It's often hypothesized that the structure of mental representation is map-like rather than language-like. The possibility arises as a counterexample to the argument from the best explanation of productivity and systematicity to the language of thought hypothesis—the hypothesis that mental structure is compositional and recursive. In this paper, I argue that the analogy with maps does not undermine the argument, because maps and language have the same kind of compositional and recursive structure.

Mental mapping is a method of interpreting with conceptual metaphors. This method is applied to the admiration song in Song of Songs 7:2–7. The song is interpreted in the context of a dance. For the purpose of interpretation, ancient Egyptian dance paintings and love poems are taken into account. The interpretation presents a methodological study that unmasks arbitrary exegesis and implausible interpretations. It discovers its subtle conceptual metaphors and shows a strategy for a comprehensible exegesis. As a side effect, (...) the male chauvinism present in this song is deconstructed. (shrink)

The German term `Mitteleuropa' was coined to designate Central Europe at the time when the Habsburg monarchy exercised its domination over the Danube area and when the Eastern borders of the Reich proclaimed in 1871 were formed, thus from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the First World War. Mitteleuropa constitutes an ambivalent `lieu de mémoire', a notion in which Central Europe has invested its memory of the past and its identity: such a notion is negative (...) when it brings to mind the mental map of German imperialism both exploited and perverted in the Third Reich; it is positive when it is interpreted as a federative idea, opening supranational perspectives associating the countries of German culture with Slavic peoples — the Hungarians, the Romanians — and with the Jews. Since the formation of the `Habsburg myth' as a retrospective utopia of a defunct harmony of nationalities in the `third Europe' situated between Western Europe and the Russian world, the Austrian tradition has become the focus of the new notion of `Zentraleuropa', prefiguring Central European union. (shrink)

The article explores the meaning and usages of "communicative and cultural memory" in the context of "mental maps". It looks particularly at theories which, on the basis of constructed symbolic divisions, connote a "lasting Balkan/European reality". The explication focuses on the content considered by these theories as specifically Balkan understanding of the concepts of Space and Time. U tekstu se razmatraju znacenja i razlicite primene sadrzaja "komunikativnog i kulturnog pamcenja u kontekstu savremenih "mentalnih mapa" i posebno teorija koje (...) na konstrukcijama simbolickih podela sugerisu "trajnu balkansku realnost". Razmatranje je ograniceno na deo sadrzaja koji ovim teorijama koristi kao argumentacija za tezu "specificno balkanskog" ili "specificno srpskog" razumevanja kategorija vremena i prostora. (shrink)

The study, conducted in March 2022, involved the analysis of the content in several social media chats and groups; the participants of those chats live in the same place and therefore have a common experience of the space. The study was based on the hypothesis of a direct connection between the mental map (a system of individual ideas about space), the cultural reputation of topoi, and urban trauma, embodied in the unease infrastructure. The problem of assessing the significance of (...) a place was solved by means of folklore toponymies – the mechanism of renaming, which indicates the degree of awareness about a specific place and defines its location on the mental map as well as ascribes a certain status to it. These statuses demonstrate the degree of significance of a place for a certain subject and form a kind of hierarchy, a system of topographical preferences. Thanks to online communication, people can not only transmit information much faster than the traditional forms of folklore dissemination allow, but also broadcast personal attitudes, conveying them as a bundle of meanings (for example, while inventing new toponyms). Therefore, one of the objectives of the study was to identify established folklore toponyms in online communication: they serve as markers of attitudes, reputation, and significance; we also try to catalogue attempts to “rename” different places. Another task was to find the symptoms of such anxiety in online communication. (shrink)

Cognitive maps play a crucial role in mammalian navigation. They provide the organism with information about its own location and the locations of landmarks within known environments. Cognitive maps have yet to receive ample attention in philosophy. In this article, we argue that cognitive maps should not be understood along the lines of conceptual mental states, such as beliefs and desires. They are more plausibly understood to be non-conceptual. We clarify what is at stake in this (...) claim, and offer two empirically-informed arguments in its favor. Both arguments submit that cognitive maps are probably non-conceptual because their representational structure seems to differ from that of conceptual mental states. (shrink)

A crucial aspect of the human mind is the ability to project the self along the time line to past and future. It has been argued that such self-projection is essential to re-experience past experiences and predict future events. In-depth analysis of a novel paradigm investigating mental time shows that the speed of this “self-projection” in time depends logarithmically on the temporal-distance between an imagined “location” on the time line that participants were asked to imagine and the location of (...) another imagined event from the time line. This logarithmic pattern suggests that events in human cognition are spatially mapped along an imagery mental time line. We argue that the present time-line data are comparable to the spatial mapping of numbers along the mental number line and that such spatial maps are a fundamental basis for cognition. (shrink)

