The present study examined the two-stage developmental theory of the understanding of embarrassment (Modigliani & Blumenfeld, 1979) through the administration of verbal and non-verbal measures. Moreover, the relationship between children's attributions of embarrassment and their ability to understand false beliefs and propensity to be shy was investigated. Ninety-five children (4 to 9 years old) were presented with brief stories in which the main character received negative, neutral, or positive social reactions. Verbal and non-verbal attributions (...) of embarrassment were examined. In addition, a false-belief task and a shyness-propensity questionnaire were administered. Using verbal measures, older children reported more embarrassment in the negative and neutral conditions compared to younger children. However, using non-verbal measures, these age differences disappeared. This suggests that young children may have a “mature” understanding of embarrassment, but may not be able to express this linguistically. Verbal and non-verbal embarrassment attributions were not related to the understanding of false beliefs, but they were related to shyness propensity. The results are discussed in terms of socio-cognitive and emotional factors in understanding emotions. (shrink)

Experts often communicate probabilities verbally (e.g., unlikely) rather than numerically (e.g., 25% chance). Although criticism has focused on the vagueness of verbal probabilities, less attention has been given to the potential unintended, biasing effects of verbal probabilities in communicating probabilities to decision-makers. In four experiments (Ns = 201, 439, 435, 696), we showed that probability format (i.e., verbal vs. numeric) influenced participants’ inferences and decisions following a hypothetical financial expert’s forecast. We observed a format effect for low (...) probability forecasts: verbal probabilities were interpreted more pessimistically than numeric equivalents. We attributed the difference to directionality, a linguistic property that biases attention toward an outcome. In the high-probability conditions, the directionality of verbal and numeric probabilities aligned (both were positive), whereas they differed in the low-probability conditions (verbal probabilities were more negative). Participants inferred recommendations congruent with the communicated direction and these inferences mediated the effect of probability format on decisions. (shrink)

In two experiments, we investigated whether 13-month-old infants expect agents to behave in a way consistent with information to which they have been exposed. Infants watched animations in which an animal was either provided information or prevented from gathering information about the actual location of an object. The animal then searched successfully or failed to retrieve it. Infants’ looking times suggest that they expected searches to be effective when—and only when—the agent had had access to the relevant information. This result (...) supports the view that infants’ possess an incipient metarepresentational ability that permits them to attribute beliefs to agents. We discuss the viability of more conservative explanations and the relationship between this early ability and later forms of ‘theory of mind’ that appear only after children have become experienced verbal communicators. (shrink)

Speakers can express a critical, dissociative attitude by being ironic. According to the Echoic account of verbal irony, this attitude targets a proposition that echoes a thought attributed to someone other than the speaker herself at the present time. This study investigated the role of echo in irony processing across the lifespan. Through a self-paced reading task, we assessed whether the degree of explicitness of the proposition echoed by the ironical statement and the age of the participant influenced irony (...) processing. Our results show that, independently of age, ironic statements were costlier to process than literal statements, with aging further increasing difficulty. Crucially, our manipulation of the echo affected reading times: it was more complex to process irony when this echoed an implicature or an implicit expectation, particularly for older adults. This work corroborates the role of the echo in verbal irony providing insights into age-related changes in irony processing. (shrink)

Someone is “verballed” in the Anglo-Australian idiom if they have attributed to them statements they did not actually make and indeed have explicitly denied. We will examine the evidence that Kuhn and Feyerabend were verballed in this sense by their critics and that the role of the idea of incommensurability in their argumentation has been systematically misunderstood and -represented. In particular, we will see that neither Kuhn nor Feyerabend, despite what their critics often say about them, held that incommensurability of (...) theories implies the rational incomparability of theories. This is especially clear in the case of Feyerabend, whose argument is NOT that theories in a scientific tradition are on occasion incommensurable, but, rather, that, when the relations of theories in a tradition are represented in a particular way, they may on occasion be incommensurable according to that representation and hence incomparable if that representation is taken as providing the mechanisms of comparison. And the point of this claim is not to establish something about science, but, rather, to establish something about the representations of science which yield this result (i.e. that two theories might be incommensurable). Feyerabend in other words invokes incommensurability (according to the standards of a particular representation) as a reductio of that mode of representation. And this argument in fact depends precisely on the comparability of theories which are, according to the representation, incommensurable. Feyerabend’s argument is about the ways in which we should understand progress in science and he is concerned, in particular, to establish that a historically informed approach is superior to an approach which, if applicable, is applicable only to what he calls “abstract traditions”. Kuhn’s work, especially in the Postscript—1969, provides complementary materials, especially in relation to a collectivised and non-“algorithmic” account of theory choice across formally incommensurable paradigms. (shrink)

This article argues that many, if not most, behavior descriptions and sequencing are in essence an interpretation of signs, and are evaluated as sequences of signs by researchers. Thus, narrative analysis, as developed by Barthes and others, seems best suited to be used in behavioral/biosemiotic studies rather than mathematical modeling, and is very similar to some classic ethology methods. As our brain interprets behaviors as signs and attributes meaning to them, narrative analysis seems more suitable than mathematical modeling to describe (...) and study behavior. Mathematical models are, on many occasions, extremely reductionist and simplifying because of computational and/or numerical representation limitations that lead to errors and straitjacketing interpretations of reality. Since actual animals are not as optimal in real life as our mathematical models, here it is proposed that we should consider logical/verbal models and semantic interpretations as equally or even better suited for behavioral analysis, and refrain from enforcing mathematical modeling as the only way to study and understand biological problems, especially those of a behavioral and biosemiotic nature. (shrink)

128 female Ss were asked to make 4 judgments about a young woman after reading her "job application portfolio." Five characteristics of the young woman were manipulated orthogonally. Ss were asked to report how each of the 5 manipulated factors had influenced each of their judgments. "Observer Ss," who had access only to very impoverished descriptions of each of the 5 factors, were asked to predict how each of the factors would influence each of the judgments. Results show that S (...) reports about the effects of the factors on the judgments were in general highly inaccurate; observer predictions were extremely similar to S reports; for the single judgment for which Ss showed substantial accuracy, observer predictions were as accurate as S reports. Results indicate that whatever introspective access to cognitive processes may exist, it is not sufficient to produce generally accurate reports about such processes, nor even to produce reports that differ much from those of poorly informed outside observers. (shrink)

