Much clinical and ethnographic evidence suggests that humans, like many other organisms, are selected to avoid close inbreeding because of the fitness costs of inbreeding depression. The proximate mechanism of human inbreeding avoidance seems to be precultural, and to involve the interaction of genetic predispositions and environmental conditions. As first suggested by E. Westermarck, and supported by evidence from Israeli kibbutzim, Chinese sim-pua marriage, and much convergent ethnographic and clinical evidence, humans negatively imprint on intimate associates during a critical period (...) of early childhood.There is also much evidence that, like other social animals, humans do not seek to maximize outbreeding, but rather to maintain an optimal balance between outbreeding and inbreeding.Closeinbreeding reduces fitness through inbreeding depression, butsomeinbreeding brings the benefits of nepotism. For simple, stateless, horticultural societies, the optimal balance seems to be achieved by a combination of precultural inbreeding avoidance of relatives with anr≤·25 and cultural rules of preferential marriage with kin withr≥·25. Adjustment of the coefficient of inbreeding to other ecological settings seems to be largely cultural. An interactive model of “culture in nature” is presented, in which culture is seen as coevolving with genes to produce the maxiniization of individual inclusive fitness. (shrink)

This paper re-addresses Quine's indeterminacy of translation/inscrutability of reference thesis, as a problem for cognitive theories of content. In contradistinction with Quine's behavioristic semantics, theories of meaning, or content, in the cognitivist tradition endorse intentional realism, and are prone to be unsympathetic to Quine's thesis. Yet, despite this fundamental difference, I argue that they are just as vulnerable to the indeterminacy. I then argue that the vulnerability is rooted in a theoretical commitment tacitly shared with Quine, namely, the commitment to (...) the view that the perceptual input to the cognitive system is extensional - differentiating objects, but not the aspects (or, properties) they manifest. Thus, input extensionalism, and not behaviorism, is what forces the indeterminacy. I conclude by suggesting that the solution to Quine's indeterminacy problem hinges on the elaboration of an intensional theory of perceptual input, and of content in general. (shrink)

The inductive category formation framework, an influential set of theories of learning in psychology and artificial intelligence, is deeply flawed. In this framework a set of necessary and sufficient features is taken to define a category. Such definitions are not functionally justified, are not used by people, and are not inducible by a learning system. Inductive theories depend on having access to all and only relevant features, which is not only impossible but begs a key question in learning. The crucial (...) roles of other cognitive processes (such as explanation and credit assignment) are ignored or oversimplified. Learning necessarily involves pragmatic considerations that can only be handled by complex cognitive processes.We provide an alternative framework for learning according to which category definitions must be based on category function. The learning system invokes other cognitive processes to accomplish difficult tasks, makes inferences, analyses and decides among potential features, and specifies how and when categories are to be generated and modified. We also examine the methodological underpinnings of the two approaches and compare their motivations. (shrink)

Abstract In the first part of this essay (Russell, 1988a) I argued that ?cognisance? (roughly: a subject's knowledge of his relation to the physical world as an experiencer of it) cannot be explained in terms of a syntactic theory of mind, due to the ?referential? and ?holistic? nature of this knowledge. The syntactic account of the higher mental functions is immediately intelligible to us due to its derivation from computer technology, so this would not appear to be a happy result (...) for scientific psychology. In this paper I outline a strategy for developing a scientific psychology of cognisance, beginning from the assumption that such a theory should have a similar status to Chomsky's competence theory of human grammar, whilst diverging from Chomsky on the question of how such a theory should be answerable to data. Most of the paper is taken up with illustrating the way in which Jean Piaget's theory of mental development in humans is at least a first approximation to such a theory. (shrink)

The commentaries reflect three core themes that pertain not just to our theory, but to the enterprise of connectionist modeling more generally. The first concerns the relationship between a cognitive theory and an implemented computer model. Specifically, how does one determine, when a model departs from the theory it exemplifies, whether the departure is a useful simplification or a critical flaw? We argue that the answer to this question depends partially upon the model's intended function, and we suggest that connectionist (...) models have important functions beyond the commonly accepted goals of fitting data and making predictions. The second theme concerns perceived in-principle limitations of the connectionist approach to cognition, and the specific concerns these perceived limitations raise for our theory. We argue that the approach is not in fact limited in the ways our critics suggest. One common misconception, that connectionist models cannot address abstract or relational structure, is corrected through new simulations showing directly that such structure can be captured. The third theme concerns the relationship between parallel distributed processing (PDP) models and structured probabilistic approaches. In this case we argue that there the difference between the approaches is not merely one of levels. Our PDP approach differs from structured statistical approaches at all of Marr's levels, including the characterization of the goals of cognitive computations, and of the representations and algorithms used. (shrink)

