Psychologists and philosophers have recently been exploring whether the mechanisms which underlie the acquisition of ‘theory of mind’ (ToM) are best charac- terized as cognitive modules or as developing theories. In this paper, we attempt to clarify what a modular account of ToM entails, and why it is an attractive type of explanation. Intuitions and arguments in this debate often turn on the role of develop- ment: traditional research on ToM focuses on various developmental sequences, whereas cognitive modules are thought (...) to be static and ‘anti-developmental’. We suggest that this mistaken view relies on an overly limited notion of modularity, and we explore how ToM might be grounded in a cognitive module and yet still afford development. Modules must ‘come on-line’, and even fully developed modules may still develop internally, based on their constrained input. We make these points con- crete by focusing on a recent proposal to capture the development of ToM in a module via parameterization. (shrink)

Number concepts must support arithmetic inference. Using this principle, it can be argued that the integer concept of exactly ONE is a necessary part of the psychological foundations of number, as is the notion of the exact equality - that is, perfect substitutability. The inability to support reasoning involving exact equality is a shortcoming in current theories about the development of numerical reasoning. A simple innate basis for the natural number concepts can be proposed that embodies the arithmetic principle, supports (...) exact equality and also enables computational compatibility with real- or rational-valued mental magnitudes. (shrink)

Human social intelligence comprises a wide range of complex cognitive and affective processes that appear to be selectively impaired in autistic spectrum disorders. The study of these neuro- developmental disorders and the study of canonical social intelligence have advanced rapidly over the last twenty years by investigating the two together. Specifically, studies of autism have provided important insights into the nature of ‘theory of mind’ abilities, their normal development and underlying neural systems. At the same time, the idea of impaired (...) development of the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying ‘theory of mind’ has shed new light on the nature of autistic disorders. This general approach is not restricted to the study of impairments but extends to mapping areas of social intelligence that are spared in autism. Here we investigate basic moral judgment and find that it appears to be substantially intact in children with autism who are severely impaired in ‘theory of mind’. At the same time, we extend studies of moral reasoning in normal development by way of a new control task, the ‘cry baby’ task. Cry baby scenarios, in which the distress of the victim is ‘unreasonable’ or ‘unjustified,’ do not elicit moral condemnation from normally developing preschoolers or from children with autism. Judgments of moral transgressions in which the victim displays distress are therefore not likely the result of a simple automatic reaction to the distress and more likely involve moral reasoning. Mapping the cognitive co-morbidity patterns of disordered development should encompass both impairments and sparings because both will be needed to make sense of the neural and genetic levels. (shrink)

We use a new model of metarepresentational development to predict a cognitive deficit which could explain a crucial component of the social impairment in childhood autism. One of the manifestations of a basic metarepresentational capacity is a ‘ theory of mind ’. We have reason to believe that autistic children lack such a ‘ theory ’. If this were so, then they would be unable to impute beliefs to others and to predict their behaviour. This hypothesis was tested using Wimmer (...) and Perner’s puppet play paradigm. Normal children and those with Down’s syndrome were used as controls for a group of autistic children. Even though the mental age of the autistic children was higher than that of the controls, they alone failed to impute beliefs to others. Thus the dysfunction we have postulated and demonstrated is independent of mental retardation and specific to autism. (shrink)

The ability to engage in and recognize pretend play begins around 18 months. A major challenge for theories of pretense is explaining how children are able to engage in pretense, and how they are able to recognize pretense in others. According to one major account, the metarepresentational theory, young children possess both production and recognition abilities because they possess the mental state concept, PRETEND. According to a more recent rival account, the Behavioral theory, young children are behaviorists about pretense, and (...) only produce and recognize pretense as a sort of behavior--namely, behaving 'as-if'. We review both the metarepresentational and Behavioral accounts and argue that the Behavioral theory fails to characterize very young children's abilities to produce and to recognize pretense. Among other problems, the Behavioral theory implies that children should frequently mis-recognize regular behavior as pretense, while certain regular forms of pretend play should neither be produced nor recognized. Like other mental states, pretense eludes purely behavioral description. The metarepresentational theory does not suffer these problems and provides a better account of children's pretense. 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Various theories of moral cognition posit that moral intuitions can be understood as the output of a computational process performed over structured mental representations of human action. We propose that action plan diagrams—“act trees”—can be a useful tool for theorists to succinctly and clearly present their hypotheses about the information contained in these representations. We then develop a methodology for using a series of linguistic probes to test the theories embodied in the act trees. In Study 1, we validate the (...) method by testing a specific hypothesis (diagrammed by act trees) about how subjects are representing two classic moral dilemmas and finding that the data support the hypothesis. In Studies 2–4, we explore possible explanations for discrete and surprising findings that our hypothesis did not predict. In Study 5, we apply the method to a less well‐studied case and show how new experiments generated by our method can be used to settle debates about how actions are mentally represented. In Study 6, we argue that our method captures the mental representation of human action better than an alternative approach. A brief conclusion suggests that act trees can be profitably used in various fields interested in complex representations of human action, including law, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, computer science, robotics, and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

of (from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) forthcoming in Social Neuroscience. [nearly final draft in .pdf] An empirical investigation of moral judgment in autism.