One of the leading cognitive models of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) proposes such experiences result from a disturbance in the process by which inner speech is attributed to the self. Research in this area has, however, proceeded in the absence of thorough cognitive and phenomenological investigations of the nature of inner speech, against which AVHs are implicitly or explicitly defined. In this paper we begin by introducing philosophical phenomenology and highlighting its relevance to AVHs, before briefly examining the evolving (...) literature on the relation between inner experiences and AVHs. We then argue for the need for philosophical phenomenology (Phenomenology) and the traditional empirical methods of psychology for studying inner experience (phenomenology) to mutually inform each other to provide a richer and more nuanced picture of both inner experience and AVHs than either could on its own. A critical examination is undertaken of the leading model of AVHs derived from phenomenological philosophy, the ipseity disturbance model. From this we suggest issues that future work in this vein will need to consider, and examine how interdisciplinary methodologies may contribute to advances in our understanding of AVHs. Detailed suggestions are made for the direction and methodology of future work into AVHs, which we suggest should be undertaken in a context where phenomenology and physiology are both necessary, but neither sufficient. (shrink)

While online disinformation practices have grown exponentially over the past decade, the COVID-19 pandemic provides arguably the best opportunity to date to study such communications at a cross-national level. Using the data provided by the International Fact-Checking Network, we examine the strategic uses of non-verbal and verbal arguments to push disinformation through social media and websites during the first wave of lockdowns in 2020 across 16 European countries. Our paper extends the work by Brennen et al. on the (...) use of visuals in COVID-19 misinformation claims by investigating the use of facial emotional expressions and body pose depictions in conjunction with framing elements such as problems identified and attribution of responsibility in the construction of disinformation messages. Our European-wide comparative analysis of 174 messages indexed by the IFCN during the months of April and May 2020 helps provide a rounder understanding of the use of non-verbal devices in advancing COVID-19 disinformation across the continent, and can provide the basis for a framework for further study of the strategic use of non-verbal devices in COVID-19 disinformation world-wide. (shrink)

Several studies have examined victim blaming in rape scenarios. However, there is limited research on the analysis of the perception of blame when two or more perpetrators are involved. The present article explores the perception of blame in cases involving rape based on the level of resistance shown by the victim and the presence of one or more perpetrators. A study was carried out involving 351 university students who responded to a survey after reading a hypothetical assault scenario. Six situations (...) were established where the victim showed either low or high resistance, depending on whether the resistance was verbal or physical and verbal, and in the presence of one or two male perpetrators. It is expected that perpetrators are more culpable when acting in groups and that less resistance from the victim leads to greater attribution of blame. The results confirm that more blame is attributed to the perpetrators when they act in groups than when they act alone. Likewise, women consider the victim generally exerts greater resistance and this variable influences the attribution of greater blame. (shrink)

When people encounter potential hazards, their expectations and behaviours can be shaped by a variety of factors including other people's expressions of verbal likelihood. What is the impact of such expressions when a person also has numeric likelihood estimates from the same source? Two studies used a new task involving an abstract virtual environment in which people learned about and reacted to novel hazards. Verbal expressions attributed to peers influenced participants’ behaviour toward hazards even when numeric estimates were (...) also available. Namely, verbal expressions suggesting that the likelihood of harm from a hazard is low yielded more risk taking with respect to said hazard. There were also inverse collateral effects, whereby participants’ behaviour and estimates regarding another hazard in the same context were affected in the opposite direction. These effects may be based on directionality and relativity cues inferred from verbal likelihood expressions. (shrink)

We can understand and act upon the beliefs of other people, even when these conflict with our own beliefs. Children’s development of this ability, known as Theory of Mind, typically happens around age 4. Research using a looking-time paradigm, however, established that toddlers at the age of 15 months old pass a non-verbal false-belief task (Onishi and Baillargeon in Science 308:255–258, 2005). This is well before the age at which children pass any of the verbal false-belief tasks. In (...) this study we present a more complex case of false-belief reasoning with older children. We tested second-order reasoning, probing children’s ability to handle the belief of one person about the belief of another person. We find just the opposite: 7-year-olds pass a verbal false-belief reasoning task, but fail on an equally complex low-verbal task. This finding suggests that language supports explicit reasoning about beliefs, perhaps by facilitating the cognitive system to keep track of beliefs attributed by people to other people. (shrink)

We can understand and act upon the beliefs of other people, even when these conflict with our own beliefs. Children’s development of this ability, known as Theory of Mind, typically happens around age 4. Research using a looking-time paradigm, however, established that toddlers at the age of 15 months old pass a non-verbal false-belief task (Onishi and Baillargeon in Science 308:255–258, 2005). This is well before the age at which children pass any of the verbal false-belief tasks. In (...) this study we present a more complex case of false-belief reasoning with older children. We tested second-order reasoning, probing children’s ability to handle the belief of one person about the belief of another person. We find just the opposite: 7-year-olds pass a verbal false-belief reasoning task, but fail on an equally complex low-verbal task. This finding suggests that language supports explicit reasoning about beliefs, perhaps by facilitating the cognitive system to keep track of beliefs attributed by people to other people. (shrink)

Interactionists about folk psychology argue that embodied interactions constitute the primary way we understand one another and thus oppose more standard accounts according to which the understanding is mostly achieved through belief and desire attributions. However, also interactionists need to explain why people sometimes still resort to attitude ascription. In this paper, it is argued that this explanatory demand presents a genuine challenge for interactionism and that a popular proposal which claims that belief and desire attributions are needed (...) to make sense of counternormative behavior is problematic. Instead, the most promising conception of belief and desire ascriptions is the communicative conception which locates them in the context of declarative and imperative communication, respectively. Such a communication can take both verbal and non-verbal form. (shrink)

