Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were (...) at work. In this paper. we show how this argument by analogy is flowed with respect to the case of second-order mental states. As a test case, we focus on the question of how other species conceive of visual attention, and in particular whether chimpanzees interpret seeing as a mentalistic event involving internal states of perception, attention, and belief. We conclude that chimpanzees do not reason about seeing in this manner, and indeed, there is considerable reason to suppose that they do not harbor representations of mental states in general. We propose a reinterpretation model in which the majority of the rich social behaviors that humans and other primates share in common emerged long before the human lineage evolved the psychological means of interpreting those behaviors in mentalistic terms. Although humans, chimpanzees, and most other species may be said to possess mental states, humans alone may have evolved a cognitive specialization for reasoning about such states. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Investigating Extended Embodiment Using a Computational Model and Human Experimentation” by Yuki Sato, Hiroyuki Iizuka & Takashi Ikegami. Upshot: Sato and colleagues make use of an innovative method that combines robotics modeling and psychological experimentation to investigate how tool use affects our living and lived embodiment. I situate their approach in a general shift from robotics to human-computer interface studies in enactive cognitive science, and speculate about the necessary conditions for the bodily incorporation of (...) tools. (shrink)

In this reply to James H. Fetzer’s “Minds and Machines: Limits to Simulations of Thought and Action”, I argue that computationalism should not be the view that (human) cognition is computation, but that it should be the view that cognition (simpliciter) is computable. It follows that computationalism can be true even if (human) cognition is not the result of computations in the brain. I also argue that, if semiotic systems are systems that interpret signs, then both humans (...) and computers are semiotic systems. Finally, I suggest that minds can be considered as virtual machines implemented in certain semiotic systems, primarily the brain, but also AI computers. In doing so, I take issue with Fetzer’s arguments to the contrary. (shrink)

I will argue that the cognitive-linguistic enterprise should step up its efforts to embrace the social and pragmatic dimensions of language. This claim will be derived from a survey of the premises and promise of the cognitive-linguistic approach to the study of language and be defended in more detail on logical and empirical grounds. Key elements of a usage-based emergentist socio-cognitive approach known as Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (Schmid 2014, 2015) will be presented in order to demonstrate how social and pragmatic aspects (...) can be integrated and operationalized in a cognitive-linguistic framework. (shrink)

The square of opposition is a diagram related to a theory of oppositions that goes back to Aristotle. Both the diagram and the theory have been discussed throughout the history of logic. Initially, the diagram was employed to present the Aristotelian theory of quantification, but extensions and criticisms of this theory have resulted in various other diagrams. The strength of the theory is that it is at the same time fairly simple and quite rich. The theory of oppositions has recently (...) become a topic of intense interest due to the development of a general geometry of opposition (polygons and polyhedra) with many applications. A congress on the square with an interdisciplinary character has been organized on a regular basis (Montreux 2007, Corsica 2010, Beirut 2012, Vatican 2014, Rapa Nui 2016). The volume at hand is a sequel to two successful books: The Square of Opposition - A General Framework of Cognition, ed. by J.-Y. Béziau & G. Payette, as well as Around and beyond the Square of Opposition, ed. by J.-Y. Béziau & D. Jacquette, and, like those, a collection of selected peer-reviewed papers. The idea of this new volume is to maintain a good equilibrium between history, technical developments and applications. The volume is likely to attract a wide spectrum of readers, mathematicians, philosophers, linguists, psychologists and computer scientists, who may range from undergraduate students to advanced researchers. (shrink)

In order to investigate cognition fundamental assumptions must be made about what, in general terms, it is. In cognitive science it is usually assumed that cognition is computational and representational. There have been well known disputes over these assumptions, with rival claims that cognition is dynamical, situated and embodied. In this paper I emphasize the relations between cognition and control. I present a model of cognition that makes the claim that it is a form of (...) high-order control, and I argue that viewing cognition as high-order control could be a useful framework assumption for cognitive science. Cognition has many aspects and different concepts can emphasize different aspects of it. Computational and representational assumptions have been very productive, and dynamical and embodied assumptions have also been productive, though to a much lesser extent so far. Control, however, has received insufficient attention in cognition science. The model I propose is based on a point that few will dispute, namely that control of behavior is the ultimate function of cognition. Bringing this to the foreground can be productive by highlighting the ways in which cognition is structured in relation to this control function. If this perspective is valuable it will be because the control function has a highly structuring effect on cognition. As a result a control-based perspective will predict many features of cognition and yield a coherent, integrated picture. (shrink)

The study tests the hypothesis that conditional probability judgments can be influenced by causal links between the target event and the evidence even when the statistical relations among variables are held constant. Three experiments varied the causal structure relating three variables and found that (a) the target event was perceived as more probable when it was linked to evidence by a causal chain than when both variables shared a common cause; (b) predictive chains in which evidence is a cause of (...) the hypothesis gave rise to higher judgments than diagnostic chains in which evidence is an effect of the hypothesis; and (c) direct chains gave rise to higher judgments than indirect chains. A Bayesian learning model was applied to our data but failed to explain them. An explanation-based hypothesis stating that statistical information will affect judgments only to the extent that it changes beliefs about causal structure is consistent with the results. (shrink)

The article discusses the dispute between constructivists and realists, which is claimed to be losing its relevance. The author tries to show that the presuppositions of the dispute relate to the ancient culture, where the ideal objects first appeared and where the question of their relation to the real world was first raised. In the history of philosophy these relations were comprehended differently, and as a result two opposing views were developed - realism and constructivism. The author argues that in (...) order to get away from the ineffectiveness ofthe opposition between these views one needs to turn to the methodological analysis of the real cognitive activity. In the process of discussing how this turn could be possible the author introducesthe notions of ideal object, objectification, diagram, thereality of object ontology, the cycle of the development a new phenomenon along with two kinds of phenomena - the natural phenomena (in the sense ofthe first nature) and the social phenomena.In the final part of the article the author offers a conceptualization of the Internet as a hand-made and mental creation of man, on the one hand, and as a natural phenomenon on the other. It is argued that the Internet exists not only as a newly created «socio-technical body» of man. In the situation ofthe present crisis it also allows us to maintain and reproduce the social and political life. As a result, it is claimed that the reality of the Internet could be considered both constructive and existential.The author concludes that if we understand the processes of construction and of natural existence not merely as two oppositions associated with one phenomenon, but as two complementary aspects of real human activities, the dispute between constructivists and realists becomes meaningless in the cognitive as well as in the practical perspective. (shrink)

