Innateness and the Situated Mind

By Robert Rupert 

Many advocates of situated approaches to the study of cognition (e.g., Griffiths and Stotz, 2000; Thelen and Smith, 1994) explicitly take exception to cognitive science’s pronounced nativist turn.

Other proponents of situated models seek to mitigate strong nativist claims, by, for example, finding ways to acknowledge innate contributions to cognitive processing while at the same time downplaying those contributions (Wilson, 2004, Chapter 3).

Still others leave implicit their apparent opposition to nativism: they emphasize the environment’s contribution to cognition so strongly as to suggest antinativist views but do not take up the issue explicitly (Clark, 1997; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1991). Thus, situated theorists have reached something approximating an antinativist consensus.

In this chapter, I argue that they should not embrace the antinativist view so readily. To this end, I divide the situated approach into two species, extended and embedded views of cognition, arguing that each version of the situated view admits of a plausible nativist interpretation with respect to at least some important cognitive phenomena.

In contrast, I also argue for the nonnativist interpretation of certain cognitive phenomena; nevertheless, these antinativist recommendations come heavily hedged -- in some cases, at the expense of a robust reading of the situated program or one of its subdivisions.

Forthcoming in P. Robbins and M. Aydede (eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition (Cambridge UP)

Source: Online Papers in Philosophy

Posted by Tony Marmo at 04:34 GMT

Updated: Friday, 9 March 2007 12:58 GMT

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A STRATEGY FOR ASSESSING CLOSURE

By Peter Murphy

This paper looks at an argument strategy for assessing the epistemic closure principle. This is the principle that says knowledge is closed under known entailment; or (roughly) if S knows p and S knows that p entails q, then S knows that q. The strategy in question looks to the individual conditions on knowledge to see if they are closed. According to one conjecture, if all the individual conditions are closed, then so too is knowledge. I give a deductive argument for this conjecture. According to a second conjecture, if one (or more) condition is not closed, then neither is knowledge. I give an inductive argument for this conjecture. In sum, I defend the strategy by defending the claim that knowledge is closed if, and only if, all the conditions on knowledge are closed. After making my case, I look at what this means for the debate over whether knowledge is closed.

Forthcoming in Erkenntnis

Posted by Tony Marmo at 17:41 BST

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Chimpanzee Theory of Mind: Looking in All the Wrong Places?

By Kristin Andrews

I respond to an argument presented by Daniel Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk that the current generation of experiments on chimpanzee theory of mind cannot decide whether chimpanzees have the ability to reason about mental states. I argue that Povinelli and Vonk's proposed experiment is subject to their own criticisms and that there should be a more radical shift away from experiments that ask subjects to predict behaviour. Further, I argue that Povinelli and Vonk's theoretical commitments should lead them to accept this new approach, and that experiments which offer subjects the opportunity to look for explanations for anomalous behaviour should be explored.

Appeared in Mind & Language, Volume 20, Issue 5, Page 521 - November 2005

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 GMT

Updated: Saturday, 12 November 2005 00:14 GMT

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Language, Logic and Ontology

— Uncovering the Structure of Commonsense Knowledge

By Walid S. Saba

The purpose of this paper is twofold:

(i) we argue that the structure of commonsense knowledge must be discovered, rather than invented;
and (ii) we argue that natural language, which is the best known theory of our (shared) commonsense knowledge, should itself be used as a guide to discovering the structure of commonsense knowledge.

In addition to suggesting a systematic method to the discovery of the structure of commonsense knowledge, the method we propose seems to also provide an explanation for a number of phenomena in natural language, such as metaphor, intensionality, and the semantics of nominal compounds. Admittedly, our ultimate goal is quite ambitious, and it is no less than the systematic ‘discovery’ of a well-typed ontology of commonsense knowledge, and the subsequent formulation of the long-awaited goal of a meaning algebra.

