Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs’ semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions (...) than to minimally different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events. (shrink)

There is extensive evidence that adults, children, and some non-human species, represent routine events in the form of hierarchically structured 'action scripts,' and show superior recall and imitation of information at relatively high-levels of this hierarchy. Here we investigate the hypothesis that a 'hierarchical bias' operates in human cultural transmission, acting to impose a hierarchical structure onto descriptions of everyday events, and to increasingly describe those events in terms of higher hierarchical levels. Descriptions of three everyday events expressed entirely in (...) terms of basic low-level actions were transmitted along ten chains each containing four adult human participants. It was found that the proportion of low-level information showed a significant linear decrease with transmission generation, while the proportions of medium- and high-level information showed significant linear increases, consistent with the operation of a hierarchical bias. The findings additionally provide support for script theory in general, and are discussed in relation to hierarchical imitation in non-human primates. (shrink)

McRae, Brown and Elman argue against the view that events are structured as frequently‐occurring sequences of world stimuli. They underline the importance of temporal structure defining event types and advance a more complex temporal structure, which allows for some variance in the component elements.

Event sequences or scripts are the conceptual representations of activities in memory. Traditional views hold that events are represented in amodal networks and are retrieved by associative strategies. The embodied cognition approach holds that knowledge is grounded in perception and retrieved by mental simulation. We used a script generation task where event sequences of activities had to be produced. Activities varied in their degree of familiarity. In a regressional design we investigated whether amodal or perceptual variables best (...) predicted knowledge retrieval to gain insight into the underlying representation. Retrieval depended on the familiarity of the activity. While novel activities mainly relied on perception‐based simulation and to a lesser extent on associative strategies, moderately familiar activities showed the opposite pattern, and events of familiar activities were retrieved by association alone. We conclude that amodal structures exist in all representations that become stronger with increasing frequency and finally prevail over perceptual structures. (shrink)

The question of origins continues to captivate human thought and sentiment, despite the postmodern insistence that knowledge of origins is impossible since it must lie beyond the boundaries of the origin of knowledge. Knowledge cannot seek causes that precede its own existence, it is said. Still, theoretical narratives continue to arise accounting for such things as the origin of the universe, of our star and solar system, of Earth, of life on the planet, of the human species, (...) of self-aware human cultures, and so on down into the origins of the local and particular. This should not be surprising; we sense that knowing our origins will tell us who we are. With this in mind, this particular originary analysis of the origin of language will critically compare some of the foundational tenets of generative anthropology with the objective findings of palaeoanthropology and linguistics. Furthermore, an originary proposal of my own will be tendered. (shrink)

This paper began with the assumption that the habitual practices of knowledge-creation, which have shaped the day-to-day contexts of teachers and researchers, are not greatly different from the practices that have led to human-made catastrophes in the Anthropocene. I pondered over my experiences as a researcher in an attempt to gain insights for thinking about and engaging in knowledge-creation differently to become more response-able in the Anthropocene. Inspired by post-qualitative research practice, I re-turned, like an earthworm, (to) two (...) research events. A theoretical framework informed by critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism guided the process. Through these re-turns, I came to understand that creating knowledge is a complex and indeterminate process that always accompanies the ‘more-than’. Attending to the notion of knowledge-ing, I discussed the ways in which knowledge emerged as a flow that was neither fully graspable nor static through more-than-human intra-actions. What I propose in this paper is not a methodological technique, but rather, a mode of practice that might disrupt our sense of Cartesian self. I offered some suggestions for teachers and researchers to reimagine the practices of knowledge-creation as a way of reinventing their subjectivity and responding to the damaged earth more responsibly. (shrink)

: This paper offers a preliminary analysis of conceptual change between event concepts. It begins with a brief review of the major findings of cognitive studies on event knowledge. The script model proposed by Schank and Abelson was the first attempt to represent event knowledge. Subsequent cognitive studies indicated that event knowledge is organized in the form of dimensional organizations in which temporally successive actions are related causally. This paper proposes a frame representation (...) to capture and outline the internal structure of event concepts, in particular, their causal connections. The frame representation offers an effective method to analyze the relations between event concepts, and to expose the unique cognitive mechanisms behind conceptual change involved event concepts. Finally this paper shows that the frame representation of event concepts is instrumental to understanding an important historical episode of conceptual change in the context of nineteenth-century optics. (shrink)