The doctrine of the “absence of the self” ( anātman ), which is the basis of the ontology of Buddhist schools of all possible orientations, in its application to practical activity implies the existence of such an organizing structure of cognition, which in its essence differs both from the orthodox systems of Indian thought ( āstika ) and from the correlationist ideas of modern transcendental epistemology. The research presents the abhidharma as a genre of Buddhist literature and a discipline (...) of Buddhist system of knowledge (Abhidharma) serves as a cognitive model producing such an image of the world from which the problem of “Self” ( ātman ) is eliminated. Such “elimination” does not mean the destruction of the “I” (ego, personality) at all, but proposes to consider it as an “assemblage”, a composition or autonomous wholeness composed of heterogeneous elements of different natures, each of which in turn is an “assemblage”, the relations between and within the individual “assemblages” being external relations. At the center of the research is the question: is it possible (or how is it possible) to have a strategy of cognition that would not assume as its basis the dichotomy “cognizing subject - cognizable world”, but would have as its goal the transcendence of phenomenal existence. It is argued that Abhidharma/abhidharma is a description of elements shaping the structure of which could be regarded just as such a cognitive strategy. The paper is based on the author’s experience of translating Asaṅga’s Abhidharmasamuccaya (4th century) and a large commentary on it, the Abhidharmasamuccayavyākhyā, attributed to Sthiramāti (6th century). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Drama in Aesthetic Education:An Invitation to Imagine the World as if It Could Be OtherwiseFlorence Samson (bio)Maxine Greene, philosopher-in-residence for the Lincoln Center Institute (LCI), suggests that through aesthetic education "new connections are made in experience: new patterns are formed, new vistas are opened. Persons see differently, resonate differently." As Rilke wrote in one of his poems, and as quoted by Greene, "they are enabled to pay heed (...) when a work of art tells them, 'You must change your life.'"1 Greene interprets Rilke's words to mean that "a work [of art], when fully perceived and carefully attended to, makes a demand upon beholders—a demand that they change, look with new eyes, hear with new ears, become something they have not been before."2 Greene believes that "the perceiving, the noticing [about which Rilke spoke] are enhanced," for in the process of "[o]pening ourselves as perceivers to the work, entering into it kinaesthetically, we free ourselves to grasp it in its vital fullness and complexity."3This life change, to which Rilke refers, occurs as we take into our own being the experiences of others and realize that not everyone sees the world as we do. As we look critically at ourselves and our complicity in situations that position people as "other," we are moved to imagine that the world could be otherwise.Curriculum, Change, and Aesthetic EducationAesthetic education, an inquiry-driven engagement with a work of art, can be a catalyst to bringing about change. The aesthetic education experience consists of a number of components. LCI agrees upon a repertoire of "works of art" deemed likely to fulfill the requirements of engagement and inquiry. These may include, but are not limited to, music, drama, and opera performances, and mask, photo, and art exhibits. For each work of art, the LCI [End Page 70] researchers and other staff prepare a resource binder, entitled Windows on the Work. The teacher educator has several meetings with the teaching artist assigned to that work to develop the questions that will power the inquiry process, determine the structure and activities of the pre- and sometimes post-performance classes, and guide the students in their engagement with the work of art.I have included an aesthetic education experience program each term in my graduate and undergraduate elementary and early childhood education courses. My course outlines describe this component and the related student assignments. For the fall 2004 course, I chose Ping Chong's Secret History: Journeys Abroad, Journeys Within.4 This drama documentary, written and directed by Ping Chong and Leyla Mordirzadeh in collaboration with Sara Zatz, was directly related to one of my course goals—teaching for equity and social justice. This involves providing teachers with opportunities to "engage in productive dialogues about both inequities and possibilities for social reconstruction in the communities within which they and their students are developing."5Ping Chong & Company was founded thirty years ago "to create innovative works of theatre and art that explore the intersection of race, history, culture, and technology in the modern world."6Ping Chong, Insider/Outsider, and His Approach to TheatreCanadian-born and New York-reared Chong—theatre director, choreographer, and video and installation artist—is "fascinated and disturbed by the position of the outsider, the person made to feel 'other' in a society" and "probe[s] the drama of those pushed from one culture to another."7 He has done extensive research on both immigrants and refugees and recognizes that there is a psychological difference in the trauma experienced by members of both groups in the transition from one culture to the other.Chong's unique "talk, reveal, and seek to understand" approach to theatre "moves us toward unification, toward diminishing the barriers between peoples, and thus toward embracing all that is good in civilization."8 His work is grounded in his experience of sharing a common ethnicity and language with his community in Chinatown and occupying the position of "other" as the only Chinese student in his high school. Because of his experience of being "other," Chong has "a real kind of empathy and connection" with his projects.9 He considers... (shrink)

This article explores universal normative bases that could help to shape a workable legal construct that would facilitate a global use of advance directives. Although I believe that advance directives are of universal character, my primary aim in approaching this issue is to remain realistic. I will make three claims. First, I will argue that the principles of autonomy, dignity and informed consent, embodied in the Oviedo Convention and the UNESCO Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, could arguably (...) be regarded as universal bases for the global use of advance directives. Second, I will demonstrate that, despite the apparent consensus of ethical authorities in support of their global use, it is unlikely, for the time being, that such consensus could lead to unqualified legal recognition of advance directives, because of different understandings of the nature of the international rules, meanings of autonomy and dignity which are context-specific and culture-specific, and existing imperfections that make advance directives either unworkable or hardly applicable in practice. The third claim suggests that the fact that the concept of the advance directive is not universally shared does not mean that it should not become so, but never as the only option in managing incompetent patients. A way to proceed is to prioritize work on developing higher standards in managing incompetent patients and on progressing towards the realization of universal human rights in the sphere of bioethics, by advocating a universal, legally binding international convention that would outlaw human rights violations in end-of-life decision-making. (shrink)

This article examines the primacy of real-world bodily experience for understanding the human mind. I defend the idea that the peculiarities of the living human brain and body, and the bodily experiences they sustain, are essential ingredients of human sense-making and conceptual systems. Conceptual systems are created, brought forth, understood and sustained, through very specific cognitive mechanisms ultimately grounded in bodily experience. They don't have a transcendental abstract logic independent of the species-specific bodily features. To defend this position, I focus (...) on a case study: the fundamental concept of time flow. Using tools of cognitive linguistics, I analyse the foundations of this concept, as it is manifested naturally in everyday language. I show that there is a precise conceptual metaphor whose inferential structure gives an account of a huge variety of linguistic expressions, semantic contents, and unconscious spontaneous gestures: Time Events Are Things In Space. I discuss various special cases of this conceptual metaphor. This mapping grounds its source domain in specific spatial bodily experiences and projects its inferential structure onto a target domain making inferences in that domain possible. This mechanism allows us to unconsciously, effortlessly, and precisely understand expressions such as ‘the year 2000 is approaching’ or ‘the days ahead of us’. The general form of the mapping seems to be universal. The analysis raises important issues which demand a deeper and richer understanding of cognition and the mind: a view that sees the mind as fully embodied. In order to avoid misunderstandings with a general notion of ‘embodiment’ which has become fashionable in contemporary cognitive science, I describe what I mean by ‘full embodiment’: an embodied-oriented approach that has an explicit commitment to all of cognition, not just to low-level aspects of cognition such as sensory-motor activity or locomotion . I take embodiment to be a living phenomenon in which the primacy of bodily grounded experience is inherently part of the very subject matter of the study of the mind. (shrink)

