The question of whether non-human animals are conscious is of fundamental importance. There are already good reasons to think that many are, based on evolutionary continuity and other considerations. However, the hypothesis is notoriously resistant to direct empirical test. Numerous studies have shown behaviour in animals analogous to consciously-produced human behaviour. Fewer probe whether the same mechanisms are in use. One promising line of evidence about consciousness in other animals derives from experiments on metamemory. A study by Hampton (Proc Natl (...) Acad Sci USA 98(9):5359–5362, 2001) suggests that at least one rhesus macaque can use metamemory to predict whether it would itself succeed on a delayed matching-to-sample task. Since it is not plausible that mere meta-representation requires consciousness, Hampton’s study invites an important question: what kind of metamemory is good evidence for consciousness? This paper argues that if it were found that an animal had a memory trace which allowed it to use information about a past perceptual stimulus to inform a range of different behaviours, that would indeed be good evidence that the animal was conscious. That functional characterisation can be tested by investigating whether successful performance on one metamemory task transfers to a range of new tasks. The paper goes on to argue that thinking about animal consciousness in this way helps in formulating a more precise functional characterisation of the mechanisms of conscious awareness. (shrink)

The human mind is extraordinary in its ability not merely to respond to events as they unfold but also to adapt its own operation in pursuit of its agenda. This ‘cognitive control’ can be achieved through simple interactions among sensorimotor processes, and through interactions in which one sensorimotor process represents a property of another in an implicit, unconscious way. So why does the human mind also represent properties of cognitive processes in an explicit way, enabling us to think and say (...) ‘I’m sure’ or ‘I’m doubtful’? We suggest that ‘system 2 metacognition’ is for supra-personal cognitive control. It allows metacognitive information to be broadcast, and thereby to coordinate the sensorimotor systems of two or more agents involved in a shared task. (shrink)

Metacognition – the ability to represent, monitor and control ongoing cognitive processes – helps us perform many tasks, both when acting alone and when working with others. While metacognition is adaptive, and found in other animals, we should not assume that all human forms of metacognition are gene-based adaptations. Instead, some forms may have a social origin, including the discrimination, interpretation, and broadcasting of metacognitive representations. There is evidence that each of these abilities depends on cultural learning and therefore that (...) cultural selectionmight shape humanmetacognition. The cultural origins hypothesis is a plausible and testable alternative that directs us towards a substantial new programme of research. (shrink)

The question of whether non-human animals are conscious is of fundamental importance. There are already good reasons to think that many are, based on evolutionary continuity and other considerations. However, the hypothesis is notoriously resistant to direct empirical test. Numerous studies have shown behaviour in animals analogous to consciously-produced human behaviour. Fewer probe whether the same mechanisms are in use. One promising line of evidence about consciousness in other animals derives from experiments on metamemory. A study by Hampton (Proc Natl (...) Acad Sci USA 98(9):5359–5362, 2001 ) suggests that at least one rhesus macaque can use metamemory to predict whether it would itself succeed on a delayed matching-to-sample task. Since it is not plausible that mere meta-representation requires consciousness, Hampton’s study invites an important question: what kind of metamemory is good evidence for consciousness? This paper argues that if it were found that an animal had a memory trace which allowed it to use information about a past perceptual stimulus to inform a range of different behaviours, that would indeed be good evidence that the animal was conscious. That functional characterisation can be tested by investigating whether successful performance on one metamemory task transfers to a range of new tasks. The paper goes on to argue that thinking about animal consciousness in this way helps in formulating a more precise functional characterisation of the mechanisms of conscious awareness. (shrink)

How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.