We argue that dominant research approaches concerning mental illness, which are centered on traditional categories of psychiatric classification as codified in the DSM-IV, have serious empirical, conceptual, and foundational problems. These problems have led to a classification scheme and body of research findings that provide a very poor map of the domain of mental illness, a map that, in turn, undermines clinical and research pursuits. We discuss some current efforts to respond to these problems and argue that the (...) DSM-5 revision process is not very promising, whereas the NIMH Research Domain Criteria initiative and some recent research in cognitive neuroscience fares better, although the latter remains potentially compromised by residual influences of the DSM-based approach. We conclude with some lessons and suggestions for the pursuit of alternative research pathways. (shrink)

We argue that the presence of a word in an utterance serves as starting point for a relevance guided inferential process that results in the construction of a contextually appropriate sense. The linguistically encoded sense of a word does not serve as its default interpretation. The cases where the contextually appropriate sense happens to be identical to this linguistic sense have no particular theoretical significance. We explore some of the consequences of this view. One of these consequences is that there (...) may be many more mentally represented concepts than there are linguistically encoded concepts. (shrink)

ConclusionA map of mental health is admittedly the vaguest of speculations at the moment. It is nowhere near as precise as anything presently seen through the mental health microscope. Indeed it may well turn out to offer nothing at all. On the other hand, the truth remains that unless we beat our addiction to microscopes we will never get even a glimpse of mental health: you can’t read a map with a microscope.

In this paper, I propose a new way of understanding the space of possibilities in the field of mental content. The resulting map assigns separate locations to theories of content that have generally been lumped together on the more traditional map. Conversely, it clusters together some theories of content that have typically been regarded as occupying opposite poles. I make my points concrete by developing a taxonomy of theories of mental content, but the main points of the paper (...) concern not merely how to classify, but how to understand, the theories. Also, though the paper takes theories of mental content as a case study, much of the discussion is applicable to theories of other phenomena. To a first approximation, the difference between the traditional and the proposed taxonomies turns on whether we classify theories of content by, on the one hand, their implications for a non-redundant supervenience base for content facts (i.e., for facts about what contents thoughts have) or, on the other, by their constitutive accounts of content. By a "constitutive account," I mean the kind of elucidation of the nature of a phenomenon that theorists have tried to give for, for example, knowledge, justice, personal identity, consciousness, convention, heat, and limit. The tendency to taxonomize by supervenience base is encouraged, I suggest, by a failure to keep clearly in view a distinction between constitutive and modal determination. Many philosophers would accept that a constitutive account cannot be captured in purely modal terms. Giving a constitutive account is not the same as specifying modally necessary and sufficient conditions. Nevertheless, philosophers often try to cash constitutive claims in modal terms. A case in point is that theories of content tend to be conceptualized in terms of the theories' implications for a supervenience base for content facts. My thesis goes beyond the by-now somewhat familiar proposition that not all modal determinants of a phenomenon are constitutive determinants. One who has taken that point on board might nevertheless conceive of a philosophical account as an attempt to specify constitutive determinants of the target phenomenon that make up a non-redundant supervenience base for the phenomenon. Shoehorning a philosophical account into this form leaves out elements that are modally redundant, but may be explanatorily or ontologically significant. For example, when a constitutive account has multiple levels, the different levels will typically be modally redundant. Formulating the account as a specification of a supervenience base of constitutive determinants will therefore flatten the account into a single level. Many of my arguments can be illustrated by considering the place of normativity in the theory of content. The new taxonomy gives a distinct niche to normative theories of content - theories that explain a thought's having a certain content at least in part in terms of the obtaining of normative facts. By contrast, on a traditional map, normative theories are invisible as such because normative facts supervene on non-normative ones. (shrink)