This paper traces the development of a deliberate and intense emphasis on visuality in literary representation of the second through fourth centuries C.E., resulting in a new cultural phenomenon: attributing the characteristics and functions of images to living persons. Calling on a range of sources from Lucian's Eikones to the Life of St. Daniel the Stylite and recent scholarship in art history and critical theory, the paper analyzes a series of interfaces between verbal and visual representation in terms of (...) an active transaction between viewer and viewed to construct meaning and establish and communicate social power. (shrink)

The monograph under review, written as a doctorate in 1999 and later revised and supplemented, offers a searching analysis of the form and function of rhetoric in the Pascal-Pentecost cycle of the 12th century homilist Cyril of Turov, together with an examination of the Byzantine sources. Lunde scrutinizes eight festal homilies for the period from Palm Sunday to the Sunday before Pentecost, using the edition by Igor' Erëmin [TODL 11–13,15 (1955–1958), reprinted as Literaturnoe nasledie Kirilla Turovskogo: Archeologičeskij obzor I izdanie (...) tekstov in 1989]. All Slavonic fragments are accompanied by English translations, predominantly drawn from Simon Franklin's Sermon and Rhetoric of Kievan Rus' [1991, reviewed by Francis Thomson in Slavica Gandensia 19], with minor alterations (e.g. p. 266, note 11) and critical remarks (e.g. p. 180, note 37). The study is positioned along the line that marks a shift in focus from philological and historical commentary towards the literary analysis of Cyril's sermons. Lunde's approach is clearly indebted to various developments in modern literary criticism, from structural linguistics to discourse analysis and communication theory. Questions of dating, attribution, and textual criticism are consciously left aside. (shrink)

This paper offers theoretical explanations for why “guided touch” or manual touch with verbal communication can be an effective way of treating the body and the mind. The active inference theory suggests that chronic pain and emotional disorders can be attributed to distorted and exaggerated patterns of interoceptive and proprioceptive inference. We propose that the nature of active inference is abductive. As such, to rectify aberrant active inference processes, we should change the “Rule” of abduction, or the “prior beliefs” (...) entailed by a patient’s generative model. This means pre-existing generative models should be replaced with new models. To facilitate such replacement—or updating—the present treatment proposes that we should weaken prior beliefs, especially the one at the top level of hierarchical generative models, thereby altering the sense of agency, and redeploying attention. Then, a new prior belief can be installed through inner communication along with manual touch. The present paper proposes several hypotheses for possible experimental studies. If touch with verbal guidance is proven to be effective, this would demonstrate the relevance of active inference and the implicit prediction model at a behavioral level. Furthermore, it would open new possibilities of employing inner communication interventions, including self-talk training, for a wide range of psychological and physical therapies. (shrink)

RESUMO O ensaio revê a análise crítica de V. N. Volóchinov a respeito dos processos de transmissão discursiva, questionando estudos consagrados das categorias estilísticas e impressionistas. Ao descobrir formas em que o discurso citado tensiona a citação fazendo emergir um discurso quase direto, que tanto pode ser do narrador como da personagem, Volóchinov entende ter encontrado uma outra história do discurso, muito mais favorável à manifestação da bivocalidade como reação ativa ao discurso de outrem e como plena manifestação do ideologema. (...) Inferimos, por conseguinte, que o problema examinado pelo teórico se coloca como uma nova episteme discursiva nos estudos dialógicos. ABSTRACT This essay reviews the critical analysis of V.N. Voloshinov with respect to the process of discursive transmission, questioning consecrated studies of stylistic and impressionistic categories. Voloshinov, on discovering ways in which reported speech creates tension in the citation, causing a quasi-direct discourse to emerge, which can be attributed to both the narrator as well as the character, understands he has found another history of discourse that is much more favorable to the manifestation of bivocality as active reaction to the discourse of the other, and as a full manifestation of the ideologeme. We infer, thus, that the problem examined by the theorist establishes a new discursive episteme in dialogic studies. (shrink)

“Parting is such sweet sorrow.” Taste metaphors provide a rich vocabulary for describing emotional experience, potentially serving as an adaptive mechanism for conveying abstract emotional concepts using concrete verbal references to our shared experience. We theorized that the popularity of these expressions results from the close association with hedonic valence shared by these two domains of experience. To explore the possibility that this affective quality underlies the semantic similarity of these domains, we used a behavioral “odd-one-out” task in an (...) online sample of 1059 participants in order to examine the semantic similarity of concepts related to emotion, taste, and color, another rich source of sensory metaphors. We found that the semantic similarity of emotion and taste concepts was greater than that of emotion and color concepts. Importantly, the similarity of taste and emotion concepts was strongly related to their similarity in hedonic valence, a relationship which was also significantly greater than that present between color and emotion. These results suggest that the common core of valence between taste and emotion concepts allows us to bridge the conceptual divide between our shared sensory environment and our internal emotional experience. (shrink)

Drawing on recent findings in the cognitive and neurosciences, this article discusses how people manage to predict each other’s actions, which is fundamental for joint action. We explore how a common coding of perceived and performed actions may allow actors to predict the what, when, and where of others’ actions. The “what” aspect refers to predictions about the kind of action the other will perform and to the intention that drives the action. The “when” aspect is critical for all joint (...) actions requiring close temporal coordination. The “where” aspect is important for the online coordination of actions because actors need to effectively distribute a common space. We argue that although common coding of perceived and performed actions alone is not sufficient to enable one to engage in joint action, it provides a representational platform for integrating the actions of self and other. The final part of the paper considers links between lower‐level processes like action simulation and higher‐level processes like verbal communication and mental state attribution that have previously been at the focus of joint action research. (shrink)

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between cognitive abilities and age differences in information search and the moderating role of task self-relevance by measuring the decision-making process of participants in both high and low self-relevance decision tasks. The participants were 57 young adults and 65 older adults who viewed five alternatives ☓ five attributes decision matrices in which they needed to open the information cells they wanted to explore by clicking the mouse. Processing speed, verbal fluency, working memory (...) and vocabulary were measured as cognitive abilities. The dependent variables were search engagement (including time-related engagement and frequency-related engagement) and search pattern (calculated based on alternative-based or attribute-based search). Results from a structured equation model showed that age negatively predicted these cognitive abilities (processing speed, verbal fluency, working memory and vocabulary), and positively predicted information searching engagement. Processing speed mediated the impact of age on study time per cell under tasks with both high and low self-relevance; whereas verbal fluency mediates total searching time and searching time per check only when the task is highly self-related, but not in the task with low self-relevance. These results suggested that self-relevance could moderate the mediation effect of verbal fluency on the relationship between age and information searching time, which means that older adults whose verbal fluency was limited need relatively more time to search information to make an informed decision. However, this impact is only sufficient when the decision task is highly self-related and draws more engagement motivation into it. (shrink)