1. Properties of mirror neurons in monkeys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (...) . . . 000 1.1. Action types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 000 1.2. Context effects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 000 2. Is there a human ‘mirror neuron system’? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 000 2.1. Monkeys versus humans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 000 2.2. Action understanding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 000 3. The development of mirroring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 000 3.1. Imitation in newborns? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 000 3.2. Effects of experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 000 3.3. Effects of sensorimotor experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. (shrink)

Since the BBS article in which Premack and Woodruff (1978) asked “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?,” it has been repeatedly claimed that there is observational and experimental evidence that apes have mental state concepts, such as “want” and “know.” Unlike research on the development of theory of mind in childhood, however, no substantial progress has been made through this work with nonhuman primates. A survey of empirical studies of imitation, self-recognition, social relationships, deception, role-taking, and perspective-taking suggests (...) that in every case where nonhuman primate behavior has been interpreted as a sign of theory of mind, it could instead have occurred by chance or as a product of nonmentalistic processes such as associative learning or inferences based on nonmental categories. Arguments to the effect that, in spite of this, the theory of mind hypothesis should be accepted because it is more parsimonious than alternatives or because it is supported by convergent evidence are not compelling. Such arguments are based on unsupportable assumptions about the role of parsimony in science and either ignore the requirement that convergent evidence proceed from independent assumptions, or fail to show that it supports the theory of mind hypothesis over nonmentalist alternatives. Progress in research on theory of mind requires experimental procedures that can distinguish the theory of mind hypothesis from nonmentalist alternatives. A procedure that may have this potential is proposed. It uses conditional discrimination training and transfer tests to determine whether chimpanzees have the concept “see.” Commentators are invited to identify flaws in the procedure and to suggest alternatives. Key Words: apes; associative learning; concepts; convergence; deception; evolution of intelligence; folk psychology; imitation; mental state attribution; monkeys; parsimony; perspective-taking; primates; role-taking; self-recognition; social cognition; social intelligence; theory of mind. (shrink)

Dennett, a philosopher, and Griffin, an ethologist, have recently presented influential arguments promoting the extended use of intentional language by students of animal behavior. This essay seeks to elucidate and to contrast the claims made by each of these authors, and to evaluate their proposals primarily from the perspective of a practicing comparative psychologist or ethologist. While Griffin regards intentional terms as explanatory, Dennett assigns them a descriptive function; the issue of animal consciousness is central to Griffin's program and only (...) tangentially related to Dennett's. The philosopher's arguments are founded upon a more coherent metaphysics, but Dennett neglects to substantiate his claim that animal competences can be most readily modelled by artificial intelligence specialists when they are described in intentional terms. Both authors assume that some examples of animal behavior should not be given an intentional characterization, but neither provides adequate guidelines for the identification of cases belonging to this negative set. (shrink)

In their constructive reviews, Frances Egan, Randy Gallistel and Steven Gross have raised some important problems for the account of content advanced by Nicholas Shea in Representation in Cognitive Science. Here the author addresses their main challenges. Egan argues that the account includes an unrecognised pragmatic element; and that it makes contents explanatorily otiose. Gallistel raises questions about homomorphism and correlational information. Gross puts the account to work to resolve a dispute about probabilistic contents in perception, but argues (...) that a question remains about whether probabilities are found in the content or instead in the manner of representation. (shrink)

Cognitive gadgets are distinctively human cognitive mechanisms – such as imitation, mind reading, and language – that have been shaped by cultural rather than genetic evolution. New gadgets emerge, not by genetic mutation, but by innovations in cognitive development; they are specialised cognitive mechanisms built by general cognitive mechanisms using information from the sociocultural environment. Innovations are passed on to subsequent generations, not by DNA replication, but through social learning: People with new cognitive mechanisms pass them on to others through (...) social interaction. Some of the new mechanisms, like literacy, have spread through human populations, while others have died out, because the holders had more students, not just more babies. The cognitive gadgets hypothesis is developed through four case studies, drawing on evidence from comparative and developmental psychology, experimental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. The framework employed – cultural evolutionary psychology, a descendant of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory – addresses parallel issues across the cognitive and behavioural sciences. In common with evolutionary developmental biology and the extended evolutionary synthesis, cultural evolutionary psychology underlines the importance of developmental processes and environmental factors in the emergence of human cognition. In common with computational approaches, it emphasises the power of general-purpose mechanisms of learning. Cultural evolutionary psychology, however, also challenges use of the behavioural gambit in economics and behavioural ecology, and rejects the view that human minds are composed of “innate modules” or “cognitive instincts.”. (shrink)