Mental models influence how individuals think and act in relation to their external environment and have been identified as leverage points to address sustainability challenges. Given the importance of mental models, a new tool to assess mental models has been developed: the Mental Model Mapping Tool (M-Tool). M-Tool was designed to have a standardized format and to be user-friendly for low literacy populations, using pictograms and audio instructions. In this paper, we evaluate M-Tool’s application in two (...) studies with Tanzanian fishers. In Study 1, we investigated M-tool’s convergent validity compared to standard interviewing methods (n= 30). Study 2 investigated M-Tool’s construct validity by relating mental model complexity to participants’ education level (n= 185), a relationship that has been well established. The findings show that (1) mental models produced with M-Tool are more complex than mental models obtained through interviewing techniques; (2) model composition is similar across the two methods; and (3) participants with higher levels of education tend to produce more complex mental models with M-Tool than participants with lower levels of education, in line with previous research. These findings suggest that M-Tool can successfully capture mental models among diverse participants. This tool offers researchers and practitioners an instrument to map and compare perceptions of (conservation) challenges across groups. (shrink)

This book is an empirically informed investigation of the philosophical problem of mental causation, and simultaneously a philosophical investigation of the status of cognitive scientific generalisations. If there is such a thing as mental causation, and if we can classify the mental states involved in these causes in a way useful for making predictions and giving scientific explanations, then these states will be natural kinds. The first task, then, is to show that there is an account of (...) natural kindhood that can accommodate cognitive kinds. The second task is to say how the scientific statements made using these mental kinds are not susceptible to being reduced to statements about physical kinds, and in fact require taking into account facts at many levels of explanation, including the biological and social levels. Lastly, the case will be made for Virtual Machine Functionalism being the correct account of the relationship between cognitive states and the broader physical world. (shrink)

The "history of mentalities" considers the attitudes of ordinary people to everyday life. The approach is closely identified with the work of the Annales school. However, whereas the Annales historians refer to the material factors which condition human life, historians investigating mentalities examine psychological underpinnings. Historians who first developed guidelines for the history of mentalities were Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, who were both concerned with collective systems of belief. Later, Philippe Ariès and Norbert Elias identified and developed theories on (...) early childhood. Finally, Michel Foucault considered the psychology of social deviants and nonconformists. This mode of interpretation provides a means of examining those aspects of life which the linear approach cannot address, such as the pressure of conformity, the sense of accelerating time, and the preoccupation with self. (shrink)

It is often claimed that pre-attentive vision has an ‘iconic’ format. This is seen to explain pre-attentive vision's characteristically high processing capacity and to make sense of an overlap in the mechanisms of early vision and mental imagery. But what does the iconicity of pre-attentive vision amount to? This paper considers two prominent ways of characterising pre-attentive visual icons and argues that neither is adequate: one approach renders the claim ‘pre-attentive vision is iconic’ empirically false while the other obscures (...) its ability to do the explanatory work, which motivates positing pre-attentive visual icons in the first place. With this noted, I introduce the notion of an ‘Analogue Map’ and argue that it provides a superior characterisation of pre-attentive vision's iconicity. I then argue that this forces a reassessment of debates which have traditionally presupposed the iconicity of pre-attentive vision, emphasising ramifications for the viability of a format-based perception-thought border. (shrink)

The meaning of mental terms and the status of mental entities are core issues in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is argued that the old Reichenbachian distinction between abstracta and illata might shed new light on these issues. First, it suggests that beliefs, desires and other pro-attitudes that make up the higher mental life are not all equally substantial or real. Second, it conceives the elements of the lower mental life as entities that are inferred from (...) concrete, observable events. As a consequence, it might teach us two lessons: first, to see reliefs in the higher mental map, and second, to acknowledge that qualia are probabilistically inferred rather than directly experienced. (shrink)

The nature of abstract and concrete semantics and differences between them have remained a debated issue in psycholinguistic and cognitive studies for decades. Most of the available behavioral and neuroimaging studies reveal distinctions between these two types of semantics, typically associated with a so-called “concreteness effect.” Many attempts have been made to explain these differences using various approaches, from purely theoretical linguistic and cognitive frameworks to neuroimaging experiments. In this brief overview, we will try to provide a snapshot of these (...) diverse views and relationships between them and highlight the crucial issues preventing this problem from being solved. We will argue that one potentially beneficial way forward is to identify the neural mechanisms underpinning acquisition of the different types of semantics (e.g., by using neurostimulation techniques to establish causal relationships), which may help explain the distinctions found between the processing of concrete and abstract semantics. (shrink)

Spatial mental representations can be derived from linguistic and non‐linguistic sources of information. This study tested whether these representations could be formed from statistical linguistic frequencies of city names, and to what extent participants differed in their performance when they estimated spatial locations from language or maps. In a computational linguistic study, we demonstrated that co‐occurrences of cities in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit predicted the authentic longitude and latitude of those cities in Middle (...) Earth. In a human study, we showed that human spatial estimates of the location of cities were very similar regardless of whether participants read Tolkien’s texts or memorized a map of Middle Earth. However, text‐based location estimates obtained from statistical linguistic frequencies better predicted the human text‐based estimates than the human map‐based estimates. These findings suggest that language encodes spatial structure of cities, and that human cognitive map representations can come from implicit statistical linguistic patterns, from explicit non‐linguistic perceptual information, or from both. (shrink)

