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Fear beyond danger Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Frédérique de Vignemont
Many agree that the more we feel that we can handle a given situation, the less afraid we are. But why? Is the situation no longer dangerous or is fear a response to more than danger? Here I analyze situations in which one reacts in cold blood to danger and argue that the formal object of fear is not the dangerous, but the unsafe. The unsafe indicates not only how the world is, but also how it can
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Alethic modality is deontic Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Qiong Wu
According to one view of alethic modality, alethic modality is deontic modality with respect to thoughts or language. To say that something is necessary is to prescribe norms on how we must think or use language. This view has been argued to have many philosophical advantages over the traditional view that takes alethic modality to describe things in the world. In this article, I argue that the deontic
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Shared semantics: Exploring the interface between human and chimpanzee gestural communication Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Mathew Henderson, Patrick G. Grosz, Kirsty E. Graham, Catherine Hobaiter, Pritty Patel‐Grosz
Striking similarities across ape gestural repertoires suggest shared phylogenetic origins that likely provided a foundation for the emergence of language. We pilot a novel approach for exploring possible semantic universals across human and nonhuman ape species. In a forced‐choice task, n = 300 participants watched 10 chimpanzee gesture forms performed by a human and chose from responses that paralleled
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The definition of assertion: Commitment and truth Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-01-28 Neri Marsili
According to an influential view, asserting a proposition involves undertaking some “commitment” to the truth of that proposition. But accounts of what it is for someone to be committed to the truth of a proposition are often vague or imprecise, and are rarely put to work to define assertion. This article aims to fill this gap. It offers a precise characterisation of assertoric commitment, and applies
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Generic cognition: A neglected source of context sensitivity Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-01-24 Mahrad Almotahari
What is the relationship between the claim that generics articulate psychologically primitive generalizations and the claim that they exhibit a unique form of context sensitivity? This article maintains that the two claims are compatible. It develops and defends an overlooked form of contextualism grounded in the idiosyncrasies of system 1 thought.
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Perception's objects, border, and epistemic role: Comments on Christopher Hill's Perceptual experience Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Zoe Jenkin
Christopher Hill's book Perceptual experience argues for a representational theory of mind that is grounded in empirical psychology. I focus here on three aspects of Hill's picture: The objects of visual awareness, the perception/cognition border, and the epistemic role of perceptual experience. I introduce challenges to Hill's account and consider ways these challenges may be overcome.
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Hill on perceptual relativity and perceptual error Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 E. J. Green
Christopher Hill's Perceptual experience is a must-read for philosophers of mind and cognitive science. Here I consider Hill's representationalist account of spatial perception. I distinguish two theses defended in the book. The first is that perceptual experience does not represent the enduring, intrinsic properties of objects, such as intrinsic shape or size. The second is that perceptual experience
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Hill on perceptual contents, Thouless properties, and representational pluralism Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Jack C. Lyons
Part of a symposium on Christopher Hill's book, Perceptual experience. Hill argues that perceptual experiences typically represent objects as having exotic properties that he calls Thouless properties. This and his representational pluralism allow him to attribute less perceptual error than the view that experiences represent simple relational properties (only). However, I think it is plausible that
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Replies to E. J. Green, Zoe Jenkin, and Jack Lyons Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Christopher S. Hill
I argue for three claims. (1) The phenomenology of visual experience is exhausted by awareness of appearance properties (i.e., certain constantly changing characteristics of external objects that are relational and viewpoint-dependent). (2) Cognition differs from perception in that it has a purely discursive or linguistic dimension, whereas perception is pervasively analog and iconic; but this does
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The acquisition of generics Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 James Ravi Kirkpatrick
It has been argued that the primary acquisition of genericity in early child speech poses a problem for standard quantificational approaches to generics and instead motivates the claim that generics give voice to an innate, default mode of generalising. This article argues that analogous puzzles involving the acquisition of A-quantifiers undermine the empirical support for a purely cognition-based
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“All animals are conscious”: Shifting the null hypothesis in consciousness science Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Kristin Andrews
The marker approach is taken as best practice for answering the distribution question: Which animals are conscious? However, the methodology can be used to increase confidence in animals many presume to be unconscious, including C. elegans, leading to a trilemma: accept the worms as conscious; reject the specific markers; or reject the marker methodology for answering the distribution question. I defend
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Pictorial syntax Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2024-01-02 Kevin J. Lande
It is commonly assumed that images, whether in the world or in the head, do not have a privileged analysis into constituent parts. They are thought to lack the sort of syntactic structure necessary for representing complex contents and entering into sophisticated patterns of inference. I reject this assumption. “Image grammars” are models in computer vision that articulate systematic principles governing