What is the relationship between imitation and culture? This article charts how definitions of imitation have changed in the last century, distinguishes three senses of “culture” used by contemporary evolutionists (Culture1–Culture3), and summarises current disagreement about the relationship between imitation and culture. The disagreement arises from ambiguities in the distinction between imitation and emulation, and confusion between two explanatory projects—the anthropocentric project and the cultural selection project. I argue that imitation gives cultural evolution an inheritance mechanism for communicative and gestural (...) skills (but not technological skills), and cultural selection yields the cognitive mechanisms that make imitation possible. (shrink)

Responding to Allen and Bekoff's (this issue) critique of Heyes and Dickinson's (1990) analysis of the intentionality of animal action, we reiterate that our approach does not assume that a hypothesis can be definitively falsified by the results of a single experiment, and argue that the evolutionary analysis favoured by Allen and Bekoff insulates intentional accounts of animal behaviour from rejection in the usual‘holistic’process of scientific evaluation. Specifically, we present data showing that the maintenance of behaviour on an omission (...) schedule cannot be construed as rational because on these schedules it is reward for withdrawal that restores approach. In addition, we argue that, since behaviour can be affected by the non‐intentional properties of representations such as search images and cognitive maps, whether or not these representations have intentional properties can be assessed empirically only through research on instrumental behaviour. (shrink)

Top scholars examine the work of Donald T. Campbell, one of the first to emphasize the social structure of science.

This paper sets out a view about the explanatory role of representational content and advocates one approach to naturalising content – to giving a naturalistic account of what makes an entity a representation and in virtue of what it has the content it does. It argues for pluralism about the metaphysics of content and suggests that a good strategy is to ask the content question with respect to a variety of predictively successful information processing models in experimental psychology and cognitive (...) neuroscience; and hence that data from psychology and cognitive neuroscience should play a greater role in theorising about the nature of content. Finally, the contours of the view are illustrated by drawing out and defending a surprising consequence: that individuation of vehicles of content is partly externalist. (shrink)

Our understanding of communication and its evolution has advanced significantly through the study of simple models involving interacting senders and receivers of signals. Many theorists have thought that the resources of mathematical information theory are all that are needed to capture the meaning or content that is being communicated in these systems. However, the way theorists routinely talk about the models implicitly draws on a conception of content that is richer than bare informational content, especially in contexts where false content (...) is important. This article shows that this concept can be made precise by defining a notion of functional content that captures the degree to which different states of the world are involved in stabilizing senders’ and receivers’ use of a signal at equilibrium. A series of case studies is used to contrast functional content with informational content, and to illustrate the explanatory role and limitations of this definition of functional content. _1_ Introduction _2_ Modelling Framework _3_ Two Kinds of Content _3.1_ Informational content _3.2_ Functional content _4_ Cases _4.1_ Case 1: Simplest case _4.2_ Case 2: Partial pooling _4.3_ Case 3: Bottleneck _4.4_ Case 4: Partial common interest _4.5_ Case 5: Deception _4.6_ Case 6: A further problem arising from divergent interests _5_ Discussion Appendix. (shrink)

1. Introduction 2. Reward-Guided Decision Making 3. Content in the Model 4. How to Deflate a Metarepresentational Reading Proust and Carruthers on metacognitive feelings 5. A Deflationary Treatment of RPEs? 5.1 Dispensing with prediction errors 5.2 What is use of the RPE focused on? 5.3 Alternative explanations—worldly correlates 5.4 Contrast cases 6. Conclusion Appendix: Temporal Difference Learning Algorithms.