The self is one of the perennial topics in philosophy, and also one of the most debated. Its existence has been both defended and contested in equal measure by philosophers including Descartes and Hume. A Map of Selves: Beyond Philosophy of Mind proposes an original and compelling defense of selfhood. N. M. L. Nathan argues that the self is an enduring substance with a unique quality not shared with any other substance. He criticizes the panpsychist theory that material objects are (...) composed of selves analogous to ours and argues for the existence of at least one transcendent self, whose activity explains both our own existence and the existence of the natural world. He concludes by considering how the world would be for us if such selves did not exist, and we were, as some philosophers think we are, not selves, but, e.g., brains or simply sequences of mental events. A radical and innovative philosophical theory of the self, A Map of Selves: Beyond Philosophy of Mind will be of interest to those working on the philosophy of self and personal identity, philosophy of mind and metaphysics. (shrink)

Thinking about the representational qualities of maps and models allows one to offer a new perspective on the nature of mindreading. The recent critiques of our dominant paradigms for mindreading, theory theory and simulation theory by enactivists such as Daniel Hutto reveal a flaw in the standard options for thinking about how we think about others. Views that rely on theorizing or simulation to account for the way in which we understand others often appear to over-intellectualize social interaction. In (...) contrast, enactivists champion embodied, non-representational forms of engagement with others. I claim that one can improve on the representational views of social cognition by moving away from talk of the mental manipulation of propositions in favor of the construction of maps and models of others. Furthermore, I claim that the current state of social neurobiology lends itself towards such a view. (shrink)

Mental time travel is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: acts on the (...) same information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two ; and is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this domain-general simulation system enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present. (shrink)

This article will examine the role of imperial maps, Christian mission, shared memories and collective consciousness in the formation of Mizo identity. Arguing that imperial maps, supposedly based upon objective European science, were meant to suit specific purposes and were laden with deeper agendas, this article will maintain that other aspiring maps also depicted conflicting claims to territory and overlooked specific details rather than giving factual descriptions. This article will look at how borders and boundaries thus constructed (...) have actual impacts upon the people, places and spaces they divide and include. It will particularly deal with the aspirations of the Mizo Christians who embraced Christianity during the colonial period, and how they are ‘in India’ but often feel ‘not of India’, and will interrogate the Biblical and historical dimensions of their mental maps. (shrink)

Teachers face significant stressors in relation to their work, placing them at increased risk for burnout and attrition. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about additional challenges, resulting in an even greater burden. Thus, strategies for reducing stress that can be delivered virtually are likely to benefit this population. Mental and Physical (MAP) Training combines meditation with aerobic exercise and has resulted in positive mental and physical health outcomes in both clinical and subclinical populations. The aim of this pilot (...) study was to evaluate the feasibility and potential effectiveness of virtual MAP Training on reducing stress and improving mood and well-being in teachers. Participants (n= 104) were from recruited online from kindergarten to grade twelve (K-12) schools in the Northeastern region of the United States and randomly assigned to a 6-week program of virtual MAP Training (n= 58) or no training (n= 13). Primary outcomes included pre-intervention and post-intervention ratings on self-report measures of social and emotional health. Changes in cognitive functioning and physical health were also examined in secondary analyses. By intervention end, participants in the MAP Training group reported less anxiety and work-related stress compared to those who received no training (ds = −0.75 to −0.78). Additionally, MAP Training participants reported improvements in depressive symptoms, rumination, work-related quality of life, perceived stress, and self-compassion (ds = 0.38 to −0.82), whereas no changes were observed in the no training group. Participants also reported increased subjective ratings of executive functioning, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and fewer sleep disturbances (ds = −0.41 to −0.74). Together, these results suggest that the combination of meditation and aerobic exercise is an effective virtual intervention for improving mental health and well-being among K-12 teachers and may enhance resilience to stressful life events such as occurred during the coronavirus pandemic. (shrink)