Young children’s failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the most likely content for the belief to be attributed from amongst several competing contents [Leslie, A. M., & Polizzi, P. (1998). Developmental Science, 1, 247–254]. We (...) tested this model with an ‘avoidance false belief task’ in which subjects predict the behavior of a character, who wants to avoid an object but who is mistaken about which of three locations it is in. The task has two equally correct answers—in seeking to avoid the location where she mistakenly believes the object to be, the character might equally go to the location where the object actually is, or to the remaining empty location. However, the model predicts that subjects will prefer one of these answers, selecting the object’s actual location over the empty location. This bias was confirmed in a series of five experiments with children aged between 4 and 8 years of age. A sixth experiment ruled out two rival explanations for children’s biased responding. Two further experiments found the opposite bias in adults. These findings support one selection model as an account of belief-desire reasoning in children, and suggest that a different model is needed for adults. The process of selecting contents for mental state attributions shows a developmental shift between 8 years of age and adulthood. (shrink)

Recent studies reveal spontaneous implicit false-belief understanding in infancy. But is this early ability genuine theory-of-mind? Spontaneous tasks may allow early success by eliminating the selection-response bias thought to underlie later failure on standard tasks. However, using anticipatory eye gaze, we find the same bias in non-verbal tasks in both preschoolers and adults. We argue that the bias arises from theory-of-mind competence itself and takes the form of a rational prior to attribute one's own belief to others. Our discussion then (...) draws attention to a number of other inferential hallmarks of early belief-desire reasoning that together suggest it is the real deal. (shrink)

Theories that propose a modular basis for developing a “theory of mind” have no problem accommodating social interaction or social environment factors into either the learning process, or into the genotypes underlying the growth of the neurocognitive modules. Instead, they can offer models which constrain and hence explain the mechanisms through which variations in social interaction affect development. Cognitive models of both competence and performance are critical to evaluating the basis of correlations between variations in social interaction and performance on (...) mental state reasoning tasks. (shrink)

Do victims’ emotions underlie preschoolers’ moral judgment abilities? Study 1 asked preschoolers (n = 72) to judge actions directed at characters who could and could not feel hurt and who did and did not cry. These judgments took into account only the nature of the action, not the nature of the victim. To further investigate how victims’ emotions might impact children’s moral judgments, Study 2 presented preschoolers (n = 37) with stories that varied in transgression type (Moral, Conventional, or None) (...) and victim’s reaction (Crying Present or Crying Absent). As in Study 1, children’s judgments were affected primarily by transgression type, and not by emotion. In an analogous task, judgments of children with autism spectrum disorders (Study 3; n = 12) were affected by both transgression type and crying. Typically developing children’s moral judgments are thus concerned primarily with action type, not with emotional displays, but the judgments of children with autism spectrum disorders can be swayed by victims’ emotions. (shrink)

The debate over off-line simulation has largely focussed on the capacity to predict behavior, but the basic idea of off-line simulation can be cast in a much broader framework. The central claim of the off-line account of behavior prediction is that the practical reasoning mechanism is taken off-line and used for predicting behavior. However, there's no reason to suppose that the idea of off-line simulation can't be extended to mechanisms other than the practical reasoning system. In principle, any cognitive component (...) can be taken off-line and used to perform some other function. On this view of off-line simulation, such accounts differ radically from traditional information-based accounts of cognitive capacities. And cognitive penetrability provides a wedge for empirically determining whether a capacity requires an information-based account or an off-line simulation account. Stich and Nichols (1992) argued that the simulation theory of behavior prediction was inadequate because behavior prediction seemed to be cognitively penetrable. We present empirical evidence that supports the claim that the behavior prediction is cognitively penetrable. As a result, the simulation account of behavior prediction still seems unpromising. However, off-line simulation might provide accounts of other cognitive capacities. Indeed, off- line simulation accounts have recently been offered for a strikingly diverse set of capacities including counterfactual reasoning, empathy and mental imagery. Goldman, for instance, maintains that counterfactual reasoning and empathy clearly demand off-line simulation accounts. We argue that there are alternative information-based explanations of these phenomena. Nonetheless, the off-line accounts of these phenomena are interesting and clearly worthy of further exploration. (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