Responding to commentaries from psychologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and anthropologists, I clarify a central purpose of Cognitive Gadgets – to overcome “cognition blindness” in research on human evolution. I defend this purpose against Brunerian, extended mind, and niche construction critiques of computationalism – that is, views prioritising meaning over information, or asserting that behaviour and objects can be intrinsic parts of a thinking process. I argue that empirical evidence from cognitive science is needed to locate distinctively human cognitive mechanisms on the (...) continuum between gadgets and instincts. Focussing on that requirement, I also address specific challenges, and applaud extensions and refinements, of the evidence surveyed in my book. It has been said that “a writer's idea of sound criticism is ten thousand words of closely reasoned adulation.” I cannot disagree with this untraceable wag, but the 30 commentators on Cognitive Gadgets provided some 30,000 words of criticism that are of much greater scientific value than adulation. I am grateful to them all. The response that follows is V-shaped. It starts with the broadest conceptual and methodological issues and funnels down to matters arising from specific empirical studies. (shrink)

The success of a piece of behaviour is often explained by its being caused by a true representation (similarly, failure falsity). In some simple organisms, success is just survival and reproduction. Scientists explain why a piece of behaviour helped the organism to survive and reproduce by adverting to the behaviour’s having been caused by a true representation. That usage should, if possible, be vindicated by an adequate naturalistic theory of content. Teleosemantics cannot do so, when it is applied to simple (...) representing systems (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Here it is argued that the teleosemantic approach to content should therefore be modified, not abandoned, at least for simple representing systems. The new ‘infotel-semantics’ adds an input condition to the output condition offered by teleosemantics, recognising that it is constitutive of content in a simple representing system that the tokening of a representation should correlate probabilistically with the obtaining of its specific evolutionary success condition. (shrink)

Research on concepts has concentrated on the way people apply concepts online, when presented with a stimulus. Just as important, however, is the use of concepts offline, when planning what to do or thinking about what is the case. There is strong evidence that inferences driven by conceptual thought draw heavily on special-purpose resources: sensory, motoric, affective, and evaluative. At the same time, concepts afford general-purpose recombination and support domain-general reasoning processes—phenomena that have long been the focus of philosophers. There (...) is a growing consensus that a theory of concepts must encompass both kinds of process. This book shows how concepts are able to act as an interface between general-purpose reasoning and special-purpose systems. Concept-driven thinking can take advantage of the complementary costs and benefits of each. The book lays out an empirically-based account of the different ways in which thinking with concepts takes us to new conclusions and underpins planning, decision-making, and action. It also spells out three useful implications of the account. First, it allows us to reconstruct the commonplace idea that thinking draws on the meaning of a concept. Second, it offers an insight into how human cognition avoids the frame problem and the complementary, less discussed, ‘if-then problem’ for nested processing dispositions. Third, it shows that metacognition can apply to concepts and concept-driven thinking in various ways. The framework developed in the book elucidates what it is that makes concept-driven thinking an especially powerful cognitive resource. (shrink)

Cognitive Gadgets is a book about the cultural evolution of distinctively human cognitive mechanisms. Responding to commentators with different and broader interests, I argue that intelligent design has been more important in the formation of grist (technologies, practices and ideas) than of mills (cognitive mechanisms), and that embracing genetic accommodation would leave research on the origins of human cognition empirically unconstrained. I also underline the need to assess empirical methods; query the value of theories that merely accommodate existing data; and (...) ask whether acquiring literacy is more laborious than learning to imitate, to talk and to read minds. (shrink)

An interesting feature of some sets of representations is that their structure mirrors the structure of the items they represent. Founding an account of representational content on isomorphism, homomorphism or structural resemblance has proven elusive, however, largely because these relations are too liberal when the candidate structure over representational vehicles is unconstrained. Furthermore, in many cases where there is a clear isomorphism, it is not relied on in the way the representations are used. That points to a potential resolution: that (...) an isomorphism must be used, hence usable, if it is to be an ingredient in a theory of content. This paper argues that the class of exploitable isomorphisms can indeed play a content-constituting role. (shrink)

There is ongoing controversy as to whether the genome is a representing system. Although it is widely recognised that DNA carries information, both correlating with and coding for various outcomes, neither of these implies that the genome has semantic properties like correctness or satisfaction conditions, In the Scope of Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Sciences, Vol. II. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 387–400). Here a modified version of teleosemantics is applied to the genome to show that it does indeed have semantic (...) properties – there is representation in the genome. The account differs in three respects from previous attempts to apply teleosemantics to genes. It emphasises the role of the consumer of representations. It rejects the standard assumption that genetic representation can be used to explain the course of an organism’s development. And it identifies the explanatory role played by representational properties of the genome. A striking consequence of this account is that other inheritance systems could also be representational. Thus, a version of the parity thesis is accepted. However, the criteria for being an inheritance system are demanding, so semantic properties are not ubiquitous. (shrink)