We present five experiments and simulation studies to establish late analogical abstraction as a new psychological phenomenon: Schema abstraction from analogical examples can revive otherwise inert knowledge. We find that comparing two analogous examples of negotiations at recall time promotes retrieving analogical matches stored in memory—a notoriously elusive effect. Another innovation in this research is that we show parallel effects for real‐life autobiographical memory (Experiments 1–3) and for a controlled memory set (Experiments 4 and 5). Simulation studies show that (...) a unified model based on schema abstraction can capture backward (retrieval) effects as well as forward (transfer) effects. (shrink)

This book presents an attempt to develop a theory of knowledge and a philosophy of mind using ideas derived from the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon. Information is seen as an objective commodity defined by the dependency relations between distinct events. Knowledge is then analyzed as information caused belief. Perception is the delivery of information in analog form for conceptual utilization by cognitive mechanisms. The final chapters attempt to develop a theory of meaning by viewing (...) meaning as a certain kind of information-carrying role. (shrink)

본 논문은 들뢰즈가 명시적으로 구분하지 않았던 ‘사건’의 구분되는 특성들을 추려내어, 세 가지 개념으로 갈별하고, 그 특징을 정리한다. 크게 잠재성의 측면에 위치하는 ‘이념적 사건’(대문자 사건)과 현행성의 측면에서 다뤄지는 그 외의 사건들(소문자 사건들)로 구분하고, 현행적 사건을 다시 그 대상에 따라 한 개체의 실존적 측면에서의 변이의 계기가 되는 스토아적 사건을 ‘실존적 사건’으로, 세계 전체의 분기로서 새로운 세계의 출현을 야기하는 라이프니츠적 사건을 ‘세계적 사건’으로 구분한다. 이는 한편으로 들뢰즈의 사건론이 주로 전개되는 『의미의 논리』내 내적 일관성을 확보하는 동시에 그것과 『주름』 사이의 그의 사유의 변화를 추적하려는 시도이다. (...) 그러나 다른 한편으로 이는 미래의 우발점을 향한 새로운 도약을 그리기 이전에, 이미 발생한 현행적 사건과 마주하는 실천적 물음에 들뢰즈가 보여주었던 ‘앎’을 대체하는 ‘믿음’의 태도를 조명하려는 것이다. 첫 번째 이념적 사건이 순수긍정의 어린 아이의 영혼에 담긴 윤리를 지시한다면, 두 번째 실존적 사건은 자신에게 덮쳐온 불운의 형상을 판단대상으로부터 판단주체로 역전시켜 사고를 사건화하는 부스케의 영혼에 담긴 삶에 대한 윤리를 지시한다. 나아가 마지막 세 번째 세계적 사건은 그러한 특정 사건이 전혀 다른 세계의 출현을 도모할 때, 그것을 적극적인 불-공가능성의 세계의 출현으로 만들어 내는 윤리를 담는다. 이로써 들뢰즈의 사건 개념은 다시 답해질 수 있다. 그것은 언제든 다시 던질 수 있는 영원회귀의 주사위 놀이이지만, 파스칼의 도박이기보다 언제나 니체적 주사위 놀이이고, 우리는 그로써 사건을 앎의 대상이 아닌 믿음의 대상으로 전환시키는 윤리를 발견하게 된다. (shrink)

Continuists maintain that, aside from their distinct temporal orientations, episodic memory and future-oriented mental time travel (FMTT) are qualitatively continuous. Discontinuists deny this, arguing that, in addition to their distinct temporal orientations, there are qualitative metaphysical or epistemological differences between episodic memory and FMTT. This chapter defends continuism by responding both to arguments for metaphysical discontinuism, based on alleged discontinuities between episodic memory and FMTT at the causal, intentional, and phenomenological levels, and to arguments for epistemological discontinuism, based on alleged (...) discontinuities with respect to the epistemic openness of the past and future, the directness or indirectness of our knowledge of past and future, and immunity to error through misidentification. The chapter concludes by sketching a positive argument for continuism. (shrink)

Summary Covert encoding is one of the strategies available to languages for the encoding of motion, in which, in accordance with the laws of Gestalt, the meaning of an expression encoding motion is not coincident with the mere sum of the meanings of each of its constitutive units, relying on the mediation of grammatical and co(n)text­established knowledge for its interpretability. Moving on from a data set gathered for a previous study and adopting a holistic, constructional approach, several strategies were (...) found in a diachronic corpus of Italian, French and Spanish for the covert encoding of motion in such languages, based on whether the motion­interpretation attributed to the covert construction is mediated by either linguistic or extralinguistic knowledge. The diachronic investigation also showed that the use of such patterns is diachronically consistent in frequency, thus proving that such patterns of interaction between language and cognition may be regarded as functional for speakers of all languages and time stages, also confirming that a holistic, constructional approach to language study can help shed light on linguistic–cognitive phenomena on the basis of language variation and change. (shrink)