This article draws on the ecological model of teacher agency and elaborates on how teacher agency is achieved, its components and how it could be strengthened. This model highlights professional competence, structural and cultural context, and professional purpose as the main elements of achieving agency. In this paper, we specify some elements of the ecological model and elaborate on how three types of reflection could be used to strengthen conditions for achieving teacher agency. These include, first, procedures aimed (...) at articulating the theory of action, including effective strategies, rules and principles for practice; second, procedures of practical reflection, aimed at fostering the conceptualization of practice and the understanding of oneself as a teacher; and third, procedures of critical reflection, which help to address the inequalities and malpractices of education and society. The main importance of this paper is to extend the practical relevance of the ecological model for teacher learning settings. (shrink)

Dynamicism has provided cognitive science with important tools to understand some aspects of “how cognitive agents work” but the issue of “what makes something cognitive” has not been sufficiently addressed yet, and, we argue, the former will never be complete without the later. Behavioristic characterizations of cognitive properties are criticized in favor of an organizational approach focused on the internal dynamic relationships that constitute cognitive systems. A definition of cognition as adaptive-autonomy in the embodied and situated neurodynamic domain is (...) provided: the compensatory regulation of a web of stability dependencies between sensorimotor structures, is created and preserved during a historical/developmental process. We highlight the functional role of emotional embodiment: internal bioregulatory processes coupled to the formation and adaptive regulation of neurodynamic autonomy. Finally, we discuss a “minimally cognitive behavior program” in evolutionary simulation modelling suggesting that much is to be learned from a complementary “minimally cognitive organization program”. (shrink)

In this paper, the authors explore the question of whether cognitive enhancement via direct neurostimulation, such as through deep brain stimulation, could be reasonably characterized as a form of transformative experience. This question is inspired by a qualitative study being conducted with people at risk of developing dementia and in intimate relationships with people living with dementia (PLWD). They apply L.A. Paul’s work on transformative experience to the question of cognitive enhancement and explore potential limitations on the kind of (...) claims that can legitimately be made about individual well-being and flourishing, as well as limit the kind of empirical work—including the authors’ own—that can hope to enlighten ethical discourse. In this paper, the authors advance the following theses: (1) it is sometimes reasonable to characterize cognitive enhancement as a transformative experience; (2) the testimonies of people intimately acquainted with dementia may still be relevant to evaluating cognitive enhancement even though cognitive enhancement may be a transformative experience; and (3) qualitative studies may still be useful in the ethical analysis of cognitive enhancement, but special attention may need to be given to how these are conducted and what kind of insights can be drawn from them. (shrink)

Humans, like all organisms, have evolved to survive in specific environments, while some elect or are forced to live and work in extreme environments. Understanding cognition as it relates to environmental conditions, we use 4E cognition as a framework to explore creativity in extreme environments. Our paper examines space arts as a case study through the history, present practices, and future possible arts in the context of humans beyond the Kármán boundary of the Earth’s atmosphere. We develop a (...) proposed taxonomy of space arts, based on prior taxonomies, and provide specific exemplars of space art developed by artists in space or for use by astronauts in space. Using examples of space art since the birth of the space age, we discuss 1) how human survival in extreme environments requires investment in the space arts, driven by consideration of all biopsychosocial factors and 2) how new scientific and engineering discoveries could be consequences or examples of creative thinking driven by artists in the various types of space art. We conclude by discussing possible benefits of space art, future research applications, and advocate that all space actors, government or private, involve artists in all projects beyond the Kármán Boundary of the Earth’s atmosphere. (shrink)

Irvin Rock's hypothesis that certain stages of perceptual processing resemble problem solving in cognition is contrasted to some recent work in computer vision (Marr, Ullman) which tries to reduce intelligence in perception to computational organization. The focal example is subjective contours which Marr thought could be handled by computational modules without descending control, and which Rock thinks are the outcome of intelligent processing.

At least since the time of Aristotle, it has been widely accepted that “man is by nature a social animal”. We eat, sleep, talk, laugh, cry, love, fight and create in ways that integrally depend on others and the social norms that we collectively generate and maintain. Yet in spite of the widely accepted importance of human sociality in underlying our daily activities, its exact manifestation and function is consistently overlooked by many academic disciplines. Cognitive science, for example, regularly neglects (...) the manner in which social interactions and interactively generated norms canalise and constitute our cognitive processes. Without the inescapable ubiquity of dynamic social norms, any given agent simply could not cognise as a human. In this thesis, I aim to use a range of insights – from phenomenology, social psychology, neuroscience, cultural anthropology and gender studies – to clarify the role of sociality for human life. More specifically, the thesis can be broadly separated into three parts. I begin with a broad explanation of how human agents are fundamentally tied to worldly entities and other agents in a way that characterises their ontological existence. In chapters 3 and 4, I criticise two recent and much-discussed theories of social cognition – namely, we-mode cognition and participatory sense-making – for failing to make intelligible the social constitution of human existence. In the later chapters, I then propose foundations for a more satisfactory theory of social cognition, as well as explicating a view of human selfhood as ‘biosocial’, such that even the autonomy of biological bodies is socially codified from a human perspective. Taken together, the aforementioned chapters should contribute to calls for a new direction in social cognitive science, whilst also yielding novel insights into the nature of human selfhood. (shrink)

This article states that drugs could be used to produce, if not more intelligent individuals, at least individuals with better cognitive functioning. Cognitive functioning is something that we might strive to produce through education, including of course the more general health education of the community. Enhancements are good if and only if they make people better at doing some of the things they want to do including experiencing the world through all of the senses, assimilating and processing what is (...) experienced, remembering and understanding things better, becoming more competent, and experiencing more. Beneficial neural changes have been reported for such familiar technologies as reading, education, physical exercise, and diet. Smart drugs create irresistible competitive pressures such that once they are used everyone is forced to follow in order to keep up, and this is coercive and corrosive. (shrink)