Consciousness in experimental subjects is typically inferred from reports and other forms of voluntary behaviour. A wealth of everyday experience confirms that healthy subjects do not ordinarily behave in these ways unless they are conscious. Investigation of consciousness in vegetative state patients has been based on the search for neural evidence that such broad functional capacities are preserved in some vegetative state patients. We call this the standard approach. To date, the results of the standard approach have suggested that some (...) vegetative state patients might indeed be conscious, although they fall short of being demonstrative. The fact that some vegetative state patients show evidence of consciousness according to the standard approach is remarkable, for the standard approach to consciousness is rather conservative, and leaves open the pressing question of how to ascertain whether patients who fail such tests are conscious or not. We argue for a cluster-based ‘natural kind’ methodology that is adequate to that task, both as a replacement for the approach that currently informs research into the presence or absence of consciousness in vegetative state patients and as a methodology for the science of consciousness more generally. 1. Introduction2. The Vegetative State3. The Standard Approach4. The Natural Kind Methodology5. Is Consciousness a Special Case? 5.1 Is consciousness a natural kind?5.2 A special obstacle?6. Conclusion. (shrink)

The distinction between top-down and bottom-up effects is widely relied on in experimental psychology. However, there is an important problem with the way it is normally defined. Top-down effects are effects of previously-stored information on processing the current input. But on the face of it that includes the information that is implicit in the operation of any psychological process – in its dispositions to transition from some types of representational state to others. This paper suggests a way to distinguish information (...) stored in that way from the kind of influence of prior information that psychologists are concerned to classify as a top-down effect. So-drawn, the distinction is not just of service to theoretical psychology. Asking about the extent of top-down processing is one way to pose some of the questions at issue in philosophical debates about cognitive penetrability – about the extent of the influence of cognitive states on perception. The existence of a theoretically-useful perception-cognition distinction has come under pressure, but even if it has to be abandoned, some of the concerns addressed in the cognitive penetrability literature can be recaptured by asking about the extent of top-down influences on any given psychological process. That formulation is more general, since it can be applied to any psychological process, not just those that are paradigmatically perceptual. (shrink)

This paper advocates explicitness about the type of entity to be considered as content- bearing in connectionist systems; it makes a positive proposal about how vehicles of content should be individuated; and it deploys that proposal to argue in favour of representation in connectionist systems. The proposal is that the vehicles of content in some connectionist systems are clusters in the state space of a hidden layer. Attributing content to such vehicles is required to vindicate the standard explanation for some (...) classificatory networks’ ability to generalise to novel samples their correct classification of the samples on which they were trained. (shrink)

The conjunctive conception takes imitation to be a combination of observational learning and copying. In the target article, and elsewhere, this conception generates problems in (1) explaining the copying of intransitive actions, (2) elucidating the potential functions of imitation, and (3) recognising when the correspondence problem has been avoided rather than solved. Hurley's careful use of subpersonal and personal levels of explanation shows us how to tackle these and other questions about imitation.

Recent theoretical work has identified a tightly-constrained sense in which genes carry representational content. Representational properties of the genome are founded in the transmission of DNA over phylogenetic time and its role in natural selection. However, genetic representation is not just relevant to questions of selection and evolution. This paper goes beyond existing treatments and argues for the heterodox view that information generated by a process of selection over phylogenetic time can be read in ontogenetic time, in the course of (...) individual development. Recent results in evolutionary biology, drawn both from modelling work, and from experimental and observational data, support a role for genetic representation in explaining individual ontogeny: both genetic representations and environmental information are read by the mechanisms of development, in an individual, so as to lead to adaptive phenotypes. Furthermore, in some cases there appears to have been selection between individuals that rely to different degrees on the two sources of information. Thus, the theory of representation in inheritance systems like the genome is much more than just a coherent reconstruction of information talk in biology. Genetic representation is a property with considerable explanatory utility. (shrink)

