What mechanisms underlie children’s language production? Structural priming—the repetition of sentence structure across utterances—is an important measure of the developing production system. We propose its mechanism in children is the same as may underlie analogical reasoning: structure-mapping. Under this view, structural priming is the result of making an analogy between utterances, such that children map semantic and syntactic structure from previous to future utterances. Because the ability to map relationally complex structures develops with age, younger children are less successful than (...) older children at mapping both semantic and syntactic relations. Consistent with this account, 4-year-old children showed priming only of semantic relations when surface similarity across utterances was limited, whereas 5-year-olds showed priming of both semantic and syntactic structure regardless of shared surface similarity. The priming of semantic structure without syntactic structure is uniquely predicted by the structure-mapping account because others have interpreted structural priming as a reflection of developing syntactic knowledge. (shrink)

This paper argues that grammatical constructions, specifically argument structure constructions that determine the “who did what to whom” part of sentence meaning and how this meaning is expressed syntactically, can be considered a kind of relational category. That is, grammatical constructions are represented as the abstraction of the syntactic and semantic relations of the exemplar utterances that are expressed in that construction, and it enables the generation of novel exemplars. To support this argument, I review evidence that there are parallel (...) behavioral patterns between how children learn relational categories generally and how they learn grammatical constructions specifically. Then, I discuss computational simulations of how grammatical constructions are abstracted from exemplar sentences using a domain-general relational cognitive architecture. Last, I review evidence from adult language processing that shows parallel behavioral patterns with expert behavior from other cognitive domains. After reviewing the evidence, I consider how to integrate this account with other theories of language development. (shrink)

There is a critical inconsistency in the literature on analogical retrieval. On the one hand, a vast set of laboratory studies has found that people often fail to retrieve past experiences that share deep relational commonalities, even when they would be useful for reasoning about a current problem. On the other hand, historical studies and naturalistic research show clear evidence of remindings based on deep relational commonalities. Here, we examine a possible explanation for this inconsistency—namely, that remindings based on relational (...) principles increase as a function of expertise. To test this claim, we devised a simple analogy‐generation task that can be administered across a wide range of expertise. We presented common events as the bases from which to generate analogies. Although the events themselves were unrelated to geoscience, we found that when the event was explainable in terms of a causal principle that is prominent in geoscience, expert geoscientists were likely to spontaneously produce analogies from geoscience that relied on the same principle. Further, for these examples, prompts to produce causal analogies increased their frequency among nonscientists and scientists from another domain, but not among expert geoscientists (whose spontaneous causal retrieval levels were already high). In contrast, when the example was best explained by a principle outside of geoscience, all groups required prompting to produce substantial numbers of analogies based on causal principles. Overall, this pattern suggests that the spontaneous use of causal principles is characteristic of experts. We suggest that expert scientists adopt habitual patterns of encoding according to the key relational principles in their domain, and that this contributes to their propensity to spontaneously retrieve relational matches. We discuss implications for the nature of expertise and for science instruction and assessment. (shrink)

We investigated the understanding of causal systems categories—categories defined by common causal structure rather than by common domain content—among college students. We asked students who were either novices or experts in the physical sciences to sort descriptions of real-world phenomena that varied in their causal structure (e.g., negative feedback vs. causal chain) and in their content domain (e.g., economics vs. biology). Our hypothesis was that there would be a shift from domain-based sorting to causal sorting with increasing expertise in the (...) relevant domains. This prediction was borne out: The novice groups sorted primarily by domain and the expert group sorted by causal category. These results suggest that science training facilitates insight about causal structures. (shrink)

Tests of economic theory often focus on choice outcomes and find significant individual differences in these outcomes. This variability may mask universal psychological processes that lead to different choices because of differences across cultures in the information people have available when making decisions. On this view, decision making research within and across cultures must focus on the processes underlying choice.

Different aspects of people's interactions with money are best conceptualized using the drug and tool theories. The key question is when these models of money are most likely to guide behavior. We suggest that the Drug Theory characterizes motivationally active uses of money and that the Tool Theory characterizes behavior in motivationally cool situations. (Published Online April 5 2006).