One of the main difficulties in motor skill acquisition is attributed to body control based on wrong mental models. This is true to various domains such as playing sports and playing musical instruments. In order to acquire adequate motor skill by modifying false belief, we need to help people find appropriate key points in achieving a body control and integrate them. In this paper, we investigate three approaches to realize such support. The first one is to encourage exploration of the (...) relations among key points constituting a motor skill, using a technique of meta-cognitive verbalization. The second one is to represent a motor skill by appropriate mechanical models. The third one is to integrate rules for component tasks in achieving a compound task. These three approaches, we argue, help people build an integrated mental model consisting of multiple relations among various key points, one that seems to be indispensable for acquisition of motor skills. These ideas suggest the possibility to create new skill rules to perform difficult tasks automatically. (shrink)

An important part of our Theory of Mind—the ability to reason about other people's unobservable mental states—is the ability to attribute false beliefs to others. We investigated whether processing these false beliefs, as well as similar but nonmental representations, is reliant on language. Participants watched videos in which a protagonist hides a gift and either takes a photo of it or writes a text about its location before a second person inadvertently moves the present to a different location, thereby rendering (...) the belief and either the photo or text false. At the same time, participants performed either a concurrent verbal interference task (rehearsing strings of digits) or a visual interference task (remembering a visual pattern). Results showed that performance on false belief trials did not decline under verbal interference relative to visual interference. We interpret these findings as further support for the view that language does not form an essential part of the process of reasoning online (“in the moment”) about false beliefs. (shrink)

It is well known that humans represent the mental states of others and use these representations to successfully predict, understand, and manipulate their behaviour. This is an impressive ability. Many comparative psychologists believe that some non-human apes and monkeys attribute mental states to others. But is this ability unique to mammals? In this paper, I review findings from a range of behavioural studies on corvids, including food caching, food recaching and food sharing studies. In order to protect their caches from (...) being pilfered, corvids successfully keep track of observing conspecifics, employ a number of caching and recaching strategies, and exploit environmental factors to reduce the amount of visual and auditory information available to observing conspecifics. When giving food items as gifts, corvids give items for which conspecifics have developed a preference. I argue that the available evidence supports the hypothesis that corvids attribute mental states to conspecifics. I further hypothesize that corvids do so through process-driven simulation and the running of non-verbal multimodal rules accomplished by a class of mental representations called semantic pointers. (shrink)

This chapter is about susceptibility to one type of division within our selves that can occur within self‐conscious experience and is present in certain mental disorders. This is the separation between experiencing oneself as subject and as agent. The chapter considers some disorders of self‐consciousness and examines the role that this particular division may play in those disorders. Companion to consciousness studies is not completed without attention to the philosophical psychopathology of self‐consciousness. The chapter also examines the case of (...) class='Hi'>verbal auditory hallucinations. Investigators often say that hallucinations involve “loss of ego boundaries” or “internal/external confusion”. The chapter presents a case of alienated self‐consciousness, and explores the phenomenon of thought insertion. According to the standard or traditional account of thought insertion, the patient is aware of her own thoughts, but denies that they are hers and attributes them to someone else. So, thought insertion certainly seems to constitute alienated awareness of one's own thoughts. (shrink)

Impaired performance in verbal fluency tasks is a frequent observation in Parkinson’s disease. As to the nature of the underlying cognitive deficit, it is commonly attributed to a frontal-type dysexecutive syndrome due to nigrostriatal dopamine depletion. Whereas dopaminergic medication typically improves VF performance in PD, e.g., by ameliorating impaired lexical switching, its effect on semantic network activation is unclear. Data from priming studies suggest that dopamine causes a faster decay of semantic activation spread. The aim of the current study (...) was to examine the impact of dopaminergic medication on the dynamic change of word frequency during VF performance as a measure of semantic spreading activation. To this end, we performed a median split analysis of word frequency during phonemic and semantic VF task performance in a PD group tested while receiving dopaminergic medication as well as after drug withdrawal, and in a sample of age-matched healthy volunteers. Dopaminergic medication in the PD group significantly affected phonemic VF with improved word production as well as increased error-rates. The expected decrease of word frequency during VF task performance was significantly smaller in the PD group ON medication than in healthy volunteers across semantic and phonemic VF. No significant group-difference emerged between controls and the PD group in the OFF condition. The comparison between both treatment conditions within the PD group did not reach statistical significance. The observed pattern of results indicates a faster decay of semantic network activation during lexical access in PD patients on dopaminergic medication. In view of improved word generation, this finding is consistent with a concept of more focused neural activity by an increased signal-to-noise ratio due to dopaminergic neuromodulation. However, the effect of dopaminergic stimulation on VF output suggests a trade-off between these beneficial effects and increased error-rates. (shrink)

When a prominent attribute looms larger in one response procedure than in another, a violation of procedure invariance occurs. A hypothesis based on compatibility between the structure of the input information and the required output was tested as an explanation of this phenomenon. It was also compared with other existing hypotheses in the field. The study had two aims: (1) to illustrate the prominence effect in a selection of preference tasks (choice, acceptance decisions, and preference ratings); (2) to demonstrate the (...) processing differences in a matching procedure versus the selected preference tasks. Hence, verbal protocols were collected in both a matching task and in subsequent preference tasks. Silent control conditions were also employed. The structure compatibility hypothesis was confirmed in that a prominence effect obtained in the preference tasks was accompanied by a lower degree of attention to the attribute levels in these tasks. Furthermore, as predicted from the structure compatibility hypothesis, it was found that fewer comparisons between attribute levels were performed in the preference tasks than in the matching task. It was therefore concluded that both these processing differences may explain the occurrence of the prominence effects. (shrink)