Determining the knowledge that guides human judgments is fundamental to understanding how people reason, make decisions, and form predictions. We use an experimental procedure called ‘‘iterated learning,’’ in which the responses that people give on one trial are used to generate the data they see on the next, to pinpoint the knowledge that informs people's predictions about everyday events (e.g., predicting the total box office gross of a movie from its current take). In particular, we use this method (...) to discriminate between two models of human judgments: a simple Bayesian model (Griffiths & Tenenbaum, 2006) and a recently proposed alternative model that assumes people store only a few instances of each type of event in memory (MinK; Mozer, Pashler, & Homaei, 2008). Although testing these models using standard experimental procedures is difficult due to differences in the number of free parameters and the need to make assumptions about the knowledge of individual learners, we show that the two models make very different predictions about the outcome of iterated learning. The results of an experiment using this methodology provide a rich picture of how much people know about the distributions of everyday quantities, and they are inconsistent with the predictions of the MinK model. The results suggest that accurate predictions about everyday events reflect relatively sophisticated knowledge on the part of individuals. (shrink)

A fascinating exploration into the 125 most important milestones in philosophy, all in one handy book perfect for keeping on your bedside table or carrying wherever you go. Now is the perfect time to expand your knowledge and learn something new or delve deeper into a topic you've always been interested in. With 125 concise, informative, and entertaining entries, The Bedside Book of Philosophy explores the key theories, great insights, thought-provoking questions, influential personalities, and seminal publications in the field (...) over the millennia. Gregory Bassham covers a wide range of topics and cultures--from Confucian ethics and Plato's theory of forms to Occam's Razor, Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, existentialism, feminist philosophy, Social Darwinism, and The Good Place--all in an accessible, conversational voice. Includes 75 black-and-white illustrations throughout. (shrink)

Research on language processing has shown that the disruption of conceptual integration gives rise to specific patterns of event-related brain potentials —N400 and P600 effects. Here, we report similar ERP effects when adults performed cross-domain conceptual integration of analogous semantic and mathematical relations. In a problem-solving task, when participants generated labeled answers to semantically aligned and misaligned arithmetic problems, the second object label in misaligned problems yielded an N400 effect for addition problems. In a verification task, when participants judged (...) arithmetically correct but semantically misaligned problem sentences to be “unacceptable,” the second object label in misaligned sentences elicited a P600 effect. Thus, depending on task constraints, misaligned problems can show either of two ERP signatures of conceptual disruption. These results show that well-educated adults can integrate mathematical and semantic relations on the rapid timescale of within-domain ERP effects by a process akin to analogical mapping. (shrink)

Thomas Reid offers an explanation of how memory of events is possible. This paper presents, criticize,s and amends his view that memory not only preserves our knowledge of the external world, but also contributes to such knowledge, by being essential for the perception of events. Reid’s views on memory are in line with his generalanti-skeptical commitments, and thus attractive, for several reasons. One reason is that, just like perception, memory is not infallible, but it can constitute or, at (...) least, ground knowledge. Reid argues that memory, like perception, is immediate: it gives direct access to the external world, and not to mental representations of the external world. Another reason is that Reid’s explanation of how memory of events works emphasizes the impor- tance of the divide between memory and perception and consciousness: it is one thing to perceive or be conscious of something; it is another to remember that thing. Despite these advantages, a careful study of Reid’s views on memory will uncover a serious problem of general philosophical interest: it is unclear how exactly we are able to remember events episodically, since it is not settled whether we ever literally perceive events. This problem is engendered by a clash of the following two intuitions: (i) we can perceive only presently existing things, and (ii) we can remember events, which usually span periods of time longer than the present (whether the present is durationless or not). (shrink)

Much of our behavior is guided by our understanding of events. We perceive events when we observe the world unfolding around us, participate in events when we act on the world, simulate events that we hear or read about, and use our knowledge of events to solve problems. In this book, Gabriel A. Radvansky and Jeffrey M. Zacks provide the first integrated framework for event cognition and attempt to synthesize the available psychological and neuroscience data surrounding it. This (...) synthesis leads to new proposals about several traditional areas in psychology and neuroscience including perception, attention, language understanding, memory, and problem solving.Radvansky and Zacks have written this book with a diverse readership in mind. It is intended for a range of researchers working within cognitive science including psychology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, anthropology, and education. Readers curious about events more generally such as those working in literature, film theory, and history will also find it of interest. (shrink)