Developmental Systems Theory (DST) emphasises the importance of non-genetic factors in development and their relevance to evolution. A common, deflationary reaction is that it has long been appreciated that non-genetic factors are causally indispensable. This paper argues that DST can be reformulated to make a more substantive claim: that the special role played by genes is also played by some (but not all) non-genetic resources. That special role is to transmit inherited representations, in the sense of Shea (2007: Biology (...) and Philosophy, 22, 313-331). Formulating DST as the claim that there are non-genetic inherited representations turns it into a striking, empirically-testable hypothesis, driving the sort of investigations that are only now beginning to appear in the scientific literature. DST’s characteristic rejection of a gene vs. environment dichotomy is preserved, but without dissolving all potentially explanatory distinctions into an interactionist causal soup, as some have alleged. (shrink)

Research on ‘moral learning’ examines the roles of domain-general processes, such as Bayesian inference and reinforcement learning, in the development of moral beliefs and values. Alert to the power of these processes, and equipped with both the analytic resources of philosophy and the empirical methods of psychology, ‘moral learners’ are ideally placed to discover the contributions of nature, nurture and culture to moral development. However, I argue that to achieve these objectives research on moral learning needs to overcome nativist bias, (...) and distinguish two kinds of social learning: learning from and learning about. An agent learns from others when there is transfer of competence—what the learner learns is similar to, and causally dependent on, what the model knows. When an agent learns about the social world there is no transfer of competence—observable features of other agents are just the content of what-is-learned. Even learning from does not require explicit instruction. A novice can learn from an expert who is ‘leaking’ her morality in the form of emotionally charged behaviour or involuntary use of vocabulary. To the extent that moral development depends on learning from other agents, there is the potential for cultural selection of moral beliefs and values. (shrink)

Millikan’s theory of content purports to rely heavily on the existence of isomorphisms between a system of representations and the things in the world which they represent — “the mapping requirement for being intentional signs” (Millikan 2004, p. 106). This paper asks whether those isomorphisms are doing any substantive explanatory work. Millikan’s isomorphism requirement is deployed for two main purposes. First, she claims that the existence of an isomorphism is the basic representing relation, with teleology playing a subsidiary role — (...) to account for misrepresentation (the possibility of error). Second, Millikan relies on an isomorphism requirement in order to guarantee that a system of representations displays a kind of productivity. This seemingly strong reliance on isomorphism has prompted the objection that isomorphism is too liberal to be the basic representing relation: there are isomorphisms between any system of putative representations and any set, of the same cardinality, of items putatively represented. This paper argues that all the work in fixing content is in fact done by the teleology. Deploying Millikan’s teleology-based conditions to ascribe contents will ensure that there is an isomorphism between representations and the things they represent, but the isomorphism ‘requirement’ is playing no substantive explanatory role in Millikan’s account of content determination. So an objection to her theory based on the liberality of isomorphism is misplaced. The second role for isomorphism is to account for productivity. If some kind of productivity is indeed necessary for representation, then functional isomorphism will again be too liberal a constraint to account for that feature. The paper suggests an alternative way of specifying the relation between a system of representations and that which they represent which is capable of playing an explanatory role in accounting for Millikan’s type of productivity. In short, the liberality of isomorphism is no objection to Millikan’s teleosemantics, since the isomorphism ‘requirement’ need play no independent substantive role in Millikan’s account of representation. (shrink)

Can findings from psychology and cognitive neuroscience about the neural mechanisms involved in decision-making can tell us anything useful about the commonly-understood mental phenomenon of making voluntary choices? Two philosophical objections are considered. First, that the neural data is subpersonal, and so cannot enter into illuminating explanations of personal level phenomena like voluntary action. Secondly, that mental properties are multiply realized in the brain in such a way as to make them insusceptible to neuroscientific study. The paper argues that both (...) objections would be weakened by the discovery of empirical generalisations connecting subpersonal properties with the personal level. It gives three case studies that furnish evidence to that effect. It argues that the existence of such interrelations are consistent with a plausible construal of the personal-subpersonal distinction. Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that the notion subpersonal representation relied on in cognitive neuroscience illicitly imports personal-level phenomena like consciousness or normativity, or is otherwise explanatorily problematic. (shrink)

