This commentary analyzes the target article to determine whether shared-intention development could be implemented and tested in robotic systems. The analysis indicates that such an implementation should be feasible and will likely rely on a construction-based approach similar to that employed in the construction grammar framework.

An action-oriented perspective changes the role of an individual from a passive observer to an actively engaged agent interacting in a closed loop with the world as well as with others. Cognition exists to serve action within a landscape that contains both. This chapter surveys this landscape and addresses the status of the pragmatic turn. Its potential influence on science and the study of cognition are considered (including perception, social cognition, social interaction, sensorimotor entrainment, and language acquisition) and its impact (...) on how neuroscience is studied is also investigated (with the notion that brains do not passively build models, but instead support the guidance of action). A review of its implications in robotics and engineering includes a discussion of the application of enactive control principles to couple action and perception in robotics as well as the conceptualization of system design in a more holistic, less modular manner. Practical applications that can impact the human condition are reviewed (e.g., educational applications, treatment possibilities for developmental and psychopathological disorders, the development of neural prostheses). All of this foreshadows the potential societal implications of the pragmatic turn. The chapter concludes that an action-oriented approach emphasizes a continuum of interaction between technical aspects of cognitive systems and robotics, biology, psychology, the social sciences, and the humanities, where the individual is part of a grounded cultural system. (shrink)

Neural organization achieves its stated goal to “show how theory and experiment can supplement each other in an integrated, evolving account of structure, function, and dynamics” (p. ix), showing in a variety of contexts – from olfactory processing to spatial navigation, motor learning and more – how function may be realized in the neural tissue, with explanatory and predictive neural network models providing a cornerstone in this approach.

Phrasal semantics is concerned with how the meaning of a sentence is composed both from the meaning of the constituent words, and from extra meaning contained within the structural organization of the sentence itself. In this context, grammatical constructions correspond to form-meaning mappings that essentially capture this “extra” meaning and allow its representation. The current research examines how a computational model of language processing based on a construction grammar approach can account for aspects of descriptive, referential and information content of (...) phrasal semantics. (shrink)

In Carruthers’ formulation, cross-domain thinking requires translation of domain specific data into a common format, and linguistic LF thus plays the role of the common medium of exchange. Alternatively, I propose a process-oriented characterization, in which there is no common representation and cross-domain thinking is rather the process of establishing mappings across domains, as in the process of analogical reasoning.

Flexible categorization clearly requires an adaptive component, but at what level of representation? We have investigated categorization in sequence learning that requires the extraction of abstract rules, but no modification of sensory primitives. This motivates the need to make explicit the distinction between sensory-level “atomic” features as opposed to concept-level “abstract” features, and the proposal that flexible categorization probably relies on learning at the abstract feature level.

Deictic pointers allow the nervous system to exploit information in a frame that is centered on the object of interest. This processing may take place in visual or haptic space, but the information processing advantages of deictic pointing can also be applied in abstract spaces, providing the basis for analogical transfer. Simulation and behavioral results illustrating this progression from embodiment to abstraction are discussed.

Grodzinsky's characterization of the syntactic function of Broca's area is convincing, but his argument that this transformation processing capability is specific to language is less so. Based on predictions from simulation studies of sequence learning, we report a correlation between agrammatic patients' impairments in (a) syntactic comprehension, and (b) nonlinguistic sequence transformation processing, indicating the existence of a nonlinguistic correlate of agrammatic aphasia.

In the context of Hurford's claim that “some feature of language structure maps onto a feature of primitive mental representations,” I will argue that Hurford's focus on 1-place predicates as the basis of the “mental representations of situations in the world” is problematic, particularly with respect to spatiotemporal events. A solution is proposed.

Analogical transfer in sequence learning is presented as an example of how the type-2 problem of learning an unbounded number of isomorphic sequences is reduced to the type-1 problem of learning a small finite set of sequences. The commentary illustrates how the difficult problem of appropriate analogical filter creation and selection is addressed while avoiding the trap of strong nativism, and it provides theoretical and experimental evidence for the existence of dissociable mechanisms for type-1 learning and type-2 recoding.

Pickering & Garrod (P&G) describe a mechanism by which the situation models of dialog participants become progressively aligned via priming at different levels. This commentary attempts to characterize how alignment and routinization can be extended into the language acquisition domain by establishing links between alignment and joint attention, and between routinization and grammatical construction learning.

In arguing for a rules-similarity continuum, Pothos should demonstrate that a single process or mechanism (a neural network model, for example) can handle the entire continuum. Pothos deliberately avoids this exercise as beyond the scope of the current research. In this context, I will present simulation, neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and experimental psychological results, arguing against the continuity hypothesis.

