Barresi & Moore's “intentional schema” will not do the work of “theory of mind.” Their model will account neither for fundamental facts of social competence, such as the social attributions of the 10-month-old infant, nor the possibility that, though having a theory of mind, the chimpanzee's theory is “weaker” than the human's.

We suggest that innatism and constructivism may differ only in their time scale.

The present intractability of and near intractability of make self-control a difficult topic.

An individual has a theory of mind if he imputes mental states to himself and others. A system of inferences of this kind is properly viewed as a theory because such states are not directly observable, and the system can be used to make predictions about the behavior of others. As to the mental states the chimpanzee may infer, consider those inferred by our own species, for example, purpose or intention, as well as knowledge, belief, thinking, doubt, guessing, pretending, liking, (...) and so forth. To determine whether or not the chimpanzee infers states of this kind, we showed an adult chimpanzee a series of videotaped scenes of a human actor struggling with a variety of problems. Some problems were simple, involving inaccessible food as in the original Kohler problems; others were more complex, involving an actor unable to extricate himself from a locked cage, shivering because of a malfunctioning heater, or unable to play a phonograph because it was unplugged. With each videotape the chimpanzee was given several photographs, one a solution to the problem, such as a stick for the inaccessible bananas, a key for the locked up actor, a lit wick for the malfunctioning heater. The chimpanzee's consistent choice of the correct photographs can be understood by assuming that the animal recognized the videotape as representing a problem, understood the actor's purpose, and chose alternatives compatible with that purpose. (shrink)

In this witty and fascinating book, Premack examines arguments over whether humans are unique because we can talk.

Exposing the chimpanzee to language training appears to enhance the animal's ability to perform some kinds of tasks but not others. The abilities that are enhanced involve abstract judgment, as in analogical reasoning, matching proportions of physically unlike exemplars, and completing incomplete representations of action. The abilities that do not improve concern the location of items in space and the inferences one might make in attempting to obtain them. Representing items in space and making inferences about them could be done (...) with an imaginal code, but representing relations and judging the relations between them, as in analogies, requires a more abstract code. Language training cannot instill such an abstract code, but for species that have the code to start with, it may enhance the animal's ability to use it. (shrink)

We argue that the function of human culture is to clarify what people value. Consequently, nothing in cetacean behavior (or any other animal's behavior) comes remotely close to this aspect of human culture. This does not mean that the traditions observed in cetaceans are uninteresting, but rather, that we need to understand why they are so different from our own.

An understanding of cause--effect relationships is fundamental to the study of cognition. In this book, outstanding specialists from comparative psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, anthropology, and philosophy present the newest developments in the study of causal cognition and discuss their different perspectives. They reflect on the role and forms of causal knowledge, both in animal and human cognition, on the development of human causal cognition from infancy, and on the relationship between individual and cultural aspects of causal understanding. The result (...) is a state-of-the-art, informative, insightful, and interdisciplinary debate aimed at the non-specialist. (shrink)

We suggest that innatism and constructivism may differ only in their time scale.

Gavagai! or the Future History of the Animal Language Controversy By DAVID PREMACK.

Gavagai! or the Future History of the Animal Language Controversy. By DAVID PREMACK.

These essays by some of the most prominent figures in linguistics, artificial intelligence, and psychology explore the problems involved in creating a general cognitive science that will treat language, thought, and behavior in an integrated fashion. They address the fundamental questions of the relations between linguistic structures and cognitive processes, between cognitive processes and language behavior, and between language behavior and linguistic structure. Contents: Introduction, Thomas G. Bever (Columbia University), John M. Carroll and Lance A. Miller (IBM Thomas J. Watson (...) Research Center). "Philosophy and "Linguistics: An Outline of Platonist Grammar, Jerrold J. Katz (CUNY). Sense and Reference in a Psychologically Based Semantics, Ray Jackendoff (Brandeis University). Some Thoughts on the Boundaries and Components of Linguistics, Charles J. Fillmore (University of California, Berkeley). Psychology: Approaches to the Study of the Psychology of Language, Walter Kintsch (University of Colorado). Toward An Abstract Performance Grammar, Charles E. Osgood (University of Illinois). Upgrading a Mind, David Premack (University of Pennsylvania). Computational "Models: "Memory, Meaning, and Syntax, Roger Schank (Yale University) and Lawrence Birnbaum (Yale University). Some Inadequate Theories of Human Language Processing, Mitchell P. Marcus (AT&T Bell Laboratories). (shrink)

In their 1978 paper, psychologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff posed the question, “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” They treated this question as interchangeable with the inquiry, “Does a chimpanzee make inferences about another individual, in any degree or kind?” Here, we offer an alternative way of thinking about this issue, positing that while chimpanzees may not possess a theory of mind in the strict sense, we ought to think of them as enactive perceivers of (...) practical and social affordances. As such, we reframe the question: “Are chimpanzees socially enactive?”. (shrink)

David and Mary Norton present the definitive scholarly edition of Hume's Treatise, one of the greatest philosophical works ever written. This volume contains their account of how the Treatise was written and published; an explanation of how they established the text; an extensive set of annotations; and a detailed bibliography and index.