A woman is listening to Sinatra before work. As she later describes it, ‘suddenly from nowhere I could hear my mother singing along to it … I was there again home again, hearing my mother … God knows why I should choose to remember that … then, to actually hear her and I had this image in my head … of being at home … with her singing away … like being transported back you know I got one of (...) those … like shivery feelings really suddenly’ (Anderson 2004, 9-10). An older couple, discussing their honeymoon forty years ago, each say that they can’t remember the show they saw, until through iterative, puzzled cross-cuing they finally get there – ‘Desert Song, that’s it’ (Harris et al 2011, 292). An elderly English veteran of a prisoner of war camp in Japan, finishing up morning tea with a young Japanese social scientist interested in reconciliation, suddenly calls out loudly - in Japanese - ‘stand to attention’. He stands to attention in front of her: like many of the men she interviews, he physically re-enacts fragments of that long-past world of the camp, bringing that absent past into this new present context with a visceral shock (Murakami 2001, 2012; Middleton & Brown 2005, 133-136). (shrink)

I will take it that general intelligence is intelligence of the kind that a typical human being—Fred, say—manifests in his role as a cognitive agent, that is, as an acquirer, receiver and circulator of knowledge in his cognitive economy. Framed in these terms, the word “general” underserves our ends. Hereafter our questions will bear upon the all-purpose intelligence of beings like Fred. Frederika appears as Fred’s AI-counterpart, not as a fully programmed and engineered being, but as a presently unrealized theoretical (...) construct. Our basic question is whether it is in principle possible to equip Frederika to do what Fred does as an all-purpose participant in his own cognitive economy. Can she achieve a sufficiency of relevant similarity to him to allow us to say that she herself can do what Fred can do, perhaps even better? One of the things that Fred can do—or at least could learn from experience to do—is discharge the duties of an Appeals Court judge. As set down in the ancient doctrine of lex non scripta, Fred must be able to detect, understand and correctly apply certain tacit and implicit rules of law which defy express propositional formulation and linguistic articulation. Fred has an even more widespread capacity for the epistemically tacit and implicit, clearly one of his most cost-saving kinds of intelligence. Indeed, most by far of what Fred will ever know he will know tacitly and implicitly. So we must ask: how tightly bound to the peculiarities of Fred’s cognitive enablement conditions is the character of the intelligence that he manifests? And how far down Fred’s causal make-up does intelligence actually go? (shrink)

Short-term or working memory provides temporary storage of information in the brain after an experience and is associated with conscious awareness. Neurons sensitive to the multiple stimulus attributes comprising an experience are distributed within many brain regions. Such distributed cell assemblies, activated by an event, are the most plausible system to represent the WM of that event. Studies with a variety of imaging technologies have implicated widespread brain regions in the mediation of WM for different categories of information. Each kind (...) of WM may thus be expected to involve many brain regions rather than a local, uniquely dedicated set of cells. Neurons in a distributed “cell assembly” may be self-selected by their temporally coherent activations. The process by which this fragmented representation of the recent past is reassembled to accomplish essentially automatic and reliable recognition of a recurrent event constitutes an important problem. One plausible mechanism to achieve the identification of past with previous events would require that the representational system mediating WM must coexist in spatial extent and somehow overlap in temporal activation with cell ensembles registering input from subsequent events. The detection of such a postulated mechanism required an experimental approach which would focus upon spatial patterns of coherent activation while information about different events was stored in WM and retrieved, rather than focusing upon the temporal sequences of activation in localized regions of interest. For this purpose, the familiar delayed matching from sample task was modified. A series of information-free flashes, or “noncontingent probes,” was presented before an initial series of visual information items, the Priming Sample, which were to be held in WM during a Delay Period. A second series of visual information items were then presented, the Matching Sample. The task required detection of any item in the second series which had beenabsentfrom the initial series. Thirty such trials with a particular category of visual information constituted a single task. Several DMS tasks with this standardized design, but with different categories of visual information, were presented within each test session. The information categories included letters of the alphabet, single digit numbers, or faces from a school yearbook. Event-related potentials , were computed from 21 standardized electrode placements, separately for information-free probes and for information items in each interval of the trials within a task. Because each electrode is particularly sensitive to coherent activation of neurons in the immediately underlying brain regions, topographic maps were constructed and interpolated across the surface of the scalp. The momentary fluctuations of the resulting voltage “landscapes” throughout the task were then subjected to quantitative analysis. Distinctive landscapes sometimes persisted for prolonged periods, implying sustained engagement of very large populations of neurons. “Difference landscapes” were constructed by subtraction of topographic maps evoked by noncontingent probes during the Delay Period from maps of probe ERPs before the presentation of the initial information in the Priming Sample. Such probe difference landscapes displayed recurrent high similarity to momentary landscapes elicited during subsequent presentation of the information items in the Matching Sample. It seemed as if the distributed cell assembly continuously engaged by mediation of WM of the diverse attributes of the initial stimuli was being dynamically compared to the ensembles engaged by registration of the subsequent stimuli. Spatial Principal Component Analysis was applied to the sequences of momentary voltage landscapes observed throughout trials of each task. This method sought a small number of spatial patterns with which these large sets of inhomogeneous spatial distributions of voltage could be reconstructed. This is the spatial analog of the reconstruction of local ERPs by temporal principal components, as often described previously. Five Spatial Principal Components were found which accounted for about 90% of the total variance of voltage across the surface of the scalp throughout every task. Theloadings,or distinguishing topographic features, of these SPCs, were highly similar during every cognitive task for every subject. However,factor scores,or relative average contribution to the overall voltage distributions, of the different SPCs varied substantially among subjects between the tasks and momentarily within successive intervals of each task. These five SPCs may reflect coherent activation of huge distributed ensembles of neurons which comprise independent but interacting functional brain subsystems. These subsystems may correspond to basic resources available to individuals for allocation to mediate conscious evaluation of information during cognitive activity, providing a filter to bind together fractionated representations of the past to evaluate the present. (shrink)

In this article an attempt is made to detect what could have been the dialectical reasons that impelled the Cār-vāka thinker Udbhatabhatta to revise and reformulate the classical materialistic concept of cognition. If indeed according to ancient Cārvākas cognition is an attribute entirely dependent on the physical body, for Udbhatabhatta cognition is an independent principle that, of course, needs the presence of a human body to manifest itself and for this very reason it is said to (...) be a peculiarity of the body. Therefore, Udbhatabhatta seems to de-scribe the cognizing faculty according to a double ontology: it is both a principle and a characteristic, both inde-pendent and dependent. Two philosophical contexts—Vaisesika and Nyāya schools—are here taken into account as possible anti-Cārvāka fault-finding points of view that spured Udbhatabhatta to reconsider the Cārvāka per-spective. Although we do not have so much textual material on this particular aspect of the ancient and medieval philosophical debate in India, it nonetheless can be supposed that Udbhatabhatta’s reformulation of the concept of cognition was a tentative response to the Vaisesika idea that cognition is not an attribute of the body, rather of the mind (which is here supposed to be eternal), and to the Naiyāyika perspective according to which cognition would be an attribute of an everlasting self. In the case of the Nyāya school, fortunately we have at our disposal the criticism put forward by Vātsyāyana against the materialistic conception of cognition during this time. By examining some Vātsyāyana’s objections, it will emerge that Udbhatabhatta’s idea of cognition really seems to have the aspect of a consistent answer to them, from a renewed materialistic point of view. (shrink)