Block’s well-known distinction between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness has generated a large philosophical literature about putative conceptual connections between the two. The scientific literature about whether they come apart in any actual cases is rather smaller. Empirical evidence gathered to date has not settled the issue. Some put this down to a fundamental methodological obstacle to the empirical study of the relation between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness. Block (2007) has drawn attention to the methodological puzzle and attempted to (...) answer it. While the evidence Block points to is relevant and important, this paper puts forward a more systematic framework for addressing the puzzle. To give it a label, the approach is to study phenomenal consciousness as a natural kind. The approach allows consciousness studies to move beyond the initial means of identifying instances of the kind, like verbal report, and to find its underlying nature. It is wellrecognised that facts about an underlying kind may allow identification of instances of the kind that do not match the initial means of identification (cp. non-liquid samples of water). This paper shows that the same method can be deployed to investigate phenomenal consciousness independently of access consciousness. (shrink)

Cultural evolution depends on both innovation (the creation of new cultural variants by accident or design) and high-fidelity transmission (which preserves our accumulated knowledge and allows the storage of normative conventions). What is required is an overarching theory encompassing both dimensions, specifying the psychological motivations and mechanisms involved. The bifocal stance theory (BST) of cultural evolution proposes that the co-existence of innovative change and stable tradition results from our ability to adopt different motivational stances flexibly during social learning and transmission. (...) We argue that the ways in which instrumental and ritual stances are adopted in cultural transmission influence the nature and degree of copying fidelity and thus also patterns of cultural spread and stability at a population level over time. BST creates a unifying framework for interpreting the findings of otherwise seemingly disparate areas of enquiry, including social learning, cumulative culture, overimitation, and ritual performance. We discuss the implications of BST for competing by-product accounts which assume that faithful copying is merely a side-effect of instrumental learning and action parsing. We also set out a novel “cultural action framework” bringing to light aspects of social learning that have been relatively neglected by behavioural ecologists and evolutionary psychologists and establishing a roadmap for future research on this topic. The BST framework sheds new light on the cognitive underpinnings of cumulative cultural change, selection, and spread within an encompassing evolutionary framework. (shrink)

A basic deep neural network (DNN) is trained to exhibit a large set of input–output dispositions. While being a good model of the way humans perform some tasks automatically, without deliberative reasoning, more is needed to approach human‐like artificial intelligence. Analysing recent additions brings to light a distinction between two fundamentally different styles of computation: content‐specific and non‐content‐specific computation (as first defined here). For example, deep episodic RL networks draw on both. So does human conceptual reasoning. Combining the two takes (...) advantage of the complementary costs and benefits of each. It also offers a better model of human cognitive competence. (shrink)

Ruth Millikan has hypothesised that human cognition contains ‘consistency testers’. Consistency testers check whether different judgements a thinker makes about the same subject matter agree or conflict. Millikan’s suggestion is that, where the same concept has been applied to the world via two routes, and the two judgements that result are found to be inconsistent, that makes the thinker less inclined to apply those concepts in those ways in the future. If human cognition does indeed include such a capacity, its (...) operation will be an important determinant of how people use concepts. It will have a major impact on which concepts they deploy and which means of application (conceptions) they rely on. Since consistency testers are a selection mechanism at the heart of conceptual thinking, they would be crucial to understanding how concepts are selected – why some are retained and proliferate and others die out. Hence, whether consistency testers for concepts exist, and how they operate, is an important question for those seeking to understand the cultural evolution of concepts, and of the words we use to express them. (shrink)