On the grounds that there are no mereological composites, mereological nihilists deny that ordinary objects exist. Even if nihilism is true, however, I argue that tables and chairs exist anyway: for I deny that ordinary objects are the mereological sums the nihilist rejects. Instead, I argue, ordinary objects have a different nature; they are arrangements, not composites. My argument runs as follows. First, I defend realism about ordinary objects by showing that there is something that plays the role of ordinary (...) objects in perception and discourse, and that ordinary objects are whatever plays this role. Next, I argue that it is arrangements that play this role. It follows that ordinary objects exist- even if mereological nihilism is true. (shrink)

On the standard view for something to exist is for one thing to exist: in slogan form, to be is to be countable. E.J. Lowe argues something can exist without being countable as one, however. His primary example is homogenous “stuff,” i.e., qualitatively uniform and infinitely divisible matter. Lacking nonarbitrary boundaries and being everywhere the same, homogenous stuff lacks a principle of individuation that would yield countably distinct constituents. So, for Lowe, homogenous stuff is strongly uncountable. Olson rejects Lowe’s view (...) and defends the orthodox connection between existence and number. He argues that if there is any stuff, there is a number of portions of stuff. Sider also rejects a stuff ontology, claiming it is incompatible with his preferred view that the familiar quantifiers of predicate logic carve at nature’s joints. Against these arguments, I defend the uncountability of stuff and the possibility of existence without countability. If to be is to be countable, more is needed than the arguments that Olson and Sider provide. (shrink)

A world where there exists n concrete things is a count-determinate world. The orthodox view is count-determinacy is necessary; if to be is to be the value of a variable and the domain of quantification is enumerable, count-determinacy follows. Yet I argue how many there are can be indeterminate; count-indeterminacy is metaphysically possible and even likely actual. Notably, my argument includes rebuttals of Evans’ reductio of indeterminate identity and the Lewis/Sider ‘argument from vagueness’. Count-indeterminacy should therefore be recognized as another (...) basic form of genuine metaphysical indeterminacy, in addition to types recently defend by Barnes, Williams, and Wilson. (shrink)

_Offering a new edition of Dewey’s 1916 collection of essays_ This critical edition of John Dewey’s 1916 collection of writings on logic, _Essays in Experimental Logic—_in which Dewey presents his concept of logic as the theory of inquiry and his unique and innovative development of the relationship of inquiry to experience—is the first scholarly reprint of the work in one volume since 1954. _Essays in Experimental Logic, _edited by D. Micah Hester and Robert B. Talisse, uses the authoritative texts (...) from the _Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882–1953_ and includes as well articles from leading journals representing various contemporary schools of philosophy that criticized Dewey’s experimentalism. Culling materials from six volumes of the chronologically arranged _Collected Works_, this single-volume edition of _Essays_ marks a crucial point in Dewey’s intellectual development: one in which Dewey critically engages idealistic and intuitionist theorists and lays the groundwork for his mature theory of inquiry. The text includes a new introduction by renowned Dewey scholar Tom Burke that places _Essays_ in philosophical and historical context. In addition to the original essays, _Essays in Experimental Logic_ also features five critical essays by Dewey’s contemporaries, including Bertrand Russell, Wendell T. Bush, R. F. Alfred Hoernlé, H. T. Costello, and C. S. Peirce. (shrink)

Processes of rapid and truncated agrarian change—driven through expanding urbanisation, infrastructure development, extractive industries, and commodity crops—are shaping the livelihood opportunities and aspirations of Indonesia’s rural youth. This study describes the everyday experiences of youth as they navigate the changing character of agriculture, aquaculture, and fishing livelihoods across gender, class, and generation. Drawing on qualitative field research conducted in the Maros District of South Sulawesi, we examine young people’s experiences of agrarian change in a landscape of entangled rural, coastal and (...) increasingly urbanised spaces. We find that young people aspire to secure, modern, and salary-based work, while continuing to seek and sustain intergenerational farming or aquaculture-based livelihoods. Youth take advantage of increased connectivity to diversify their incomes, yet their dependence on mobility also introduces new forms of gendered and class based precarity such as insecure working arrangements, disruption to education and violence (especially for young unskilled women and youth from financially insecure households). Our study highlights the persistent conditions of precarity that many young people encounter in both rural and urban settings, while challenging assumptions that youth are uninterested in rural futures. (shrink)

For over three decades, clinical ethicists in the United States have recorded their consulting activities to supplement documentation in the medical record, often using locally developed instrument...