This metatheoretical paper investigates mind wandering from the perspective of philosophy of mind. It has two central claims. The first is that, on a conceptual level, mind wandering can be fruitfully described as a specific form of mental autonomy loss. The second is that, given empirical constraints, most of what we call “conscious thought” is better analyzed as a subpersonal process that more often than not lacks crucial properties traditionally taken to be the hallmark of personal-level cognition - such (...) as mental agency, explicit, consciously experienced goal-directedness, or availability for veto control. I claim that for roughly two thirds of our conscious life-time we do not possess mental autonomy (M-autonomy) in this sense. Empirical data from research on mind wandering and nocturnal dreaming clearly show that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly an automatic, non-agentive process and that personal-level cognition is an exception rather than the rule. This raises an interesting new version of the mind-body problem: How is subpersonal cognition causally related to personal-level thought? More fine-grained phenomenological descriptions for what we called “conscious thought” in the past are needed, as well as a functional decomposition of umbrella terms like “mind wandering” into different target phenomena and a better understanding of the frequent dynamic transitions between spontaneous, task-unrelated thought and meta-awareness. In an attempt to lay some very first conceptual foundations for the now burgeoning field of research on mind wandering, the third section proposes two new criteria for individuating single episodes of mind-wandering, namely, the “self-representational blink” (SRB) and a sudden shift in the phenomenological “unit of identification” (UI). I close by specifying a list of potentially innovative research goals that could serve to establish a stronger connection between mind wandering research and philosophy of mind. (shrink)

This paper reports on a case study which aims to recreate the hearing voices symptom in schizophrenia. The case study was submitted for a co-curricular module at King’s College London by a first-year undergraduate Music student, Bethany James, and was created using the web application, Mahara. The core of the case study consists of a soundscape of both everyday and unusual sounds, in conjunction with an original musical composition. The paper describes the case study and discusses it using chaos narrative (...) as an analytical lens. The paper argues that the case study effectively evokes the hearing voices symptom, conveying a lucid sense of the experience to non-sufferers and thus potentially creating use value for clinicians and care workers. (shrink)

The present study aims to elucidate whether insight problem solving could be facilitated by the cognitive component of humour. The authors take interest in whether the logical mechanisms of humour can affect how fast insight problems are solved. To that end, the authors conducted two experiments where participants solved insight problems after watching visual humorous stimuli such as videos and slideshows. The first experiment demonstrated the overall impact of facilitation by humour on insight problem solving; however, it did not (...) show any difference in how particular logical mechanisms of humour affect the solution time of insight problems. The second experiment showed that the cognitive component of humour could selectively affect insight problems whose difficulty stems from different sources. These results suggest that the cognitive component of humour, when operationalised as logical mechanisms and schema switching, contributes to solving insight problems. (shrink)

The material in "TCU," as we've come to refer to this volume, began as a Master's Thesis that examined the manner in which knowledge of fairly complex, patterned material could be acquired without any conscious effort to learn it and with little to no awareness of what had been learned. It was dubbed implicit learning and, over a fifty-plus year span, became a vigorously researched area in the social sciences. TCU brings together several dozen scientists from a variety of (...) backgrounds and presents a broad (and deep) overview of how the exploration of the cognitive unconscious grew from that first study to a domain of research to which contributions have been made by sociologists, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, modelers, social and organizational psychologists, sport psychologists, primatologists, developmentalists, linguists, psychiatrists and psychotherapists, and measurement and assessment researchers. The core message seems fairly straightforward. Unconscious, implicit cognitive processes play a role in virtually everything interesting that human beings do. The implicit and explicit elements of cognition form a rich and complex interactive framework that make up who we are. The volume has contributions from over 30 distinguished authors from nine different countries and gives a balanced and thorough overview of where the field is today, a bit over a half-century since the first experiments were run. (shrink)

The “default system” of the brain has been described as a set of regions which are ‘activated’ during rest and ‘deactivated’ during cognitively effortful tasks. To investigate the reliability of task-related deactivations, we performed a meta-analysis across 12 fMRI studies. Our results replicate previous findings by implicating medial frontal and parietal brain regions as part of the “default system”.However, the cognitive correlates of these deactivations remain unclear. In light of the importance of social cognitive abilities for human beings and their (...) propensity to engage in such activities, we relate our results to findings from neuroimaging studies of social cognition. This demonstrates a remarkable overlap between the brain regions typically involved in social cognitive processes and the “default system”.We, henceforth, suggest that the physiological ‘baseline’ of the brain is intimately linked to a psychological ‘baseline’: human beings have a predisposition for social cognition as the default mode of cognizing which is implemented in the robust pattern of intrinsic brain activity known as the “default system”. (shrink)

In a recent book (Tye 2017), Michael Tye argues that we have reason to attribute phenomenal consciousness to functionally similar robots like commander Data of Star Trek. He relies on a kind of inference to the best explanation – ‘Newton’s Rule’, as he calls it. I will argue that Tye’s liberal view of consciousness attribution fails for two reasons. First, it leads into an inconsistency in consciousness attributions. Second, and even more importantly, it fails because ceteris is not paribus. The (...) big, categorical difference in history between Data-like robots on the one hand and human beings on the other hand defeats the ceteris paribus assumption, which can be seen by various considerations. So the inference rule cannot be applied. We should not attribute phenomenal consciousness to robots like Data. (shrink)

In a recent book, Michael Tye argues that we have reason to attribute phenomenal consciousness to functionally similar robots like commander Data of Star Trek. He relies on a kind of inference to the best explanation – ‘Newton’s Rule’, as he calls it. I will argue that Tye’s liberal view of consciousness attribution fails for two reasons. First, it leads into an inconsistency in consciousness attributions. Second, and even more importantly, it fails because ceteris is not paribus. The big, categorical (...) difference in history between Data-like robots on the one hand and human beings on the other hand defeats the ceteris paribus assumption, which can be seen by various considerations. So the inference rule cannot be applied. We should not attribute phenomenal consciousness to robots like Data. (shrink)