A step towards a theory of consciousness would be to characterise the effect of consciousness on information processing. One set of results suggests that the effect of consciousness is to interfere with computations that are optimally performed non-consciously. Another set of results suggests that conscious, system 2 processing is the home of norm-compliant computation. This is contrasted with system 1 processing, thought to be typically unconscious, which operates with useful but error-prone heuristics. -/- These results can be reconciled by separating (...) out two different distinctions: between conscious and non-conscious representations, on the one hand, and between automatic and deliberate processes, on the other. This pair of distinctions is used to illuminate some existing experimental results and to resolve the puzzle about whether consciousness helps or hinders accurate information processing. This way of resolving the puzzle shows the importance of another category, which we label ‘type 0 cognition’, characterised by automatic computational processes operating on non-conscious representations. (shrink)

Research on concepts has focused on categorization. Categorization starts with a stimulus. Equally important are episodes that start with a thought. We engage in thinking to draw out new consequences from stored information, or to work out how to act. Each of the concepts out of which thought is constructed provides access to a large body of stored information. Access is not always just a matter of retrieving a stored belief (semantic memory). Often it depends on running a simulation. Simulation (...) allows conceptual thought to draw on information in special-purpose systems, information stored in special-purpose computational dispositions and special-purpose representational structures. While the utility of simulation, prospection or imagination is widely appreciated, the role of concepts in the process is not well understood. This paper turns to cognitive and computational neuroscience for a model of how simulations enable thinkers to reach novel conclusions. Carried over to conceptual thought, the model suggests that concepts are ‘plug & play’ devices. The distinctive power of thought-driven simulation derives from the ability of concepts to plug into two kinds of structure at once: the combinatorial structure of a thought at one end and special-purpose structural representations at the other. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Concepts in interaction: social engagement and inner experiences’. (shrink)

What makes fast, cumulative cultural evolution work? Where did it come from? Why is it the sole preserve of humans? We set out a self-assembly hypothesis: cultural evolution evolved culturally. We present an evolutionary account that shows this hypothesis to be coherent, plausible, and worthy of further investigation. It has the following steps: (0) in common with other animals, early hominins had significant capacity for social learning; (1) knowledge and skills learned by offspring from their parents began to spread because (...) bearers had more offspring, a process we call CS1 (or Cultural Selection 1); (2) CS1 shaped attentional learning biases; (3) these attentional biases were augmented by explicit learning biases (judgements about what should be copied from whom). Explicit learning biases enabled (4) the high-fidelity, exclusive copying required for fast cultural accumulation of knowledge and skills by a process we call CS2 (or Cultural Selection 2), and (5) the emergence of cognitive processes such as imitation, mindreading and metacognition – ‘cognitive gadgets’ specialised for cultural learning. This self-assembly hypothesis is consistent with archaeological evidence that the stone tools used by early hominins were not dependent on fast, cumulative cultural evolution, and suggests new priorities for research on ‘animal culture’. (shrink)

Concepts are our tools for thinking. They enable us to engage in explicit reasoning about things in the world. Like physical tools, they can be more or less good, given the ways we use them – more or less dependable for categorisation, learning, induction, action-planning, and so on. Do concept users appreciate, explicitly or implicitly, that concepts vary in dependability? Do they feel that some concepts are in some way defective? If so, we metacognize our concepts. One example that has (...) been studied is a person’s judgement about how well they have learnt a new category. There are many other forms that concept-metacognition could take. This paper offers a preliminary taxonomy of different forms of metacognition directed at concepts. It suggests that concept-metacognition may affect the way one concept from a range of candidates is selected for use, and the way a concept is relied on in reasoning. Concept-metacognition may also play a pivotal role in the social process of constructing concepts, in replacing the old and constructing the new tools for thinking. (shrink)

The New Thinking contained in this volume rejects an Evolutionary Psychology that is committed to innate domain-specific psychological mechanisms: gene-based adaptations that are unlearnt, developmentally fixed and culturally universal. But the New Thinking does not simply deny the importance of innate psychological traits. The problem runs deeper: the concept of innateness is not suited to distinguishing between the two positions. That points to a more serious problem with the concept of innateness as it is applied to human psychological phenotypes. This (...) paper argues that the features of recent human evolution highlighted by the New Thinking imply that the concept of inherited representation, set out here, is a better tool for theorising about human cognitive evolution. (shrink)