Thirty-years research seemed to reveal that there is a U-shape development in children’s theory-of-mind abilities: infants have the competence to attribute false beliefs properly when measured by looking time and anticipatory eye gaze, while children younger than four systematically fail the standard false belief tasks measuring their voluntary responses. Why is it, and why does the infants’ implicit belief reasoning seem to be free from the inhibition and selection requirements? Are there really two systems, one explicit measured by verbal (...) tasks and one implicit shown in non-verbal context, involved in theory-of-mind reasoning? We investigated preschoolers’ and adults’ belief attribution with the anticipatory looking method, in both a low-demand and high-demand false-belief reasoning tasks. Subjects’ nonverbal performances turned out to be better in the low-demand condition: they showed strong bias to look at the locations congruent with the actor’s false belief. However, neither adults’ nor children’s eye gaze in the high-demand condition showed belief-congruent anticipations. Besides, adults’ predictions were better with verbal responses than with nonverbal anticipatory eye gaze. Together, these results suggested that there are dual systems involved in belief reasoning, and the two systems share similar property in terms of their sensitivity to the task demands. (shrink)

Against claims that cognitive science of religion undercuts belief in God, many defenders of theistic belief have invoked the Religious Reasons Reply: science cannot undercut belief in God if one has good independent reasons to believe. However, it is unclear whether this response helps salvage the god beliefs of most people. This paper considers four questions: (1) What reasons do Christians have for believing in God? (2) What kinds of beliefs about God can the reasons support? (3) Are the reasons (...) rationalizations? (4) Can cognitive science undercut the reasons? Many Christians invoke everyday religious experiences (EREs)—such as experiences of divine presence, guidance, and communication—as reasons to believe. Unlike another popular reason to believe in God (the appearance of design and beauty in nature), EREs can support beliefs about a relational God who is present to me, who guides my life, and who speaks to me. EREs are not rationalizations since they seem to cause and sustain such beliefs. Nonetheless, EREs like experiences of hearing God speak are problematic reasons to believe. ‘Soft’ voice-hearing experiences are easily undercut. ‘Hard’ experiences of an external, audible voice are probably underpinned by similar cognitive processes as audio-verbal hallucinations. (shrink)

In this paper, we contrast English and Greek resultative secondary predication, showing that Greek lacks the productive syntactic strategy which English employs. We propose that the difference in productivity should be attributed to properties of the morphology in the two languages (namely, to the differing productivity of certain verbal affixes). Finally, we give a compositional semantics for the complex event formation in the morphology/syntax that accounts for the contrasts between resultatives in English and Greek.

One can agree with the critics of the Aristotelian theory of essences who say that the determination of the essence of a thing rests upon a linguistic decision, without accepting the conclusion that "a controversy as to whether rationality is of the essence of man is ultimately verbal." For linguistic decisions, that is, the acceptance of a classificatory scheme together with its associated system of definitions, may be motivated and justified by our knowledge of facts or our appreciation of (...) values. If, say, a Freudian and an Aristotelian were disputing the adequacy of defining man as a rational animal, the former might reject the definition on the grounds that the conscious intellect plays less of a causal role in human decisions and thinking than was once believed, whereas the latter might claim that reason ought to play a greater role if the good life be possible. Conflicts over definitions reflect theoretical and ethical differences. Once these differences are reconciled, the verbal conflict is no longer important. But the easing of the verbal conflict is not solely a verbal affair. It presupposes a harmonious adjustment of values and beliefs. The function of a philosophy of human nature is to formulate and discuss a definition of man which proposes certain human attributes as essential and which is to be justified to the extent that it best summarizes those features of human life which are of greatest causal and ethical significance. It is to be expected that, in order for a satisfactory definition to be reached, any number of philosophical problems would have to be dealt with along the way. A philosophy of man is a judgment about what is important in human affairs, but it is not for that reason arbitrary unless one is convinced that value judgments are arbitrary, that one cannot provide reasons, good or bad, for them. When, in the context of ethics, Aristotle cites the rational faculty rather than the capacity to laugh as the function of man, he was stressing that reason has greater importance than a sense of humor in moral deliberation. And when Marx, in his Theses on Feuerbach, claims: "The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations," he was indicating that in order to understand why men act and think the way they do it is necessary to understand the society in which they live. (shrink)

This article is devoted to the crisis of the modern philosophy caused by the generally accepted approach towards the ontology issues of existence and the ways to solve these problems. Before Kant’s theory the fundamental principle of the universe organization in the ontology was the determination of the existence as the number of objects that were independent from the subject and explored as they were. Kant showed then that the subject deals only with the images of its own conscience. The (...) existence became not the thing-in-itself, but the thing, that opens to the human mind. But this experience gave no answer to the question about the differences between the immanent perceptions of conscience and the universe itself. This article reveals that the transition from the understanding of things as independent existing objects toward the understanding of their subjective origin as objects themselves demands more radical conclusions. These conclusions consist of that fact that the ontology should concentrate more exploring existence as the unformed organic whole and not to forget about its general problemsand presentations about the conscience. Currently we can get non-verbal knowledge about the existence itself and take steps of getting verbal one. Separation of the existence as the unformed organic whole from the presentations of conscience prevents from mistake of determining the things created by the subject in the process of universe perception as its attributes (the plurality of interpretations turns into the ontology pluralism). (shrink)