In this paper I will investigate the possibility of defending the concept of ‘mental representation’ against certain contemporary critiques. Some authors, likeAnthony Chemero, argue that it is possible to explain offline actions with dynamic concepts. Hence, the dynamic discourse preempts the representational one. I doubt that this is a recommendable strategy. A form of representation is necessary, though one which is different from the classical one. Instead of eliminating the concept of representation (as radical dynamicists do) or of splitting (...) cognitive explanation in two separate discourses (as the adepts of the hybrid cognition version do), I consider that a dynamic concept of ‘representation’ is a better option. In my view, the higher level order resulted from the complex brain-body-environment coupling can be interpreted as being representational in nature. The dynamic paradigm involves a significant change concerning the intentional nature of representational states: the basic forms of representations are not maps of reality implemented as such in the brain, but limit conditions, attractors constraining the cognitive system’s evolution in its space state to reach its goals. On a certain threshold of complexity, the system develops stable attractors and attractor landscapes which could be interpreted as standing for something outside the system. This conception offers the advantages of avoiding preemptionargument, of unifying the cognitive explanation and, by its interscalar account, offers dynamic tools for building more complex artificial intelligent systems. (shrink)

The theory of mind debate has reached a “hybrid consensus” concerning the status of theory-theory and simulation-theory. Extant hybrid models either specify co-dependency and implementation relations, or distribute mentalizing tasks according to folk-psychological categories. By relying on a non-developmental framework these models fail to capture the central connection between simulation and theory. I propose a “dynamic” hybrid that is informed by recent work on the nature of similarity cognition. I claim that Gentner’s model of structure-mapping allows us to understand simulation (...) as a process in which psychological representations are aligned, causing the spontaneous abstraction of theoretical generalizations about the psychological domain. (shrink)

One important way in which neuroscience, particularly neuroanatomy, contributes to cognitive science is by providing a model of the brain's architecture, which, in turn, can be utilized as a guide to the architecture of cognition. This project assumes commitment to a view, now well established, that different mental processes, such as perceiving and remembering, employ different parts of the brain (where part is loosely construed so as not to exclude entities which may themselves be composite). These parts may differ (...) according to their internal organizational structure, information processing capacities, and degree of informational connectivity with other parts. Later I will present an example of research in visual processing where researchers are currently attempting to realize the heuristic potential of the brain's architecture in order to understand cognitive organization. Of prior importance, however, is an understanding of how neuroscientists decipher the architecture of the brain itself. This task of mapping the brain, of carving it up into distinct areas, is not as straightforward as one might think. There are, for example, several different criteria by which one might fix a given boundary between brain regions. Below, I not only highlight some of the more interesting facets of brain mapping research but also elaborate on why such research is of interest to cognitive scientists. (shrink)

Mental health research faces a suite of unresolved challenges that have contributed to a stagnation of research efforts and treatment innovation. One such challenge is how to reliably and validly account for the subjective side of patient symptomatology, that is, the patient’s inner experiences or patient phenomenology. Providing a structured, standardised semantics for patient phenomenology would enable future research in novel directions. In this contribution, we aim at initiating a standardized approach to patient phenomenology by sketching a tentative formalisation (...) within the framework of an applied ontology, in the broader context of existing open-source Open Biomedical Ontologies resources such as the Mental Functioning Ontology. We further discuss a number of prevailing challenges and observations bearing on this task. (shrink)

The early documents depict Gautama’s ascent to Enlightenment in heroic and mythical proportions. Written several centuries after the fact, much of the narrative is no doubt hagiography, embellished by the creative imagination and the hindsight of doctrinal rationalizations. Nonetheless, in sum, the documents chronicle an intensely personal pilgrimage that incorporates and supersedes competing spiritual landscapes. The narrative assumes the primacy of mind and efficacy of mental concentration.

