We explored the influence of negation on cognitive dynamics, measured using mouse‐movement trajectories, to test the classic notion that negation acts as an operator on linguistic processing. In three experiments, participants verified the truth or falsity of simple statements, and we tracked the computer‐mouse trajectories of their responses. Sentences expressing these facts sometimes contained a negation. Such negated statements could be true (e.g., “elephants are not small”) or false (e.g., “elephants are not large”). In the first experiment, as predicted by (...) the classic notion of negation, we found that negation caused more discreteness in the mouse trajectory of a response. The second experiment induced a simple context for these statements, yet negation still increased discreteness in trajectories. A third experiment enhanced the pragmatic context of sentences, and the discreteness was substantially diminished, with one primary measure no longer significantly showing increased discreteness at all. Traditional linguistic theories predict rapid shifts in cognitive dynamics occur due to the nature of negation: It is an operator that reverses the truth or falsity of an interpretation. We argue that these results support both propositional and contextual accounts of negation present in the literature, suggesting that contextual factors are crucial for determining the kind of cognitive dynamics displayed. We conclude by drawing broader lessons about theories of cognition from the case of negation. (shrink)

When reasoning about deontic rules (what one may, should, or should not do in a given set of circumstances), reasoners adopt a violation‐detection strategy, a strategy they do not adopt when reasoning about indicative rules (descriptions of purported state of affairs). I argue that this indicative‐deontic distinction constitutes a primitive in the cognitive architecture. To support this claim, I show that this distinction emerges early in development, is observed regardless of the cultural background of the reasoner, and can be selectively (...) disrupted at the neurological level. I also argue that this distinction emerged as a result of selective pressure favouring the evolution of reasoning strategies that determine survival within dominance hierarchies. (shrink)

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

In this paper I discuss the kinds of idealisations invoked in normative theories—logic, epistemology, and decision theory. I argue that very often the so-called norms of rationality are in fact mere idealisations invoked to make life easier. As such, these idealisations are not too different from various idealisations employed in scientific modelling. Examples of the latter include: fluids are incompressible (in fluid mechanics), growth rates are constant (in population ecology), and the gravitational influence of distant bodies can be ignored (in (...) celestial mechanics). Thinking of logic, epistemology, and decision theory as normative models employing various idealisations of these kinds, changes the way we approach the justification of the models in question. (shrink)

The object of this paper is to show why recent research in the psychology of deductive and probabilistic reasoning does not have.

Bart Streumer thinks that we cannot believe the global normative error theory. Streumer's argument presupposes a Cartesian theory of belief fixation. The Cartesian theory entails that we can understand a proposition without believing it. But the Cartesian theory of belief fixation is false, and the Spinozan theory is true. The Spinozan theory of belief fixation entails that we cannot understand a proposition without believing it. The present paper argues that Streumer's claim is false, and we can believe the global normative (...) error theory because the Spinozan theory is correct. The paper then applies the Spinozan theory of belief fixation to the “Now what?” problem for global normative error theory and responds to objections. (shrink)

This essay reviews Theatre, Communication, Critical Realism (2010) by Tobin Nellhaus. It begins by outlining the objective of the book and proceeds to evaluate its central argument. The objective is to develop a theory of theatre founded on the premises of critical realism and thereby theoretically situate theatrical performance in its socio-cultural matrix. The argument is that critical realism is effective for developing a comprehensive account of theatrical performance because it has the capacity to reveal truths about the structure of (...) social reality (that correspond to those articulated by critical realism). In the second part of the review, employing the methods of conceptual analysis, I propose that Nellhaus’s thesis of ‘ontological doubling’ (which claims that performance doubles human agency) is undermined by certain epistemological presuppositions regarding the ontology of fictional characters. (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze utterances (...) as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

In a theoretical first part we attempt to articulate the notions of concession, refutation and negation for monological linguistic activity, on the basis among other things of Mœschler's work on conversation. We distinguish the illocutionary act of refutation and the complex intervention of refutation, concession-invention, concession-repetition and concession-quotation. In a second part we analyze the place and role of (descriptive) negation in counter-argumentative texts written by 8- to 12-year-old pupils and adults in an artificial situation. We consider phenomena observed by (...) certain “contradictory” properties of negation in the context of the task in question: namely potential help in generating content by mechanisms of the argumentative law of negation extended to predicates, negation takes the risk polyphonically of argumentative drift. This may explain the fact that it is so rare. (shrink)

A focused review of the literature on reasoning suggests that mechanisms based upon contraries are of fundamental importance in various abilities. At the same time, the importance of contraries in the human perceptual experience of space has been recently demonstrated in experimental studies. Solving geometry problems represents an interesting case as both reasoning abilities and the manipulation of perceptual–figural aspects are involved.In this study we focus on perceptual changes in geometrical problem solving processes in order to understand whether a mental (...) manipulation in terms of opposites might help. Four conditions were studied, two of which concerned the search for contraries as an implicit or explicit strategy.Results demonstrated that contraries, when used explicitly in solution processes, constitute an effective heuristic: The number of correct solutions increased, less time was needed to find a solution and participants were oriented towards the use of perception-based solutions—not only wer.. (shrink)

People can reason about the preferences of other agents, and predict their behavior based on these preferences. Surprisingly, the psychology of reasoning has long neglected this fact, and focused instead on disinterested inferences, of which preferences are neither an input nor an output. This exclusive focus is untenable, though, as there is mounting evidence that reasoners take into account the preferences of others, at the expense of logic when logic and preferences point to different conclusions. This article summarizes the most (...) recent account of how reasoners predict the behavior and attitude of other agents based on conditional rules describing actions and their consequences, and reports new experimental data about which assumptions reasoners retract when their predictions based on preferences turn out to be false. (shrink)