Current psychological research on causal inference is dominated by two basic approaches: the covariation approach and the mechanism approach. This article reviews these two approaches, evaluates the contributions and limitations of each approach, and suggests how these approaches might be integrated into a more comprehensive framework. Covariation theorists assume that cognizers infer causal relations from conditional probabilities computed over samples of multiple events, but they do not provide an adequate account of how cognizers constrain their search for candidate causes and (...) relevant evidence. Mechanism theorists assume that cognizers use their knowledge of potential mechanisms to infer the causes of individual events, but they do not account for the origins of this kind of knowledge. Theorists might integrate these approaches into a framework that overcomes these limitations by (1) examining important relations between cognizers' beliefs about the nature of causality, the logic of causal inference, and the processes cognizers use to make causal inferences, and (2) providing a more complete account of cognizers' conceptions of causality and the origins of those conceptions. (shrink)

The paper examines constraints and preferences employed by people in learning decision rules from preclassified examples. Results from four experiments with human subjects were analyzed and compared with artificial intelligence (AI) inductive learning programs. The results showed the people's rule inductions tended to emphasize category validity (probability of some property, given a category) more than cue validity (probability that an entity is a member of a category given that it has some property) to a greater extent than did the AI (...) programs. Although the relative proportions of different rule types (e.g., conjunctive vs. disjunctive) changed across experiments, a single process model provided a good account of the data from each study. These observations are used to argue for describing constraints in terms of processes embodied in models rather than in terms of products or outputs. Thus AI induction programs become candidate psychological process models and results from inductive learning experiments can suggest new algorithms. More generally, the results show that human inductive generalizations tend toward greater specificity than would be expected if conceptual simplicity were the key constraint on inductions. This bias toward specificity may be due to the fact that this criterion both maximizes inferences that may be drawn from category membership and protects rule induction systems from developing over‐generalizations. (shrink)

The study of human intelligence was once dominated by symbolic approaches, but over the last 30 years an alternative approach has arisen. Symbols and processes that operate on them are often seen today as approximate characterizations of the emergent consequences of sub- or nonsymbolic processes, and a wide range of constructs in cognitive science can be understood as emergents. These include representational constructs (units, structures, rules), architectural constructs (central executive, declarative memory), and developmental processes and outcomes (stages, sensitive periods, neurocognitive (...) modules, developmental disorders). The greatest achievements of human cognition may be largely emergent phenomena. It remains a challenge for the future to learn more about how these greatest achievements arise and to emulate them in artificial systems. (shrink)

The notion of domain specificity plays a central role in some of the most important debates in cognitive science. Yet, despite the widespread reliance on domain specificity in recent theorizing in cognitive science, this notion remains elusive. Critics have claimed that the notion of domain specificity can't bear the theoretical weight that has been put on it and that it should be abandoned. Even its most steadfast proponents have highlighted puzzles and tensions that arise once one tries to go beyond (...) an initial intuitive sketch of what domain specificity involves. In this paper, we address these concerns head on by developing an account of what it means for a cognitive mechanism to be domain specific that overcomes the obstacles that have made domain specificity seem so problematic. We then apply this understanding of domain specificity to one of the key debates that it has figured prominently in—the rationalism-empiricism debate concerning the origins of cognitive traits—and introduce several related theoretical notions that work alongside domain specificity in helping to clarify what makes a view more (or less) rationalist. This example illustrates how the notion of domain specificity can, and should, continue to play a central role in ongoing debates in cognitive science. (shrink)

The purposes of this paper are twofold: first, I wish to correct a systematic bias in Husserlian transcendental phenomenology. This bias is in favor of intuition of essences of meaning and against the intuition of essences of sensation. This bias is explained as a product of Husserl's mind-body dualism. Second, I suggest the possibility of a neurophenomenology from a biogenetic structural point of view. This neurophenomenology merges the knowledge of essences derived from mature contemplation with knowledge of the structures of (...) experience derived from neuroanthropology. After addressing these two issues I proceed to describe the sensorium from a neurophenomenological perspective, and the constituent element of perception, the dot. I hypothesize fat experience arises in the dialogue between prefrontal cortical processes and sensorial processes, that experience is constituted within a field of sensorial dots that arise and dissolve in temporal frames. I conclude that Husserl's view of the phenomenology of time is essentially correct and is both in keeping with findings from current neurophysiology, and amenable to a modem scientific view of consciousness and to many of the religious traditions encountered by ethnographers. The implications of a neurophenomenology for the anthropological study of consciousness are suggested. (shrink)