On Frankfurt's view of free will, in its simplest form, an agent is free just in case her second-order volitions -- those second-order desires she wishes to be effective -- are in accord with her first-order volitions -- those first-order desires that one actually acts upon. That is, an agent has free will just in case she has the desires she wants to have and they are the desires she acts upon. But now consider an agent who lacks free will (...) because her first-order volitions and second-order volitions conflict. Suppose also that, with enough therapy, she could alter her first-order volitions to be in accord with her second-order volitions. So it is true that she can alter her first-order volitions. Still, there is the question of what she should she do. A natural response that a real self theorist might make is that the agent should change her first-order volitions in order to reflect her second-order volitions. But this is not, in principle, the only option available to our agent. Instead of changing her first-order volitions to reflect her second-order volitions, she might also consider simply revising her second-order volitions to fit with her first-order volitions. In fact, since second-order volitions are arguably more reasons responsive, it could turn out for our agent that changing her second-order volitions is actually the most rational option to take. This applies to even the most recent developments of real self, hierarchical, reasons responsive, and even intention embedded accounts of free will. Indeed, there is empirical evidence that people change their conceptions of themselves quite readily in the face of cognitive dissonance of the kind faced by desire conflicts. But this way of attaining free will does not seem to comport with our conception of a free agent. Free will seems too easy to obtain if all that is required is that our second-order volitions are in accord with our first-order volitions, and I see no particularly principled way of arguing that we shouldn't consider changing our second-order volitions instead of changing our first-order volitions. Secondly, this conception of free will is also subject to other counter examples. A person, for instance, may not be able to respect hierarchies due to some personality trait or other, but she might also be the kind of person for whom even were this trait lacking, still would not want to respect hierarchies. Here we have case in which a person's first order volitions and second order volitions coincide, but we do not want to call her free either. Additional evidence that this cannot be the right conception of free will comes from ideas put forth in the literature on practical rationality: I can be in situations in which the only rational action for me to take is to change my desires (MacIntosh), but if we cannot make irrational decisions, and these are understood as decisions to act in ways that go against our current desires, then being in a situation in which I choose to change my current desires should not be possible, thereby challenging any conception of free will that requires the changing of desires, whether first-order or second-order. I conclude, then, that any compatibilist conception of free will of the kind mentioned will be ultimately unsatisfying. (shrink)

Boredom can motivate us to perform actions that are painful, imprudent, morally objectionable, or unwise in other respects. It can also give rise to forms of akrasia: we may be unwilling to do what we know we must, simply because we will find it boring; when we are racked with boredom—bored stiff, bored to tears—actions that might otherwise never occur to us to do can begin to appear attractive, and sometimes remain attractive against our better judgment. But boredom is also (...) relevant to another set of moral or ethical con- cerns. Alongside questions about what we may do out of boredom, and about whether such actions are morally justifiable, conducive to our well-being, or instrumentally rational, a person’s character can be revealed by how her dispositions of boredom express themselves. And just as our emotional dispositions can be not just criticized, but also improved, so we may think that our dispositions of boredom, too, may be both criticized and improved. From a virtue-theoretical approach to boredom that would encourage this shift of focus from the ethical significance of actions to include assessments of character and motive as well, three questions emerge. What kind of atti- tude is boredom, such that it can motivate (sometimes objectionable) forms of action, while also reflecting or disclosing something about the kind of character one has? What does it disclose or reveal about a person that she is bored by particular things, and not others, and to greater and lesser extents? And is there a virtue that could come to govern our dispositions of boredom, providing an ideal that one might aspire to? (shrink)

Although panpsychism has had a very long history, one that goes back to the very origin of western philosophy, its force has only recently been appreciated by analytic philosophers of mind. And even if many still reject the theory as utterly absurd, others have argued that it is the only genuine form of physicalism. This paper examines the case for panpsychism and argues that there are at least goodprima faciereasons for taking it seriously. In a second step, the paper discusses (...) the main difficulty the theory has to face, the ‘composition problem’. This is the problem of explaining how the primitive experiences that are supposed to exist at the ultimate level of reality could give rise to the unified experience of a human being. What assumptions as to the nature of experience generate the composition problem? Is mental composition impossible in principle or do we simply lack at present any understanding of phenomenal parts and wholes? (shrink)

The main claim of the famous paper “The Extended Mind”, written by Clark and Chalmers (CC), is that the mind could literally extend into the external world. Among the many opponents of this claim, Robert Rupert has raised two main objections against it. The first, depending on the acceptance or denial of the possible 4th feature the hypothesis of extended cognition (HEC) is either insignificant or implausible and the second, external cognitive states are so immensely different from internal (...) ones that they should be counted as distinct. In this paper, I will not only answer Rupert’s criticisms through system-respond and differences in R-properties, but I will, in the end, also respond to the criticisms on extended mind, which are based on the observation that it is not as groundbreaking as it first appeared to be, and claim that even if that is the case, it doesn’t posit a problem to its significance. (shrink)

We are all guided by thousands of norms, but how did our capacity for normative cognition evolve? I propose there is a deep but neglected link between normative cognition and practical skill. In modern humans, complex motor skills and craft skills, such as toolmaking, are guided by internally represented norms of correct performance. Moreover, it is plausible that core components of human normative cognition evolved as a solution to the distinctive problems of transmitting complex motor skills and (...) craft skills, especially skills related to toolmaking, through social learning. If this is correct, the expansion of the normative domain beyond technique to encompass more abstract norms of fairness, reciprocity, ritual and kinship involved the elaboration of a basic platform for the guidance of skilled action by technical norms. This article motivates and defends this “skill hypothesis” for the origin of normative cognition and sets out various ways in which it could be empirically tested. (shrink)

In our dealings with animals at least most of us see them as conscious beings. On the other hand the employment of human categories to animals seems to be problematic. Reflecting on the details of human beliefs, for example, casts serious doubt on whether the cat is able to believe anything at all. These theses try to reflect on methodological issues when investigating animal minds. Developing a theory of animal mentality seems to be a test case of the interdisciplinary research (...) programme in cognitive science. From the philosopher`s perspective the most pressing problem is how to talk about animal minds. Can we just employ the vocabulary of human psychology? If not, exploring animal minds contains the non-trivial task of introducing a terminology that allows to see the distinctness of animal minds and to see its connection to the human case. The treatment of some topic in cognitive science has to reach a reflective equilibrium between our intuitions, a phenomenological approach, philosophical conceptual analysis, various empirical approaches and model building. Reflective equilibrium means in this context that we have to reach a coherent model which incorporates as much of our intuitions concerning animal consciousness and integrates at the same time the findings of the different co-operating sciences. There can be various trade-offs in case of conflict between, say, philosophical definitions of mental terms as to be applied to animals, neurophysiology, our reflected intuitions and ethological model building based on a computational theory of animal minds. The paper gives an example of reflective equilibrium in discussing the case for awareness in vertebrates. It considers the role of evolutionary reasoning. The main focus lays on two examples of comparing our human notions with corresponding abilities in animals, and how an appropriate conceptual apparatus dealing with the abilities of animals could be introduced. (shrink)