Children and adults from a remote Zafimaniry village in eastern Madagascar were probed for their intuitive understanding of the biological inheritance of bodily features. They were told a story about a baby adopted at birth, and were asked whether, when grown, he would be more likely to resemble his birth parents or his adoptive parents in bodily traits, beliefs, preferences, temperaments, and skills. In spite of the fact that the Zafimaniry, like other Southeast Asian and Malagasy peoples, profess explicit beliefs (...) concerning the fixation of individuals' properties that are at variance with Western folkbiology, Zafimaniry adults responded as do American adults on the task. Zafimaniry children, however, did not repond as did the adults, nor did they respond as did the majority of American children. Rather, they responded in the manner most consistent with what would be predicted, for children as well as for adults, from the ethnographic literature. That is, they tended to judge that an adopted boy would resemble his adoptive rather than his birth parents on virtually all traits, including bodily traits. The implications of these findings for current debates within cognitive science and anthropology are discussed. (shrink)

The relation between logic and thought has long been controversial, but has recently influenced theorizing about the nature of mental processes in cognitive science. One prominent tradition argues that to explain the systematicity of thought we must posit syntactically structured representations inside the cognitive system which can be operated upon by structure sensitive rules similar to those employed in systems of natural deduction. I have argued elsewhere that the systematicity of human thought might better be explained as resulting from the (...) fact that we have learned natural languages which are themselves syntactically structured. According to this view, symbols of natural language are external to the cognitive processing system and what the cognitive system must learn to do is produce and comprehend such symbols. In this paper I pursue that idea by arguing that ability in natural deduction itself may rely on pattern recognition abilities that enable us to operate on external symbols rather than encodings of rules that might be applied to internal representations. To support this suggestion, I present a series of experiments with connectionist networks that have been trained to construct simple natural deductions in sentential logic. These networks not only succeed in reconstructing the derivations on which they have been trained, but in constructing new derivations that are only similar to the ones on which they have been trained. (shrink)

Intelligence can be understood as a form of rationality, in the sense that an intelligent system does its best when its knowledge and resources are insufficient with respect to the problems to be solved. The traditional models of rationality typically assume some form of sufficiency of knowledge and resources, so cannot solve many theoretical and practical problems in Artificial Intelligence (AI). New models based on the Assumption of Insufficient Knowledge and Resources (AIKR) cannot be obtained by minor revisions or extensions (...) of the traditional models, and have to be established fully according to the restrictions and freedoms provided by AIKR. The practice of NARS, an AI project, shows that such new models are feasible and promising in providing a new theoretical foundation for the study of rationality, intelligence, consciousness, and mind. (shrink)

Unified, all-purpose, philosophical models of reduction in science lack resources for capturing varieties of cross-scientific relations that have proven critical to understanding some scientific achievements. Not only do those models obscure the distinction between successional and cross-scientific relations, their preoccupations with the structures of both theories and things provide no means for accommodating the contributions to various sciences of theories and research about long-term diachronic processes involving large-scale, distributed systems. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the parade case. (...) Explanatory pluralism accommodates a wider range of connections between theories and inquiries in science than all-purpose models of reduction do. Consequently, it provides analytical tools for understanding the roles of the theoretical proposals about the evolution of the human mind/brain that have proliferated over the last two decades. Those proposals have testable implications pertaining to both structure and processing in the modern human mind/brain. An example of such research illustrates how those proposals and investigative tools and experiments cut across both explanatory levels and modes of analysis within the cognitive sciences and how those studies can yield evidence that bears on the assessment of competing theories and models. (shrink)

I argue for a soft compatibilist theory of free will, i.e., such that free will is compatible with both determinism and indeterminism, directly opposite hard incompatibilism, which holds free will incompatible both with determinism and indeterminism. My intuitions in this book are primarily based on an analysis of meditation, but my arguments are highly syncretic, deriving from many fields, including behaviorism, psychology, conditioning and deconditioning theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, simulation theory, etc. I offer a causal/functional analysis of (...) meta-mental control, or 'metacausality', cashed out in counterfactual terms, to solve what I call the easy problem of free will. (shrink)

In a case study, the mechanism of decomposition of diazonium ions in solution is discussed; the reasonable mechanism brought forward in 1940 was not refuted until 1973, in spite of experimental results published in 1952 that were not consistent with the proposed mechanism. A new mechanistic hypothesis, mentioned in the literature in 1973, was in contradiction to the paradigm that nitrogen molecules do not react with organic reagents in solution. After a psychologically explainable crisis the new hypothesis was tested experimentally (...) and the paradigm mentioned was falsified for this case. In the analysis it is shown that Pop-perian logic was commingled with Kuhn’s cycle of normal science, crisis, and revolution, as well as with a psychological barrier. Joint investigations of modern problems by chemists and philosophers of science are encouraged because they may elucidate how progress in scientific discoveries takes place at the present time. (shrink)

In this article we propose a theoretical framework of distributed representations and a methodology of representational analysis for the study of distributed cognitive tasks—tasks that require the processing of information distributed across the internal mind and the external environment. The basic principle of distributed representations Is that the representational system of a distributed cognitive task is a set of internal and external representations, which together represent the abstract structure of the task. The basic strategy of representational analysis is to decompose (...) the representation of a hierarchical task into its component levels so that the representational properties at each level can be independently examined. The theoretical framework and the methodology are used to analyze the hierarchical structure of the Tower of Hanoi problem. Based on this analysis, four experiments are designed to examine the representational properties of the Tower of Hanoi. Finally, the nature of external representations is discussed. (shrink)