Nearly all success is due to some mix of ability and luck. But some successes we attribute to the agent’s ability, whereas others we attribute to luck. To better understand the criteria distinguishing credit from luck, we conducted a series of four studies on knowledge attributions. Knowledge is an achievement that involves reaching the truth. But many factors affecting the truth are beyond our control and reaching the truth is often partly due to luck. Which sorts of luck (...) are compatible with knowledge? We find that knowledge attributions are highly sensitive to lucky events that change the explanation for why a belief is true. By contrast, knowledge attributions are surprisingly insensitive to lucky events that threaten but ultimately fail to change the explanation for why a belief is true. These results shed light on our concept of knowledge, help explain apparent inconsistencies in prior work on knowledge attributions, and constitute progress toward a general understanding of the relation between success and luck. (shrink)

According to one interpretation of Aristotle’s famous thesis, to say that action is the conclusion of practical reasoning is to say that action is itself a judgment about what to do. A central motivation for the thesis is that it suggests a path for understanding the non-observational character of practical knowledge. If actions are judgments, then whatever explains an agent’s knowledge of the relevant judgment can explain her knowledge of the action. I call the approach to action (...) that accepts Aristotle’s thesis so understood Normativism. There are many reasons to doubt Normativism. My aim in this paper is to defend Normativism from a pair of arguments that purport to show that a normative judgment could not constitute an event in material reality and also the knowledge of such a happening. Both highlight a putative mismatch between the natures of, on the one hand, an agent’s knowledge of her normative judgment and, on the other, her knowledge of her own action. According to these objections, knowledge of action includes (a) perceptual knowledge and (b) knowledge of what one has already done. But knowledge of a normative judgment includes neither. Hence knowledge of action cannot simply be knowledge of a normative judgment. (shrink)

Warren and Dresang comment on the contributions from a psycholinguistic perspective, highlighting close relations between the respective research on events and proposing that, for example, verbs may indeed directly pre‐activate templates of the typically involved event participants.

1. Causal explanations depend on our interests, our purposes, and our prior knowledge. ⇒ No uniquely real causal explanation.

We propose a novel ontological analysis of relations and relationships based on a re-visitation of a classic problem in the practice of knowledge repre- sentation and conceptual modeling, namely relationship reification. Our idea is that a relation holds in virtue of a relationship's existence. Relationships are therefore truthmakers of relations. In this paper we present a general theory or reification and truthmaking, and discuss the interplay between events and rela- tionships, suggesting that relationships are the focus of events, which (...) emerge from the context (the scene) they occur in. (shrink)

Elman (2009) proposed that the traditional role of the mental lexicon in language processing can largely be replaced by a theoretical model of schematic event knowledge founded on dynamic context-dependent variables. We evaluate Elman’s approach and propose an alternative view, based on dual coding theory and evidence that modality-specific cognitive representations contribute strongly to word meaning and language performance across diverse contexts which also have effects predictable from dual coding theory.

How do historians, comparative linguists, biblical and textual critics and evolutionary biologists establish beliefs about the past? How do they know the past? This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that offer scientific knowledge of the past. Using the analytic tools of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science the book covers such topics as evidence, theory, methodology, explanation, determination and underdetermination, coincidence, contingency and counterfactuals in historiography. Aviezer Tucker's central claim is that historiography as a scientific discipline (...) should be thought of as an effort to explain the evidence of past events. He also emphasizes the similarity between historiographic methodology to Darwinian evolutionary biology. This is an important, fresh approach to historiography and will be read by philosophers, historians and social scientists interested in the methodological foundations of their disciplines. (shrink)

This paper aims to outline, and argue for, an approach to episodic memory broadly in the spirit of knowledge-first epistemology. I discuss a group of influential views of epsiodic memory that I characterize as ‘two-factor accounts’, which have both proved popular historically and have also seen a resurgence in recent work on the philosophy of memory. What is common to them is that they try to give an account of the nature of episodic memory in which the concept of (...) knowledge plays no explanatory role. I highlight some parallels between these two-factor accounts and attempts to give a reductive definition of knowledge itself. I then discuss some problems two-factor accounts of episodic memory face in explaining the distinctive sense in which episodic recollection involves remembering personally experienced past events, before sketching an alternative approach to episodic memory, which takes as basic the idea that episodic memory involves the retention of knowledge. I argue that we can give an exhaustive constitutive account of what episodic memory is, and how it differs from other types of mental states, by considering what particular type of knowledge is retained in episodic memory, and what exactly having that knowledge consists in. (shrink)