The present study was designed to investigate visually handicapped students' explanations for failure when the motive to maintain or enhance self-esteem was in conflict with the motive to present a favorable social image. Subjects experienced manipulated failure in a text comprehension task and were subsequently asked to give causal and responsibility attributions in the presence of either a visually handicapped or a non-handicapped experimenter. It was expected that visually disabled participants would claim a “handicap-bonus” from the non-handicapped experimenter by (...) explicitly presenting non-defensive attributions and accounts as well as handicap-related responses, while defensive explanations should be more pronounced when faced with a blind experimenter. The data provide support for the existence of presumed social expectations as determinants of individuals' verbal self-presentations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:242 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Thus Locke's mistake is not the simplistic one of bringing in a new type of perception --perception of the agreement of an idea with something which is not an idea. He attributes the certainty which is appropriate for a general verbal truth concerning archetypal ideas to a real truth concerning ectypal ideas. There is an additional difficulty in Locke's use of the distinction between (...) adequate and inadequate ectypal ideas when he uses them in his theory of self knowledge. How can we be sure that these simple ectypal ideas are adequate? We have certainty concerning the adequacy of our archetypal ideas because we have a complete knowledge of the archetype which is itself an idea. However, we are not given a complete knowledge of the archetype of simple ectypal ideas. We are assured of the adequacy of simple ectypal ideas only by assuming the truth of the causal principle. This leads to a circular argument. We can be assured of the adequacy of the causal relation considered as a product of our own construction. If the idea of the causal relation is archetypal, then the idea of this relation is adequate. However, when the causal relation is used to assure us of the adequacy of our simple ectypal ideas, the causal relation is no longer restricted to the level of archetypal ideas. In order to insure the adequacy of our simple ideas, the causal relation must be a relation between our ectypal ideas and something which is not an idea, viz., the power which causes the sensation. Archetypal ideas of relations are adequate, but this is not an archetypal idea of a relation, and thus we have no way of judging its adequacy. The only way to determine the adequacy of the causal connection is to show the adequacy of our simple ectypal ideas, but the adequacy of these simple ectypal ideas is itself predicated on the adequacy of the idea of the causal relation. Thus, the whole argument for the adequacy of simple ectypal ideas is circular. Either the real and nominal essences of simple ideas are identical as claimed in Book Three, or the real and nominal essences of simple ideas are not identical, as claimed in Book Two. If the real and nominal essences of simple ideas are identical, then these simple ideas are archetypal and adequate but they afford us no knowledge about any extra-mental thing. If the real and nominal essences of simple ideas are not identical then simple ideas are ectypal, but we cannot be assured of their adequacy because their adequacy is dependent on the causal relation whose adequacy is not assured. Thus, Locke's epistemology does not support his claim for intuitive knowledge of his own existence, but the mistakes he does make are not nearly as simplistic as they are often claimed to be. DONALD W. GOTTERBARN University of Southern California THE DISTINGUISHABLE AND THE SEPARABLE; A NOTE ON HUME AND CAUSATION In this note, I shall be concemed with only one part of Hume's doctrine of causation, and my criticism of this feature of his position will leave much of the remainder untouched. This is not to say that my point is unimportant, for I shall challenge Hume's fight to claim that there cannot in any case be a direct impression of connection, force, or power. He attempted to establish this claim by argument, and I wish to show that there is a fatal flaw in that argument. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 243 In order that what follows shall not be misunderstood, two points must be noted. First, I would not claim that we have an impression of connection, force, or power in all cases in which we hold that events are related as cause and effect. There are many instances in which this is not true, and the number and even the varieties of these cases could be greatly expanded beyond the illustrations which Hume gave in the Treatise and the Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding. I shall only argue that he did not offer adequate reasons for holding that there are no eases in which we can possibly have such... (shrink)

Many mental phenomena involve thinking about people who do not exist. Imagined characters appear in planning, dreams, fantasizing, imaginary companions, bereavement hallucinations, auditory verbal hallucinations, and as characters created in fictional narratives by authors. Sometimes these imagined persons are felt to be completely under our control, as when one fantasizes about having a great time at a party. Other times, characters feel as though they are outside of our conscious control. Dream characters, for example, are experienced by dreamers as (...) autonomous entities, and often do things that frighten and surprise dreamers. Some imagined persons, such as characters in fiction, start off under conscious control of the author, but over time, can appear to gain an illusion of independent agency. I propose an explanation for different autonomy attributions: characters are by default non-autonomous, unless their personalities are well-practiced. Characters become autonomous because modeling their thinking has become automatized, like many other well-practiced activities. (shrink)

This paper elaborates the hypothesis that the unique demography and sociology of Ashkenazim in medieval Europe selected for intelligence. Ashkenazi literacy, economic specialization, and closure to inward gene flow led to a social environment in which there was high fitness payoff to intelligence, specifically verbal and mathematical intelligence but not spatial ability. As with any regime of strong directional selection on a quantitative trait, genetic variants that were otherwise fitness reducing rose in frequency. In particular we propose that the (...) well-known clusters of Ashkenazi genetic diseases, the sphingolipid cluster and the DNA repair cluster in particular, increase intelligence in heterozygotes. Other Ashkenazi disorders are known to increase intelligence. Although these disorders have been attributed to a bottleneck in Ashkenazi history and consequent genetic drift, there is no evidence of any bottleneck. Gene frequencies at a large number of autosomal loci show that if there was a bottleneck then subsequent gene flow from Europeans must have been very large, obliterating the effects of any bottleneck. The clustering of the disorders in only a few pathways and the presence at elevated frequency of more than one deleterious allele at many of them could not have been produced by drift. Instead these are signatures of strong and recent natural selection. (shrink)

I review recent evidence that very young, pre-verbal infants attribute belief-like states when anticipating the behavior of others. This evidence is drawn from infant performance on non-verbal false belief tasks. I argue that, contrary to typical interpretations, such evidence does not show that infants attribute belief-like states. Rather, it shows that infants apply an enhanced version of what Gergely ( 2011 ) calls the “teleological stance” to brief bouts of behavior. This requires them to parse behavioral sequences into (...) goals and rationally/informationally-constrained means of achieving them; however, it does not require the attribution of unobservable mental states, like beliefs, that are causally responsible for behavior. (shrink)

This article deals with the methodologies commonly used in the framework of the structural approach to social representations. It concerns free and hierarchical evocations, the characterization questionnaire, the similarity analysis, the basic cognitive schemes model, the attribute-challenge technique and the test of context independence. More than a simple review of these methodologies, it offers a critical approach concerning the problems encountered and related to: thresholds or “cutoff points” used to diagnose the structure and the accuracy of the structural diagnosis, grouping (...) methods employed to reduce the corpus of verbal associations, the dilemma between reliability and feasibility, especially in field research, the adequacy and number of modalities of response in the framework of the structural diagnosis. Following this evaluation, this article suggests potential solutions to overcome these methodological limitations. Moreover, as methodological issues are closely related to theoretical questions, the link between social representation theory and identity approaches is discussed. (shrink)