During the last twenty-five years or so there has been a remarkable growth in the interdisciplinary field bordering on cognitive psychology, linguistics, neurobiology, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind. The book under review makes a belated but significant contribution to the literature of cognitive science, since it provides the first detailed comparison of the views of two of the field's most influential figures, Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget. The text is based on a conference which was held in October (...) of 1975 at the Abbaye de Royaumont near Paris. Besides Chomsky and Piaget, the participants at the conference included such notables as Jacques Monod and Gregory Bateson, the philosophers Jerry Fodor and Stephen Toulmin, psychologists Norbert Bischof, David Premack and Bärbel Inhelder, as well as distinguished representatives from the fields of biology, anthropology, and artificial intelligence. The major focus of the discussion concerned the differences between Chomsky's and Piaget's views on the nature/nurture question in psychology. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn can be seen as challenging those committed to sui generis moral facts to explain the supervenience of the moral on the descriptive. We hold that normative facts in general are sui generis. We also hold that the normative supervenes on the descriptive, and we here endeavour to answer the generalization of Blackburn's challenge. In the course of pursuing this answer, we suggest that Frank Jackson's descriptivism rests on a conception of properties inappropriate to discussions of normativity, and we (...) see reason to reject descriptivism generally. We also discuss the views of David Brink, Jonathan Dancy and Bernard Williams in this area. (shrink)

While Hegel’s infamous “end of art” thesis states that art is “for us, a thing of the past” he insists that philosophy and, to a degree that is often underestimated by contemporary readers, religion endure within the structure of modern life. In this paper I aim to demonstrate how by focusing on Hegel’s claim that religion meets no end, we can come to a better understanding of how and why he thinks art does end. This will lead us away from (...) common, but false, picture of Hegel as being indifferent (or even hostile) to art’s sensuous mode of intelligibility. Inasmuch as religion remains both necessarily sensuous and a component of social life that realizes freedom and divinity within modernity, the “problem” with art cannot be its sensuousness per se. What art ultimately finds itself unable to do, and what religion can do, is find a way to reconcile the destabilizing force of individual, subjective freedom with a jointly-held representation of who and what we are and what we value most, what Hegel calls “divinity” (das Göttliche). By countenancing the vital role of religion in Hegel’s thought, we can therefore better understand one of his most famous, and least understood philosophical claims. (shrink)

Consciousness and Mind presents David Rosenthal's influential work on the nature of consciousness. Central to that work is Rosenthal's higher-order-thought theory of consciousness, according to which a sensation, thought, or other mental state is conscious if one has a higher-order thought that one is in that state. The first four essays develop various aspects of that theory. The next three essays present Rosenthal's homomorphism theory of mental qualities and qualitative consciousness, and show how that theory fits with and helps (...) sustain the HOT theory. A crucial feature of homomorphism theory is that it individuates and taxonomizes mental qualities independently of the way we're conscious of them, and indeed independently of our being conscious of them at all. So the theory accommodates the qualitative character not only of conscious sensations and perceptions, but also of those which fall outside our stream of consciousness. Rosenthal argues that, because this account of mental qualities makes no appeal to consciousness, it enables us to dispel such traditional quandaries as the alleged conceivability of undetectable quality inversion, and to disarm various apparent obstacles to explaining qualitative consciousness and understanding its nature. Six further essays build on the HOT theory to explain various important features of consciousness, among them the complex connections that hold in humans between consciousness and speech, the self-interpretative aspect of consciousness, and the compelling sense we have that consciousness is unified. Two of the essays, one an extended treatment of homomorphism theory, appear here for the first time. There is also a substantive introduction, which draws out the connections between the essays and highlights their implications. (shrink)

[Open access] In this book symposium the author takes up questions from phenomenology, hermeneutics, ethical theory, and intellectual history raised by a group of scholarly interlocutors from a range of backgrounds. In the course of engaging with these issues, he discusses, inter alia, McDowell’s realism, Jonathon Lear’s work on the end of a world, Michael Oakeshott’s view of selfhood, Heidegger’s conception of Jemeinigkeit, Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, and Gadamer’s hermeneutic conception of truth.

Criticized as a nostalgic anachronism by those who oppose her version of political theory and lauded as symbol of direct democratic participation by those who favor it, the Athenian polis features prominently in Hannah Arendt's account of politics. This essay traces the origin and development of Arendt's conception of the polis as a space of appearance from the early 1950s onward. It makes particular use of the Denktagebuch, Arendt's intellectual diary, in order to shed new light on the historicity of (...) one of her central concepts. The article contends that both critics and partisans of Arendt's use of the polis have made the same mistake: they have presumed that the polis represents a space of face-to-face immediacy. In fact, Arendt compared the polis to a series of analogues, many of which are not centered on direct exchanges between political actors and spectators. As a result, Arendt's early work on the polis turns out to anticipate many of the concerns of her later work on judgment, and her theory of the polis becomes a theory of topics. (shrink)