The essays in this collection address different aspects of Dewey's philosophy of logic, from his work at the beginning of the twentieth century to the culmination of his logical thought in the 1938 volume, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR&R) is based on the idea that propositional content can be rigorously represented in formal languages long the province of logic, in such a way that these representations can be productively reasoned over by humans and machines; and that this reasoning can be used to produce knowledge-based systems (KBSs). As such, KR&R is a discipline conventionally regarded to range across parts of artificial intelligence (AI), computer science, and especially logic. This standard view of KR&R’s participating fields (...) is correct — but dangerously incomplete. The view is incomplete because, as we explain herein, sophisticated KR&R must rely heavily upon philosophy. Encapsulated, the reason is actually quite straightforward: Sophisticated KR&R must include the representation of not only simple properties, but also concepts that are routine in the formal sciences (theoretical computer science, mathematics, logic, game theory, etc.), and everyday socio-cognitive concepts like mendacity, deception, betrayal, and evil. Because in KR&R the representation of such concepts must be rigorous in order to enable machine reasoning (e.g., machine-generated and machine-checked proofs that a is lying to b) over them, philosophy, devoted as it is in no small part to supplying analyses of such concepts, is a crucial partner in the overall enterprise. To put the point another way: When the knowledge to be represented is such as to require lengthy formulas in expressive formal languages for that representation, philosophy must be involved in the game. In addition, insofar as the advance of KR&R must allow formalisms and processes for representing and reasoning over visual propositional content, philosophy will be a key contributor into the future. (shrink)

Predictive processing approaches to the mind are increasingly popular in the cognitive sciences. This surge of interest is accompanied by a proliferation of philosophical arguments, which seek to either extend or oppose various aspects of the emerging framework. In particular, the question of how to position predictive processing with respect to enactive and embodied cognition has become a topic of intense debate. While these arguments are certainly of valuable scientific and philosophical merit, they risk underestimating the variety of approaches gathered (...) under the predictive label. Here, we first present a basic review of neuroscientific, cognitive, and philosophical approaches to PP, to illustrate how these range from solidly cognitivist applications—with a firm commitment to modular, internalistic mental representation—to more moderate views emphasizing the importance of ‘body-representations’, and finally to those which fit comfortably with radically enactive, embodied, and dynamic theories of mind. Any nascent predictive processing theory must take into account this continuum of views, and associated theoretical commitments. As a final point, we illustrate how the Free Energy Principle attempts to dissolve tension between internalist and externalist accounts of cognition, by providing a formal synthetic account of how internal ‘representations’ arise from autopoietic self-organization. The FEP thus furnishes empirically productive process theories by which to guide discovery through the formal modelling of the embodied mind. (shrink)

Respiratory rhythms sustain biological life, governing the homeostatic exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Until recently, however, the influence of breathing on the brain has largely been overlooked. Yet new evidence demonstrates that the act of breathing exerts a substantive, rhythmic influence on perception, emotion, and cognition, largely through the direct modulation of neural oscillations. Here, we synthesize these findings to motivate a new predictive coding model of respiratory brain coupling, in which breathing rhythmically modulates both local and global neural (...) gain, to optimize cognitive and affective processing. Our model further explains how respiratory rhythms interact with the topology of the functional connectome, and we highlight key implications for the computational psychiatry of disordered respiratory and interoceptive inference. (shrink)

Various theorists contend that we may live in a computer simulation. David Chalmers in turn argues that the simulation hypothesis is a metaphysical hypothesis about the nature of our reality, rather than a sceptical scenario. We use recent work on consciousness to motivate new doubts about both sets of arguments. First, we argue that if either panpsychism or panqualityism is true, then the only way to live in a simulation may be as brains-in-vats, in which case it is unlikely that (...) we live in a simulation. We then argue that if panpsychism or panqualityism is true, then viable simulation hypotheses are substantially sceptical scenarios. We conclude that the nature of consciousness has wide-ranging implications for simulation arguments. (shrink)