Suppose that we develop a medically safe and affordable means of enhancing human intelligence. For concreteness, we shall assume that the technology is genetic engineering (either somatic or germ line), although the argument we will present does not depend on the technological implementation. For simplicity, we shall speak of enhancing “intelligence” or “cognitive capacity,” but we do not presuppose that intelligence is best conceived of as a unitary attribute. Our considerations could be applied to specific cognitive abilities such as (...) class='Hi'>verbal fluency, memory, abstract reasoning, social intelligence, spatial cognition, numerical ability, or musical talent. It will emerge that the form of argument that we use can be applied much more generally to help assess other kinds of enhancement technologies as well as other kinds of reform. However, to give a detailed illustration of how the argument form works, we will focus on the prospect of cognitive enhancement. (shrink)

Mādhyamikas argue that ultimate reality, which is without any delimitation and hence cannot be verbalized in itself, can be expressed in words on the basis of the attribution or superimposition of the basis for the application of the word. The denotation theory of ultimate reality Bhartṛhari advances in the Dravyasamuddeśa of his Vākyapadīya convincingly explains that, insofar as ultimate reality is spoken of, we must say that it is denoted by the word; ultimate reality is said to be ineffable only (...) in the sense that it is far from what is conveyed as something by the word; language is a pointer to the ultimate reality. The point that the application of a word to ultimate reality depends on the attribution of the basis for the application of the word to it naturally leads to an idea that one should not hypostatize the basis, although without resorting to it any word cannot be used to convey the ultimate reality; otherwise, it would have to be said that the ultimate reality to which the word is applied has in essence the property which serves as the basis. Such a property is precisely what the Mādhyamikas consider to be the svabhāva ‘intrinsic nature’. What they understand by the term śūnyatā is precisely that everything has no real basis for the application of the word to it. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical work is informed throughout by a particular broad theme: that the semantic and mentalistic attributes of language and human life are shown by verbal and nonverbal conduct, but that they resist incorporation into the domain of the straightforwardly factual. So argues John Koethe, in contrast to the standard view that Wittgenstein's earlier and later philosophical positions are sharply opposed. According to the received view, Wittgenstein's thinking underwent a radical transformation after the Tractatus, leading him to abandon (...) classical realism and to develop an alternative semantics based on the notion of warranted assertability. Koethe maintains that the thesis that semantic claims are not made true by any facts whatsoever, which was a central part of Wittgenstein's early theory of elementary propositions, was one he continued to develop in his later writings, and that it is perfectly compatible with classical realism. In making his case for the essential continuity of Wittgenstein's thought, Koethe ranges over the entire corpus of the philosopher's writing, and concludes by pointing out connections between Wittgenstein's views and those of several contemporary philosophers, including Nagel, Dennett, Davidson, and Dummett. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.1 (2002) 55-59 [Access article in PDF] One Stage Is Not Enough Andrew W. Young and Karel W. de Pauw Keywords: delusions, Cotard delusion, Capgras delusion, cognitive neuropsychiatry. WE WELCOME THE OPPORTUNITY to offer our reflections on Philip Gerrans' interesting paper. Our opinion is that on fundamental issues we agree quite a bit—but there are clear differences when it comes to details.The most basic issue (...) concerns the nature of the enterprise. Like Gerrans, we think that it is possible to create testable accounts of the formation and maintenance of what would otherwise seem bizarre and inexplicable delusions, and that these accounts should be grounded in theoretical models of factors that underpin our everyday perception and reasoning. This general approach certainly forms part of what has been called cognitive neuropsychiatry. However, we disagree with Gerrans in that we see cognitive neuropsychiatry as an attempt to draw on the underlying logic of cognitive neuropsychology, rather than (as Gerrans implies) its current methods. The underlying logic of cognitive neuropsychological approaches has been to try to understand the effects of brain injury in terms of disruption of different components of theoretical models of normal abilities. In this approach, a model of normal performance is tested by its ability to account for the effects of brain injury. Where the model of normal performance also provides a convincing account of brain injury it is retained, and when it fails to account for effects of brain injury, it is revised or abandoned. In cognitive neuropsychiatry, the key theoretical move has been to argue that an adequate model of normal performance should be able to account for any disordered pattern (Ellis and Young 1990). The same logic of seeking to explain disordered performance by reference to models of normal function is then attempted, but for disorders that would usually fall within the province of psychiatry.In our opinion, however, cognitive neuropsychiatry will not simply involve importing the methods of cognitive neuropsychology into the new domain; they will need to be developed and adapted to fit the new agenda (Young 2000).In cognitive neuropsychology, progress has often come from the careful investigation of people with stable, selective deficits of fundamental cognitive functions involved in sensory analysis, memory, and verbal or motor output. In contrast, delusional beliefs can be relatively unstable; often they are only held for a few weeks or even days. When the delusions change, patients may modify or abandon them as suddenly as they seemed to form them, or they may give them up much more slowly and reluctantly. At the very least, this creates difficulties in the timing of investigations and in interpreting the relation of deficits and symptoms, which may be recorded on separate dates. These methodological problems [End Page 55] are exacerbated by the fact that deficits linked to complex abnormal experiences such as delusions may be multifaceted and diffuse, even when the delusions themselves have a specific content or theme. Such complications do not invalidate cognitive neuropsychiatry, but they do mean it will need to develop its own methods for dealing with them and making appropriate inferences.One of the key complexities that has surfaced already involves the idea that delusional beliefs might reflect the interaction of two or more contributory factors. Gerrans discusses a particular variant of this idea, which had been suggested by Young and Leafhead (1996) as an approach to understanding the Cotard delusion: The Cotard delusion represents a depressed person's attempt to account for abnormal perceptual experiences. It follows that the delusion is based on an unfortunate interaction between different contributory factors. One set of factors creates the abnormal perceptual experiences, which are characterised by lack of emotional responses and feelings of emptiness, depersonalisation and derealisation. The other factors result in a misinterpretation of these perceptual changes, in which the patients' depressed moods lead them correctly to attribute the changes to themselves, but to exaggerate their consequences. (Young and Leafhead, 1996, 166) Gerrans describes this as a two-stage account, but argues that a one-stage account based only on abnormal perceptual... (shrink)