I propose to consider the question, "Can machines think?" This should begin with definitions of the meaning of the terms "machine" and "think." The definitions might be framed so as to reflect so far as possible the normal use of the words, but this attitude is dangerous, If the meaning of the words "machine" and "think" are to be found by examining how they are commonly used it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the meaning and the answer to (...) the question, "Can machines think?" is to be sought in a statistical survey such as a Gallup poll. But this is absurd. Instead of attempting such a definition I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words. The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the 'imitation game." It is played with three people, a man (A), a woman (B), and an interrogator (C) who may be of either sex. The interrogator stays in a room apart front the other two. The object of the game for the interrogator is to determine which of the other two is the man and which is the woman. He knows them by labels X and Y, and at the end of the game he says either "X is A and Y is B" or "X is B and Y is A." The interrogator is allowed to put questions to A and B. We now ask the question, "What will happen when a machine takes the part of A in this game?" Will the interrogator decide wrongly as often when the game is played like this as he does when the game is played between a man and a woman? These questions replace our original, "Can machines think?". (shrink)

Hegel and the Spirit explores the meaning of Hegel's grand philosophical category, the category of Geist, by way of what Alan Olson terms a pneumatological thesis. Hegel's philosophy of spirit, according to Olson, is a speculative pneumatology that completes what Adolf von Harnack once called the "orphan doctrine" in Christian theology--the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Olson argues that Hegel's development of philosophy as pneumatology originates out of a deep appreciation of Luther's dialectical understanding of Spirit and that Hegel's (...) doctrine of Spirit is thus deeply interfused with the values of Würtemberg Pietism. Olson further maintains that Hegel's Enzyklopdie is the post-Enlightenment philosophical equivalent of a Trinitätslehre and that his Rechtsphilosophie is an ecclesiology. Thus Hegel and the Spirit demonstrates the truth of Karl Barth's observation that Hegel is the potential Aquinas of Protestantism. Exploring Hegel's philosophy of spirit in historical, cultural, and personal religious context, the book identifies Hegel's relationship with Hölderlin and his response to Hölderlin's madness as key elements in the philosopher's religious and philosophical development, especially with respect to the meaning of transcendence and dialectic. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: The Roots of the Blues in Trauma, Loss, and Adversity Transforming Trauma, Loss, and Adversity The Blues as Living Oral History Transformation through Music Emotional Regulation in the Blues The Creative Reverberation of Traumatic Loss The Blues as a Living, Evolving Legacy Notes.

Even long after their formal exclusion has come to an end, members of previously oppressed social groups often continue to face disproportionate restrictions on their freedom, as the experience of many women over the last century has shown. Working within in a framework in which freedom is understood as independence from arbitrary power, Mary Wollstonecraft provides an explanation of why such domination may persist and offers a model through which it can be addressed. Republicans rely on processes of rational public (...) deliberation to highlight and combat oppression. However, where domination is primarily social rather than legal or political (such as where cultural attitudes, traditions and values exert an arbitrary and inhibiting force) then this defence against domination is often negated. Prejudice, she argues, ‘clouds’ people’s ability to reason and skews debate in favour of the dominant powers, thereby entrenching patterns of subjection. If they are to be independent, then, citizens require not only political rights but a platform from which to add their perspectives and interests to the background social values which govern political discussion. (shrink)

Black and Wilensky (1979) have made serious methodological errors in analyzing story grammars, and in the process they have committed additional errors in applying formal language theory. Our arguments involve clarifying certain aspects of knowledge representation crucial to a proper treatment of story understanding.Particular criticisms focus on the following shortcomings of their presentation: 1) an erroneous statement from formal language theory, 2) misapplication of formal language theory to story grammars, 3) unsubstantiated and doubtful analogies with English grammar, 4) various non (...) sequiturs concerning the generation of non‐stories, 5) a false claim based on the artificial distinction between syntax and semantics, and 6) misinterpretation of the role of story grammars in story understanding.We conclude by suggesting appropriate criteria for the evaluation of story grammars. (shrink)

