what the (...) Sorites has to offer is a straightforward truth regarding how incapable robots and their logic are of handling categories like ours. (shrink)

The term “deep history” refers to historical accounts framed temporally not by the advent of a written record but by evolutionary events (Smail 2008; Shryock and Smail 2011). The presumption of deep history is that the events of today have a history that traces back beyond written history to events in the evolutionary past. For human kinship, though, even forming a history of kinship, let alone a deep history, remains problematic, given limited, relevant data (Trautman et al. 2011). With regard (...) to a deep history, one conjecture is that human kinship evolved from primate social systems in a gradual, more-or-less continuous manner (see Chapais 2008); another conjecture is that kinship, in accordance with the incest account of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) or the fanciful, tetradic account of Nicholas J. Allen (1986), “comes into existence with a leap” (Trautman et al. 2011: 176); and yet another, the account to be developed in this paper, is that kinship, as it is understood and lived by culture bearers today, is the consequence of a profound and qualitative evolutionary transformation going from an ancestral primate-like social system predicated on extensive face-to-face interaction to the relation-based social systems that characterize human societies (Read 2012). (shrink)

Theory‐of‐mind (ToM) is an integral part of social cognition, but how it develops remains a critical question. There is evidence that children can gain insight into ToM through experience, including language training and explanatory interactions. But this still leaves open the question of how children gain these insights—what processes drive this learning? We propose that analogical comparison is a key mechanism in the development of ToM. In Experiment 1, children were shown true‐ and false‐belief scenarios and prompted to engage in (...) multiple comparisons (e.g., belief vs. world). In Experiments 2a, 2b, and 3, children saw a series of true‐ and false‐belief events, varying in order and in their alignability. Across these experiments, we found that providing support for comparing true‐ and false‐belief scenarios led to increased performance on false‐belief tests. These findings show that analogical comparison can support ToM learning. (shrink)

This paper discusses how theories of definition and probabilistic theories of categorization could help distinguish between translation and adaptation, and eventually between translation and adaptation studies. Part I suggests readopting the common parlance definition of “translation” as the accurate rendition of the meaning of a verbal expression in another natural language, and “adaptation” as change that leads to better fit. Readopting these common parlance definitions entails categorical implications. The author discusses three parameters: whereas “translation” represents an invariance-oriented, semiotically invested, cross-lingual (...) phenomenon, “adaptation” refers to a variance-oriented phenomenon, which is not semiotically invested, and entails better fit. Part II discusses how theories of categorization could help distinguish between TS and LFAS. The study of the disciplinarization of knowledge involves epistemic and socio-political conditioners. This section concludes that medium specificity, i.e., the linguistic versus lit-film paradigm, plays a major role in separating TS from LFAS. Another player that deserves more attention is the Romantic as opposed to the Classicist value system. (shrink)

I analyse conceptual change and conceptual engineering in the special case of colour concepts. The case raises the prospects of conceptual engineering because a precise standard for measuring the amelioration of the structure of concepts is available. On the other hand, the study highlights the problems with controlling conceptual engineering pointed out by Cappelen. I argue that in the case of conceptual change of colour concepts varying degrees of optimization, design and control are possible. I submit that this observation can (...) be generalized to other classes of concepts. As a result, the scope of conceptual engineering is reduced considerably; conceptual engineering appears as a limit case of conceptual change. (shrink)

Category-based induction is an inferential mechanism that uses knowledge of conceptual relations in order to estimate how likely is for a property to be projected from one category to another. During the last decades, psychologists have identified several features of this mechanism, and they have proposed different formal models of it. In this article; we propose a new mathematical model for category-based induction based on distances on conceptual spaces. We show how this model can predict most of the properties of (...) this kind of reasoning while providing a solid theoretical foundation for it. We also show that it subsumes some of the previous models proposed in the literature and that it generates new predictions. (shrink)

The paper argues that an account of understanding should take the form of a Carnapian explication and acknowledge that understanding comes in degrees. An explication of objectual understanding is defended, which helps to make sense of the cognitive achievements and goals of science. The explication combines a necessary condition with three evaluative dimensions: an epistemic agent understands a subject matter by means of a theory only if the agent commits herself sufficiently to the theory of the subject matter, and to (...) the degree that the agent grasps the theory (i.e., is able to make use of it), the theory answers to the facts and the agent’s commitment to the theory is justified. The threshold for outright attributions of understanding is determined contextually. The explication has descriptive as well as normative facets and allows for the possibility of understanding by means of non-explanatory (e.g., purely classificatory) theories. (shrink)