In 1950, Alan Turing proposed his eponymous test based on indistinguishability of verbal behavior as a replacement for the question "Can machines think?" Since then, two mutually contradictory but well-founded attitudes towards the Turing Test have arisen in the philosophical literature. On the one hand is the attitude that has become philosophical conventional wisdom, viz., that the Turing Test is hopelessly flawed as a sufficient condition for intelligence, while on the other hand is the overwhelming sense that were a (...) machine to pass a real live full-fledged Turing Test, it would be a sign of nothing but our orneriness to deny it the attribution of intelligence. The arguments against the sufficiency of the Turing Test for determining intelligence rely on showing that some extra conditions are logically necessary for intelligence beyond the behavioral properties exhibited by an agent under a Turing Test. Therefore, it cannot follow logically from passing a Turing Test that the agent is intelligent. I argue that these extra conditions can be revealed by the Turing Test, so long as we allow a very slight weakening of the criterion from one of logical proof to one of statistical proof under weak realizability assumptions. The argument depends on the notion of interactive proof developed in theoretical computer science, along with some simple physical facts that constrain the information capacity of agents. Crucially, the weakening is so slight as to make no conceivable difference from a practical standpoint. Thus, the Gordian knot between the two opposing views of the sufficiency of the Turing Test can be cut. (shrink)

A beneficial effect of gesture on learning has been demonstrated in multiple domains, including mathematics, science, and foreign language vocabulary. However, because gesture is known to co-vary with other non-verbal behaviors, including eye gaze and prosody along with face, lip, and body movements, it is possible the beneficial effect of gesture is instead attributable to these other behaviors. We used a computer-generated animated pedagogical agent to control both verbal and non-verbal behavior. Children viewed lessons on mathematical equivalence (...) in which an avatar either gestured or did not gesture, while eye gaze, head position, and lip movements remained identical across gesture conditions. Children who observed the gesturing avatar learned more, and they solved problems more quickly. Moreover, those children who learned were more likely to transfer and generalize their knowledge. These findings provide converging evidence that gesture facilitates math learning, and they reveal the potential for using technology to study non-verbal behavior in controlled experiments. (shrink)

The proposal of a semantics for quotations using explanatory notions drawn from philosophical theories of pictures. In Quotations as Pictures, Josef Stern develops a semantics for quotations using explanatory notions drawn from philosophical theories of pictures. He offers the first sustained analysis of the practice of quotation proper, as opposed to mentioning. Unlike other accounts that treat quotation as mentioning, Quotations as Pictures argues that the two practices have independent histories, that they behave differently semantically, that the inverted commas employed (...) in both mentioning and quotation are homonymous, that so-called mixed quotation is nothing but subsentential quotation, and that the major problem of quotation is to explain its dual reference or meaning—its ordinary meaning and its metalinguistic reference to the quoted phrase attributed to the quoted subject. Stern argues that the key to understanding quotation is the idea that quotations are pictures or have a pictorial character. As a phenomenon where linguistic competence meets a nonlinguistic symbolic ability, the pictorial, quotation is a combination of features drawn from the two different symbol systems of language and pictures, which explains the exceptional and sometimes idiosyncratic data about quotation. In light of this analysis of verbal quotation, in the last chapters Stern analyzes scare quotation as a nonliteral expressive use of the inverted commas and explores the possibility of quotation in pictures themselves. (shrink)

'Thought insertion' in schizophrenia involves somehow experiencing one's own thoughts as someone else's. Some philosophers try to make sense of this by distinguishing between ownership and agency: one still experiences oneself as the owner of an inserted thought but attributes it to another agency. In this paper, we propose that thought insertion involves experiencing thought contents as alien, rather than episodes of thinking. To make our case, we compare thought insertion to certain experiences of 'verbal hallucination' and show that (...) they amount to different descriptions of the same phenomenon: a quasi-perceptual experience of thought content. We add that the agency/ownership distinction is unhelpful here. What requires explanation is not why a person experiences a type of intentional state without the usual sense of agency, but why she experiences herself as the agent of one type of intentional state rather than another. We conclude by sketching an account of how this might happen. (shrink)

This essay centres on the English translation of Georg Lukács’s Tailism and the Dialectic. Lukács is generally heralded as a founding theoretician of a ‘Western Marxism’, in opposition to ‘Eastern’ Soviet Marxism, and his most impressive and most influential work, History and Class Consciousness, is generally treated as having rehabilitated Marxist concern with questions of subjectivity. It might therefore come as a surprise when Lukács in Tailism states that the purpose of History and Class Consciousness was to demonstrate ‘that the (...) organisation and tactics of Bolshevism are the only possible consequence of Marxism’. In my view, however, this should already be abundantly clear from History and Class Consciousness. For Lukács’s absorption with proletarian subjectivity was motivated by an obsession with what he saw as its immaturity. And he coined the category of ‘reification’ in order to explain his disappointed expectations, to explain, that is, why the proletariat did not make a ‘socialist’ revolution in the ‘objectively ripe’ situation of an ‘imperialist war’ created by ‘moribund capitalism’. In short, Lukács did raise anew the question of the subjective, but only to then declare that workers, not even ‘the most revolutionary among them’, could never attain proper class consciousness, which he attributed instead to the ‘revolutionary party’ bearing the properly revolutionary theory. For this reason I agree with Slavoj Žižek’s characterisation of Lukács as the ‘ultimate philosopher [my emphasis] of Leninism’ – although I do think that Lenin himself would have found, as he did in connection with one of Lukács’s other works, Marxism ‘present only at a verbal level’. My concern is two-fold: with a critique of the methodological short-cuts that Lukács made in his purely conceptual derivation of the concept of reification, and his purely conceptual attribution of it as the necessary form of working-class consciousness ‘in its immediacy’; and with the dangerous political consequences that Lukács derived from his assessment of the reified character of working-class subjectivity, mainly a theoretical guarantee that the party with the proper revolutionary theory must always be right, or at least more right than anyone else. (shrink)