Essays that put noted political thinkers of the past—including Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Wollstonecraft, Marx, and Confucius—in dialogue with current environmental political theory. Contemporary environmental political theory considers the implications of the environmental crisis for such political concepts as rights, citizenship, justice, democracy, the state, race, class, and gender. As the field has matured, scholars have begun to explore connections between Green Theory and such canonical political thinkers as Plato, Machiavelli, Locke, and Marx. The essays in this volume put important figures (...) from the political theory canon in dialogue with current environmental political theory. It is the first comprehensive volume to bring the insights of Green Theory to bear in reinterpreting these canonical theorists. Individual essays cover such classical figures in Western thought as Aristotle, Hume, Rousseau, Mill, and Burke, but they also depart from the traditional canon to consider Mary Wollstonecraft, W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and Confucius. Engaging and accessible, the essays also offer original and innovative interpretations that often challenge standard readings of these thinkers. In examining and explicating how these great thinkers of the past viewed the natural world and our relationship with nature, the essays also illuminate our current environmental predicament. Essays on Plato • Aristotle • Niccolò Machiavelli • Thomas Hobbes • John Locke • David Hume • Jean-Jacques Rousseau • Edmund Burke • Mary Wollstonecraft • John Stuart Mill • Karl Marx • W. E. B. Du Bois • Martin Heidegger • Hannah Arendt • Confucius Contributors Sheryl D. Breen, W. Scott Cameron, Peter F. Cannavò, Joel Jay Kassiola, Joseph H. Lane Jr. Timothy W. Luke, John M. Meyer, Özgüç Orhan, Barbara K. Seeber, Francisco Seijo, Kimberly K. Smith, Piers H. G. Stephens, Zev Trachtenberg, Andrew Valls, Harlan Wilson. (shrink)

The species-specific organizational property of speech is a continual mouth open-close alternation, the two phases of which are subject to continual articulatory modulation. The cycle constitutes the syllable, and the open and closed phases are segments framescontent displays that are prominent in many nonhuman primates. The new role of Broca's area and its surround in human vocal communication may have derived from its evolutionary history as the main cortical center for the control of ingestive processes. The frame and content components (...) of speech may have subsequently evolved separate realizations within two general purpose primate motor control systems: (1) a motivation-related medial system, including anterior cingulate cortex and the supplementary motor area, for self-generated behavior, formerly responsible for ancestral vocalization control and now also responsible for frames, and (2) a lateral system, including Broca's area and surround, and Wernicke's area, specialized for response to external input (and therefore the emergent vocal learning capacity) and more responsible for content. (shrink)

Among the objections to the implementation of what I will call "genome editing in human reproduction" is that it does not address any unmet medical need, and therefore fails to meet an important criterion for introducing an unproven procedure with potentially adverse consequences. To be clear: what I mean by GEHR is the use of any one of a number of related biological techniques, such as the CRISPR-Cas9 system, deliberately to modify a functional sequence of DNA in a cell of (...) a human embryo, so that the modified sequence is replicated in the cells of a resulting child and may, without further intervention, be passed on to that child's biological descendants. It is... (shrink)

This article reexamines the classical distinction between professional and organizational work orientations for the case of engineers. Based on data from a survey questionnaire mailed to a sample of 800 engineers in the Rochester, New York, area in 1986, it argues that the two orientations are not opposites. Instead, it is possible to score high on measures of both orientations, or to score low on both. The result is a more complex, fourfold typology of engineers' work orientations. This fourfold typology (...) is then applied to the analysis of engineers' job satisfaction. The most important finding is that the content of engineers' work—that is, the level of challenge and the intrinsic interest of the work—is the central predictor of their satisfaction. The results thus support the conjecture that contemporary engineers have become highly focused—perhaps overly focused—on the gratifications derived from technical work as a process. (shrink)

Henry David Thoreau, though often characterised as individualist or apolitical, is in fact an important link between Jeffersonian agrarian republicanism and environmentalism. Like the Jeffersonians, Thoreau espouses a political economy of citizenship, criticises modern capitalism, and celebrates simplicity and personal independence. However, Thoreau rejects the Jeffersonians' focus on conquest of the wilderness and economic industriousness, both of which were meant to promote virtue. Thoreau advocates preservation of wild nature as essential for cultivating virtue and regards nature as a community deserving (...) respect and protection. He criticises an emphasis on economic industriousness as promoting overwork, environmental destruction and greed. Thoreau emerges as a complex figure whose legacy points in two contrasting directions: toward a more ecologically responsible or sustainable republicanism embracing preservation of a spectrum of landscapes from wilderness to agrarian, and also toward a problematic, depoliticising separation between human beings and nature. (shrink)

This paper examines how people in West Africa are reacting to the Ebola virus disease, an epidemic presently prevalent in the region. Certain lifestyle changes are suggested. Additionally, the heart of the paper focuses on the request by governments to be allowed access to experimental drugs, such as Zmapp and TKM-Ebola, for their infected populations. The author argues that granting such a request would circumvent research ethics procedures, which could potentially constitute significant risk to users of the drugs. The Pfizer (...) Kano meningitis trial of 1996 is cited as an example to buttress how unapproved drugs could prove fatal. (shrink)