Moving from a behavioral definition of intelligence, which describes it as the ability to adapt to the surrounding environment and deal effectively with new situations (Anastasi, 1986), this paper explains to what extent the performance obtained by ChatGPT in the linguistic domain can be considered as intelligent behavior and to what extent they cannot. It also explains in what sense the hypothesis of decoupling between cognitive and problem-solving abilities, proposed by Floridi (2017) and Floridi and Chiriatti (2020) should be interpreted. (...) The problem of symbolic grounding (Harnad, 1990) is then addressed to show the problematic relationship between ChatGPT and the natural environment, and thus the impossibility for it to understand the symbols it manipulates. To explain the reasons why ChatGPT does not succeed in this task, an investigation is carried out and a possible solution to the problem in the artificial domain is proposed by making a comparison with the natural ability of living beings to ground their own meanings from some basic cognitive-sensory aspects, which, it is explained, are directly related to the emergence of self-awareness in humans. Thus, the question is raised whether a possible and concrete solution to the Symbol Grounding Problem would involve in the artificial domain the development of cognitive abilities fully comparable to those of humans. Finally, I explain the difficulties that would have to be overcome before such a level could be reached, since human cognitive capacities are intimately linked to intersubjectivity and intercorporeality. (shrink)

Much contemporary social epistemology takes as its starting point individuals with sophisticated propositional attitudes and considers (i) how those individuals depend on each other to gain (or lose) knowledge through testimony, disagreement, and the like and (ii) if, in addition to individual knowers, it is possible for groups to have knowledge. In this paper I argue that social epistemology should be more attentive to the construction of knowers through social and cultural practices: socialization shapes our psychological and practical orientation so (...) that we perform local social practices fluently. Connecting practical orientation to an account of ideology, I argue that to ignore the ways in which cognition is socially shaped and filtered is to allow ideology to do its work unnoticed and unimpeded. Moreover, ideology critique cannot simply challenge belief, but must involve challenges to those practices through which we ourselves become the vehicles and embodiments of ideology.V. (shrink)

There is growing interest in machine ethics in the question of whether and under what circumstances an artificial intelligence would deserve moral consideration. This paper explores a particular type of moral status that the author terms psychological moral patiency, focusing on the epistemological question of what sort of evidence might lead us to reasonably conclude that a given artificial system qualified as having this status. The paper surveys five possible criteria that might be applied: intuitive judgments, assessments of intelligence, the (...) presence of desires and autonomous behavior, evidence of sentience, and behavioral equivalence. The author suggests that despite its limitations, the latter approach offers the best way forward, and defends a variant of that, termed the cognitive equivalence strategy. In short, this holds that an artificial system should be considered a psychological moral patient to the extent that it possesses cognitive mechanisms shared with other beings such as nonhuman animals whom we also consider to be psychological moral patients. -/- . (shrink)

Currently, there is an increasing number of older population groups, especially in developed countries. This demographic trend, however, may cause serious problems, such as an increase in aging diseases, one of which is dementia whose main symptom consists in the decline of cognitive functioning. Although there has been ongoing pharmacological research on this neurological disorder, it has not brought satisfying results as far as its treatment is concerned. Therefore, governments all over the world are trying to develop alternative, non-pharmacological strategies/activities, (...) which could help to prevent this cognitive decline while this aging population is still healthy in order to reduce future economic and social burden. One of the non-pharmacological approaches, which may enhance cognitive abilities and protect against the decline in healthy older population, seems to be the learning of a foreign language. The purpose of this mini-review is to discuss recent findings about the effect of foreign language learning on the enhancement of cognitive functions among healthy older individuals. The findings, divided into three research areas, show that the learning of a foreign language may generate a lot of benefits for older individuals, such as enhancement of cognitive functioning, their self-esteem, increased opportunities of socializing, or reduction of costs. However, as Ware et al. (2017) indicate, any intervention program on foreign language learning should be well thought of and tailored to the needs of older people in order to be effective and avoid accompanying factors, such as older people’s anxiety or low self-confidence. Nevertheless, more empirical studies should be done in this area. (shrink)

As scientific progress approaches the point where significant human enhancements could become reality, debates arise whether such technologies should be made available. This paper evaluates the widespread concern that human enhancements will inevitably accentuate existing inequality and analyzes whether prohibition is the optimal public policy to avoid this outcome. Beyond these empirical questions, this paper considers whether the inequality objection is a sound argument against the set of enhancements most threatening to equality, i.e., cognitive enhancements. In doing so, I (...) shall argue that cognitive enhancements can be embraced wholeheartedly, for three separate reasons. However, though the inequality objection does not sufficiently support the conclusion that cognitive enhancements should be prohibited, it raises several concerns for optimal policy design that shall be addressed here. (shrink)

Underdetermination arguments support the conclusion that no amount of empirical data can uniquely determine theory choice. The full content of a theory outreaches those elements of it (the observational elements) that can be shown to be true (or in agreement with actual observations).2 A number of strategies have been developed to minimize the threat such arguments pose to our aspirations to scientific knowledge. I want to focus on one such strategy: the invocation of additional criteria drawn from a pool of (...) cognitive or theoretical values, such as simplicity or generality, to bolster judgements about the worth of models, theories, and hypotheses. What is the status of such criteria? Larry Laudan, in Science and Values, argued that cognitive values could not be treated as self-validating, beyond justification, but are embedded in a three-way reticulational system containing theories, methods, and aims or values, which are involved in mutually supportive relationships (Laudan, 1984). My interest in this paper is not the purportedly self-validating nature of cognitive values, but their cognitive nature. Although Laudan rejects the idea that what he calls cognitive values are exempt from rational criticism and disagreement, he does seem to think that the reticulational system he identifies is independent of non-cognitive considerations. It is this cognitive/non-cognitive distinction that I wish to query in this paper. Let me begin by summarizing those of my own views about inquiry in which this worry about the distinction arises. (shrink)