: The multifaceted nature of the map animates a wide range of debates that reveal its interdisciplinary nature. Our goal is to overcome classical cognitivism harmonizing the fields of neuroscience, geography, and enactivism to promote a holistic view not only of the map, but also of human beings and, more specifically, of the dynamic subject-world relationship. We have retraced the spatiality of the body and described the spatial dimension of implicit and explicit bodily skills and properties involved in the exploration (...) of – and engagement with – the world. We believe that maps, which present space in isolation, cannot grasp the global quality of subjective experience: space and time are not separable concepts for a cognitive agent engaged in the world. Finally, going beyond the theory of the extended mind to extended consciousness, we argue that ecological mapping, mental mapping, and practical mapping are closely interrelated. Keywords: Mapping; Enactivism; Image; Perception; Extended Consciousness Sono una mente, quindi sono una mappa. La costruzione di mappe come processo spazio-temporale esteso Riassunto: La natura poliedrica della mappa anima una vasta gamma di dibattiti che rivelano la sua natura interdisciplinare. Nostro scopo è quello di superare il cognitivismo classico, armonizzando campi quali la neuroscienza, la geografia e l’enattivimo, per promuovere una visione olistica non solo della mappa, ma anche dell’essere umano e, più specificamente, del rapporto dinamico tra soggetto e mondo. Intendiamo ripercorrere la spazialità del corpo e descrivere la dimensione spaziale delle abilità e delle proprietà corporee implicite ed esplicite implicate nell’esplorazione del – e nel coinvolgimento con – il mondo. Crediamo che le mappe, che presentano lo spazio in maniera isolata, non possono cogliere la qualità globale dell’esperienza soggettiva: lo spazio e il tempo non sono concetti separabili per un agente cognitivo coinvolto nel mondo. Infine, passando dalla teoria della mente estesa a quella della coscienza estesa, intendiamo sostenere che la creazione di mappe ecologiche, mentali e pratiche sia un’attività profondamente interconnessa. Parole chiave: Mappatura; Enattivismo; Immagine; Percezione; Coscienza estesa. (shrink)

Social transmission is at the core of cultural evolutionary theory. It occurs when a demonstrator uses mental representations to produce some public displays which in turn allow a learner to acquire similar mental representations. Although cultural evolutionists do not dispute this view of social transmission, they typically abstract away from the multistep nature of the process when they speak of cultural variants at large, thereby referring both to variation and evolutionary change in mental representations as well as (...) in their corresponding public displays. This conflation suggests that differentiating each step of the transmission process is redundant. In this paper, I examine different forms of interplay between the multistep nature of social transmission and the metric spaces used by cultural evolutionists to measure cultural variation and to model cultural change. I offer a conceptual analysis of what assumptions seem to be at work when cultural evolutionists conflate the complex causal sequence of social transmission as a single space of variation in which populations evolve. To this aim, I use the framework of variation spaces, a formal framework commonly used in evolutionary biology, and I develop two theoretical concepts, ‘technique’ and ‘technical space’, for addressing cases where the complexity of social transmission defies the handy assumption of a single variation space for cultural change. (shrink)

I argue that a critical feature of language that distinguishes it from animal communication isdisplacement,the means to communicate about the non-present. This implies a capacity for mental travels in time and space, which is the ability to call to mind past episodes, imagine future ones or purely fictitious ones, and locate them in different places. While mental travel in time, in particular, is often considered to be unique to humans, behavioral and neurophysiological evidence suggests that it is evident (...) in some form, at least, in nonhuman animals, including rodents, and may go far back in the evolution of animals that move. The linguistic capacity to share experiences that transcend space and time evolved much more recently, accelerating during the Pleistocene with increasing demands for effective cooperation and long-distance planning. The expansion of mental time travel probably co-evolved with the development of language itself, because the sharing of memories, plans, and stories vastly added to our own individual experiences. From this perspective, the critical period of the Road Map runs from the emergence of the genusHomoaround 2 million years ago to the present. (shrink)

People often make use of a spatial “mental time line” to represent events in time. We investigated whether the eyes follow such a mental time line during online language comprehension of sentences that refer to the past, present, and future. Participants' eye movements were measured on a blank screen while they listened to these sentences. Saccade direction revealed that the future is mapped higher up in space than the past. Moreover, fewer saccades were made when two events are (...) simultaneously taking place at the present moment compared to two events that are happening in different points in time. This is the first evidence that oculomotor correlates reflect mental looking along an abstract invisible time line during online language comprehension about time. Our results support the idea that observing eye movements is likely to “detect” invisible spatial scaffoldings which are involved in cognitively processing abstract meaning, even when the abstract meaning lacks an explicit spatial correlate. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed. (shrink)

Talk of ”mental representations” is ubiquitous in the philosophy of mind, psychology, and cognitive science. A slogan common to many different approaches says that representations ”stand in for” the things they represent. This slogan also attaches to most talk of "internal models" in cognitive science. We argue that this slogan is either false or uninformative. We then offer a new slogan that aims to do better. The new slogan ties the role of representations to the cognitive role played by (...) the deliverances of perception. After clarifying the new slogan and warding off some misunderstandings, we discuss how the new slogan still captures the seed of truth in the old, point to some specific misunderstandings that can be avoided, and then suggest some ways that the new slogan is useful in the project of giving a satisfying philosophical theory of representation. (shrink)