Source: Semantics Archive

Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST

Updated: Sunday, 18 September 2005 08:43 BST

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Inateness and Brain-Wring Optimization:

Non-genomic nativism

by Chistopher Cherniak

The study of minimization of neural connections reveals interrelations between the Innateness Hypothesis and theses associated with the Central Dogma of genetics. The discussion of innateness here shifts from the usual focus upon abstract cognitive structure instead to underlying brain hardware structure, to hardwired neuroanatomy.

Experimental work in computational neuroanatomy has uncovered distinctively efficient layout of wiring in nervous systems. When mechanisms are investigated by which such "best of all possible brains" design is attained, significant instances turn out to emerge "for free, directly from physics": Such generation of optimal brain structure appears to arise simply by exploiting basic physical processes, without need for intervention of genes. An idea that physics suffices here--of complex biological structure as self-organizing, generated without genomic activity--turns attention to the role of the genome in morphogenesis. The familiar "nature / nurture" alternatives for origins of basic internal mental structure are that it arises either from the genome or from invariants of the external environment. A third alternative is explored for the cases here, a non-genomic nativism.

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Posted by Tony Marmo at 00:01 BST

Updated: Saturday, 3 September 2005 23:07 BST

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Machine Learning and the Cognitive Basis of Natural Language

By Shalom Lappin

Machine learning and statistical methods have yielded impressive results in a wide variety of natural language processing tasks. These advances have generally been regarded as engineering achievements. In fact it is possible to argue that the success of machine learning methods is significant for our understanding of the cognitive basis of language acquisition and processing. Recent work in unsupervised grammar induction is particularly relevant to this issue. It suggests that knowledge of language can be achieved through general learning procedures, and that a richly articulated language faculty is not required to explain its acquisition.

Source: Online Papers in Philosophy

Posted by Tony Marmo at 17:20 BST

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Reference Determination and Conceptual Change

By Ingo Brigandt

The paper discusses reference determination from the point of view of conceptual change in science. The first part of the discussion uses the homology concept, a natural kind term from biology, as an example. It is argued that the causal theory of reference gives an incomplete account of reference determination even in the case of natural kind terms. Moreover, even if descriptions of the referent are taken into account, this does not yield a satisfactory account of reference in the case of the homology concept. I suggest that in addition to the factors that standard theories of reference invoke the scientific use of concepts and the epistemic interests pursued with concepts are important factors in determining the reference of scientific concepts. In the second part, I argue for a moderate holism about reference determination according to which the set of conditions that determine the reference of a concept is relatively open and different conditions may be reference fixing depending on the context in which this concept is used. It is also suggested that which features are reference determining in a particular case may depend on the philosophical interests that underlie reference ascription and the study of conceptual change.

Source: Online Papers in Philosophy

Posted by Tony Marmo at 07:20 BST

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Knowledge and Explanation

By Carrie Jenkins

In this paper I attempt a project of this kind. I propose a necessary and sufficient condition for A knows that p which is, although recognizably similar to the traditional sets of conditions, arguably immune to the kind of counterexample which tends to deter philosophers from thinking that any illuminating conditions can be found. I present this condition, however, not as an analysis of knowledge, but rather as a way of getting a handle on the concept and furthering the effort to understand what its role in our lives might be. Taken in this spirit, the current proposal is not at odds with the principles that motivate Craig?s view.
In denying my proposal the status of a reductive analysis, I am mindful of the fact that it will tell us little more than that knowledge is ?non-accidental true belief?. What it offers is a (hopefully fruitful) way of spelling out what is meant by ?non-accidental? in this context. In what follows, I shall write ?KAp? for ?A knows that p? and ?BAp? for ?A believes that p.? I shall propose that KAp just in case BAp and it can be said (under specific circumstances, to be described shortly) that A believes p because p is true. But this is not a causal account of knowledge. The ?because? signals not causation, but explanation.

To appear in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy
Source: Online Papers in Philosophy

Posted by Tony Marmo at 17:41 BST

Updated: Wednesday, 1 June 2005 17:53 BST

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