An important objection to political liberalism is that it provides no means by which to decide conflicts between public and non-public reasons. This article develops John Rawls' idea of `reasoning from conjecture' as one way to argue for a commitment to public reason. Reasoning from conjecture is a form of non-public justification that allows political liberals to reason from within the comprehensive views of at least some unreasonable citizens. After laying out the basic features of this form of non-public justification, (...) this article responds to three objections based on concerns about insincerity, cultural imperialism, and the epistemic authority of those who reason from conjecture. (shrink)

A common objection to the idea of public reason is that it cannot resolve fundamental political issues because it excludes too many moral considerations from the political domain. Following an important but often overlooked distinction drawn by Gerald Gaus, there are two ways to understand this objection. First, public reason is often said to be inconclusive because it fails to generate agreement on fundamental political issues. Second, and more radically, some critics have claimed that public reason is indeterminate because it (...) cannot provide any citizen with sufficient reason(s) for making important political decisions. Against the first of these objections, I argue that the purpose of public reason is not to end reasonable disagreement. Rather, it is to provide a suitable framework of values and principles within which citizens may resolve their moral and political differences. Against the second objection, I argue, first, that the indeterminacy of public reason is much less common than its inconclusiveness; and, second, that there are second-order decision-making strategies that may enable citizens to cope with cases of indeterminacy. The incompleteness of public reason, whether it takes the form of inconclusiveness or indeterminacy, is not a reason for citizens to abandon their commitment to public justification. (shrink)

In the 20th century, public health was responsible for most of the 30-year increase in average life expectancy in the United States.1 Most of the significant advances in public health required the combined effort of scientists and attorneys. Scientists identified public health threats and the means of controlling them, but attorneys and policymakers helped convert those scientific discoveries into laws that could change the behavior of industries or individuals at a population level. In tobacco control, public health scientists made the (...) groundbreaking discovery that smoking caused lung cancer, but attorneys and policymakers developed and implemented the policies and litigation strategies that helped reduce smoking rates by more than half over the past 50 years. (shrink)

The Bayesian brain hypothesis, as formalized by the free-energy principle, is ascendant in cognitive science. But, how does the Bayesian brain obtain prior beliefs? Veissière and colleagues argue that sociocultural interaction is one important source. We offer a complementary model in which “interoceptive self-inference” guides the estimation of expected uncertainty both in ourselves and in our social conspecifics.

NoteThe following was written as a commentary on an article we published in our Spring 2023 issue, “’Comprehensive Healthcare for America’: Using the Insights of Behavioral Economics to Transform the U. S. Healthcare System,” by Paul C. Sorum, Christopher Stein, and Dale L. Moore. This commentary should have appeared alongside that article. We apologize to the authors and our readers for the error.

Bruineberg and colleagues report a striking confusion, in which the formal Bayesian notion of a “Markov blanket” has been frequently misunderstood and misapplied to phenomena of mind and life. I argue that misappropriation of formal concepts is pervasive in the “predictive processing” literature, and echo Richard Feynman in suggesting how we might resist the allure of cargo cult computationalism.

This article discusses an interdisciplinary and community-engaged public health law course that was developed as part of The Future of Public Health Law Education faculty fellowship program. Law and public health students worked collaboratively to assist a local health department in preparing for the law-related aspects of Public Health Accreditation Board review.

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed a revival of interest in relativism. Proponents have defended various accounts that seek to model the truth-conditions of certain propositions along the lines of standard possible world semantics. The central challenge for such views has been to explain what advantage they have over contextualist theories with regard to the possibility of disagreement. I will press this worry against Max Kölbel’s account of faultless disagreement. My case will proceed along two distinct but connected lines. First, I (...) will argue that the sense of faultlessness made possible by his relativism conflicts with our intuitive understanding of disagreement. And second, that his meta-epistemological commitments are at odds with the socio-epistemic function of disagreement. This latter problem for relativistic accounts of truth has thus far been largely ignored in the literature. (shrink)