The traditional philosophical questions around human freedom are to do with how to square freedom for human organisms with increasingly scientific understandings of the universe itself. At the beginning of Western philosophical consciousness, Plato, unlike later philosophers eligible of the label rationalist, maintained that there are obstacles to free and rational agency, owing in no small measure to pressures exerted by the human psyche from what later were referred to as biological drives and drives for social status. In subsequent eras, (...) these obstacles came under the heading of “weakness of will”—a conception shared widely in popular and traditional culture. Today the realities of addiction, social stresses, forces of habit, culture, social position, and group identity, together with psychological findings about cognitive biases, have come to dominate the landscape of empirically-based obstacles to agency. Can the image of the human being under the microscope of contemporary science, including cognitive and social science, be reconciled with the “manifest image” of human beings as sources of their individual behaviors (and held responsible accordingly), particularly if the scientific image is best construed in terms of governance by laws of nature? (The phrases manifest image and scientific image were coined by the twentieth-century American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, see Sellars 1962.) How is it possible to square the idea of laws of nature with the manifest image in which humans exercise free agency as they play their various parts in the drama that is life? Does the manifest image thus square better with a theistic image of the world, as both seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes and eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant seem to have thought, and by contrast the scientific image square better with atheism? A deterministic universe, such as was proposed during the Enlightenment, was early on thought to pose a threat to the idea of human freedom. (It does not pose the same threat to the idea of a sovereign creator, however, because the notion of a creator of the universe already puts the entity who qualifies for the office outside the regime of those laws, ahead of them both in time and in ontological status.) One traditional answer to the threat has been the notion of compatibilism— which simply asserts that freedom and determinism are not incompatible. The devil, of course, has been in the details of explaining how this can be so, and many schools of thought on the matter exist. It is worthwhile noting that there are enormously compelling reasons, from the quantum regime so well described by quantum theory, to reject determinism: the laws governing the universe are simply not fully deterministic. This, of course, vitiates the need to confront the threat as originally posed. However, the trouble, if one follows along this line of thought, is to make sense of the nature of freedom in a world governed partly by deterministic laws and partly by nondeterministic ones that admit of an element of chance. Is such a world itself any more compatible with the idea of human freedom? In this section we grapple with the question of human freedom, what it could mean, and whether it is best accepted in the context of a form of theism. We find that theism has no more resources for addressing these difficulties than atheism does. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mild Cognitive Impairment:Kinds, Ethics, and Market ForcesStephen Ticehurst (bio)KeywordsAlzheimer’s disease, dementia, human kinds, mild cognitive impairment, natural kindsIn their article, Graham and Ritchie (2006) robustly confront the term mild cognitive impairment (MCI). They contrast a "real" diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) with a potentially spurious human invention called MCI. They argue we should not push MCI and AD too close together, lest MCI catch too much of the reflected (...) reality it does not deserve. I agree with their purpose, but suspect their argument is not as clear cut as we might hope.Classification is fundamental to the human activity called science. It is reflected also in the way we allocate and refine words. Classification allows us to determine the usefulness of terms, to share meaning, and hopefully to predict. MCI is an attempt at classification in this manner.The first problem is the clarity of definition. Graham and Ritchie imply that others see MCI as a precursor to dementia. At times they fall prey to this belief themselves. But is this what MCI claims? This link to AD and its recursive coloring of MCI is central to their argument. It seems that many hope that MCI is a term for "at risk of dementia." This confusion hampers much of the debate. The current operationally defined nosological criteria specify MCI is not dementia. This means that MCI can not be dementia without changing the criteria for one or both. At present, the evidence does not support this. Those people with MCI who will go on to develop dementia cannot reliably be distinguished from those who have a defective memory for other reasons. In the meantime, the link between MCI and dementia of various types is a valid area for investigation. Graham and Ritchie should have more confidence that usefulness can be determined by science and that this will triumph in the end.Modern psychiatry is very keen to believe it is naturalistic. Everything can be measured and will soon be explained by physical laws. However, Graham and Ritchie point to the intrusion of human concepts and values that may be shaping the way we measure the natural world. They invoke the term human kind to differentiate this activity from natural kinds. Psychiatry has always struggled to connect its diagnoses to naturalistic ideas of pathology and etiology. It could be argued that psychiatric nosology has always been susceptible to the creations of humans. Another modern invention—early psychosis—has parallels with the MCI story. But as the Rorschach test shows, most of us continue to see shapes in what really [End Page 53] is only an inkblot. If the shape is something we really want to see, expect, or have been trained to look for, so much the better. A definable precursor state to dementia (or schizophrenia) would make us all happy, not just those insatiable shareholders. However, the earlier in the unfolding of degenerative dementia we go, the less reliable and valid are our clinical diagnoses.Graham and Ritchie say MCI is a human kind, unlike Alzheimer's disease, which is an essential natural kind. The authors argue that the purported relationship between MCI and AD feed back in a loop to give MCI a natural kind standing that it does not yet deserve. They examine the underlying social processes that support this firming of an as yet insubstantial concept. These include the desire for patients and their doctors to have hope and pharmaceutical companies to have markets and profits. They invoke a mythical authorized person who can determine a diagnosis as a newly formed kind after a common act of recognition. Using kind in this context appears to refer to a thing rather than a term. But it is the term that is being socially validated, not the thing. AD is a more socially validated term than MCI, but its relationship with reality remains humanly constructed.Does the invocation of kinds aid this argument? A kind is not really what it appears. A kind is a term to describe a concept that humans hold about the world. Therefore, dividing kinds into various types, such as natural, human, and practical, betrays the inevitable human... (shrink)

Cognitive Linguistics is an approach to language study based on three central premises: that the function of language is to convey meaning, that linguistic description must rely on constructs that are psychologically real, and that grammar emerges from usage. Over the last 40 years, this approach to studying language has made enormous strides in virtually every aspect of linguistic inquiry, achieving major insights as well as bringing about a conceptual unification of the language sciences. However, it has also faced problems, (...) which, I argue, must be addressed if the approach is to continue to flourish. Some of these are shared with generative linguistics, while some are peculiar to the cognitive approach. The former include excessive reliance on introspective evidence; paying only lip service to the Cognitive Commitment; too much focus on hypothesis formulation (and not enough on hypothesis testing); ignoring individual differences; and neglecting the social aspects of language. The latter include assuming that we can deduce mental representations from patterns of use and equating distribution with meaning. I conclude by sketching out how these pitfalls could be avoided. (shrink)

The idea that Jake could understand the Na'vi by driving his avatar for a few months is as absurd as thinking that Bill Gates could understand what it means to be poor if he chose to live below the poverty line for a few months. Selfridge and Quaritch show that it's possible to achieve cognitive empathy for the Na'vi without being an avatar driver. Their judgments about what the Na'vi are thinking don't differ much from those of Grace (...) and Jake. The cognitive empathy may influence actions to some degree. It may be part of the reason why Selfridge initially favors a less aggressive approach to relocating the Na'vi. Even as Jake is developing a deeper understanding of Omaticaya, he still makes reports to Quaritch that are used to plan an assault on “the people.”. (shrink)

Cognition is defined as the brain’s ability to acquire, process, store, and retrieve information. Pain has been described as an unpleasant sensory or emotional experience, and for experiencing pain consciously, cognitive processing becomes imperative. Moreover, evaluation of pain strongly depends on cognition as it requires learning and recall of previous experiences. There could be a possible close link between neural systems involved in cognition and pain processing, and studies have reported an association between pain and cognitive (...) impairment. In this narrative review, we explore the available evidence that has investigated cognitive changes associated with pain. We also examine the anatomical, biochemical, and molecular association of pain and neuro-cognition. Additionally, we focus on the cognitive impairment caused by analgesic medications. There is a need to improve our understanding of pathophysiology and cognitive impairment mechanisms associated with chronic pain and its treatment. This area provides a diverse opportunity for grounding future research, aiding institution of timely interventions to prevent chronic pain and associated cognitive decline, ultimately improving patient care. (shrink)