Republicans understand freedom as the guaranteed protection against any arbitrary use of coercive power. This freedom is exercised within a political community, and the concept of arbitrariness is defined with reference to the actual ideas of its citizens about what is in their shared interests. According to many current defenders of the republican model, this form of freedom is understood in strictly negative terms representing an absence of domination. I argue that this assumption is misguided. First, it is internally inconsistent. (...) The central republican focal point of arbitrariness is a necessarily socially-constructed ideal that only exists as the creation of the citizens themselves. Secondly, republican freedom operates in two distinct realms or spheres. There is freedom under a law that is required to uphold the collective good as reflected in society’s norms, and there is freedom within that very system of norms. The threats to freedom from within each sphere are different and must be addressed accordingly. The negative approach, however, conflates the two and emphasises only the dangers faced under the law. This exposes citizens – especially those from marginalised social groups – to domination in the second realm from oppressive social norms. Only by clearly recognising the nature of both kinds of threats can a comprehensive republican freedom be formulated. (shrink)

Independence is a central and recurring theme in Mary Wollstonecraft's work. Independence should not be understood as an individualistic ideal that is in tension with the value of community but as an essential ingredient in successful and flourishing social relationships. I examine three aspects of this rich and complex concept that Wollstonecraft draws on as she develops her own notion of independence as a powerful feminist tool. First, independence is an egalitarian ideal that requires that all individuals, regardless of sex, (...) be protected to a comparable extent in all areas of social, political, and economic life, no matter whether this is in the public or private sphere. Second, so long as this egalitarian condition is not compromised, independence allows for individuals to perform differentiated social roles, including along gendered lines. Finally, the ongoing and collective input of both women and men is required to ensure that the conditions necessary for social independence are maintained. In Wollstonecraft's hands, then, independence is a powerful ideal that allows her to argue that women must be able to act on their own terms as social and political equals, doing so as women whose perspectives and interests may differ from men's. (shrink)

Independence is a central and recurring theme in Wollstonecraft’s work. Independence should not be understood as an individualistic ideal that is in tension with the value of community but as an essential ingredient in successful and flourishing social relationships. I examine three aspects of this rich and complex concept that Wollstonecraft draws on as she develops her own notion of independence as a powerful feminist tool. First, independence is an egalitarian ideal that requires that all individuals, regardless of sex, are (...) protected to a comparable extent in all areas of social, political and economic life, no matter whether this is in the public or private sphere. Secondly, so long as this egalitarian condition is not compromised, independence allows for individuals to perform differentiated social roles, including along gendered lines. Finally, the on-going and collective input of both women and men is required to ensure that the conditions necessary for social independence are maintained. In Wollstonecraft’s hands, then, independence is a powerful ideal that allows her to argue that women must be able to act on their own terms as social and political equals, doing so as women whose perspectives and interests may differ from men’s. (shrink)

''The problem of Transcendence is the problem of our time. " I Needless to say, Transcendence was a particularly lively i~sue when Karl Heim wrote these words in the mid-1930's. Within the province of philosophi cal theology and philosophy of religion, however, it is always the prob lem, as Gordon Kaufman has recently reminded us. 2Por the question concerning the nature and the reality of Transcendence has not only to do with self-transcendence, but with the being of Transcendence-Itself, that is (...) to say, with the nature and the reality of God as experienced and understood at any given time or place. Now there are those today who would claim that any further discus sion of the latter half of this proposition, namely,Transcendence-Itse1f or God, is worthless and quite beside the point. Such persons would claim that the particular logia represented by the theological sciences has collapsed by virtue of its object having disappeared. Indeed, when one surveys the contemporary scene in philosophy and theology, there is a good deal of evidence that this is the case':"" theology of late having be come something of a "spectacle," to use Pritz Buri's term. One of the reasons for this, we here contend, is that the richness and the diversity of the meaning of Transcendence has been lost. And even though we do not here intend to resolve the issue, neither do we assume that such an enqui ry is either impossible or irrelevant. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question of whether animals have souls and the ability to experience God after death within the limitations of their nature. Plausible explanations for the natural origin of life and for the development of subsequent complexity are increasingly being advanced by molecular biologists. Christian tradition and scholasticism teach that the human body is animated by the soul which is the agent of vital activities. This teaching is incompatible with the claim for a natural origin for life. At (...) some stage in the evolution of chordates and cephalopods a sense of self-awareness and an ability to distinguish between pleasure and the absence of pleasure would have arisen permitting the potential for ensoulment. The premise that evolution was gradual but ensoulment was discontinuous predicates the irrational conclusion that for one generation the parents were animals without souls and their children humans, made in the image of God, and with souls. Biological gradualism is incompatible with a sudden ensoulment dichotomy both in the evolutionary history of humans and for a maturing foetus, human or animal. Gradualism must apply to both body and soul. A Christian interpretation of physicalism, however, provides an alternative to dualism and resolves the paradoxes and difficulties relating to animals. (shrink)