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Hunger, homeostasis, and desire Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-12-13 Mohan Matthen
Hunger is a psychological state that serves physiological energy homeostasis. I argue that it is a pure underived desire to eat and examine its role in homeostasis. After scene-setting explanations of homeostasis and desire, I argue that hunger is a close phenomenological match with underived desire. Then, I show why desire is an apt instrument for energy homeostasis. Finally, I argue that energy homeostasis
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Slurs in quarantine Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-12-05 Bianca Cepollaro, Simone Sulpizio, Claudia Bianchi, Isidora Stojanovic
We investigate experimentally whether the perceived offensiveness of slurs survives when they are reported, by comparing Italian slurs and insults in base utterances (Y is an S), direct speech (X said: “Y is an S”), mixed quotation (X said that Y is “an S”), and indirect speech (X said that Y is an S). For all strategies, reporting decreases the perceived offensiveness without removing it. For slurs
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How words matter: A psycholinguistic argument for meaning revision Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-11-14 Steffen Koch
Linguistic interventions aim to change our linguistic practices. A commonly discussed type of linguistic intervention is meaning revision, which seeks to associate existing words with new or revised meanings. But why does retaining old words matter so much? Why not instead introduce new words to express the newly defined meanings? Drawing on relevant psycholinguistic research, this paper develops an
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Core morality? Or merely core agents and social beings? A response to Spelke's what babies know Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-11-03 J. Kiley Hamlin
Spelke's What babies know describes the remarkably sophisticated mental lives of infants through the theoretical framework of core knowledge. To Spelke, young infants possess six independent core domains, two of which allow them to reason about the social world: the core agent and the core social being systems. Critically, Spelke argues that these core systems fail to communicate prior to 10 months
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Core knowledge, language learning, and the origins of morality and pedagogy: Reply to reviews of What babies know Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-11-03 Elizabeth S. Spelke
The astute reviews by Hamlin and by Revencu and Csibra provide compelling arguments and evidence for the early emergence of moral evaluation, communication, and pedagogical learning. I accept these conclusions but not the reviewers' claims that infants' talents in these domains depend on core systems of moral evaluation or pedagogical communication. Instead, I suggest that core knowledge of people
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Emotions in time: The temporal unity of emotion phenomenology Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Kris Goffin, Gerardo Viera
According to componential theories of emotional experience, emotional experiences are phenomenally complex in that they consist of experiential parts, which may include cognitive appraisals, bodily feelings, and action tendencies. These componential theories face the problem of emotional unity: Despite their complexity, emotional experiences also seem to be phenomenologically unified. Componential
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Kinds in the cognitive sciences: Reply to Weiskopf, Sullivan, and Robins Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Muhammad Ali Khalidi
In this response to three critiques of my book, Cognitive ontology, I expand on some of its main themes. First, I demarcate the domain of cognition to support my claim that it is properly investigated from Marr's computational level. Then, I defend the claim that cognitive kinds ought to be individuated externalistically, by contrast with neural kinds, which are often individuated internalistically
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Names are not (always) predicates Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Laura Delgado
A main selling point of predicativism is that, in addition to accounting for predicative uses of proper names, it can successfully account for their referential uses while treating them as predicates, thus providing a uniform semantics for proper names. The strategy is to postulate an unpronounced determiner that is realised with names when they appear to function as singular terms, making them effectively
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Who's in and who's out of the cognitive kinding game? Comments on Muhammad Ali Khalidi's Cognitive ontology: Taxonomic practices in the mind-brain sciences Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Jacqueline A. Sullivan
Muhammad Ali Khalidi contends that because cognitive science casts a wider net than neuroscience in searching for the causes of cognition, it is in the superior position to discover “real” cognitive kinds. I argue that while Khalidi identifies appropriate norms for individuating cognitive kinds, these norms ground his characterization of taxonomic practices in cognitive science, rather than the other
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Computation as the boundary of the cognitive Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Daniel Weiskopf
Khalidi identifies cognition with Marrian computation. He further argues that Marrian levels of inquiry should be interpreted ontologically as corresponding to distinct semi-closed causal domains. But this counterintuitively places the causal domain of representations outside of cognition proper. A closer look at Khalidi's account of concepts shows that these allegedly separate Marrian domains are
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Kinding memory: Commentary on Muhammad Ali Khalidi's Cognitive ontology Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Sarah K. Robins
My commentary focuses on Khalidi's defense of episodic memory as a cognitive kind. His argument relies on merging two distinct accounts of episodic memory—the phenomenal and the etiological. I suggest that Khalidi's framework can be used to carve the contemporary memory literature differently. On this view, the phenomenal account supports constructive episodic simulation as a cognitive kind, the etiological
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The missing link between core knowledge and language: Review of Elizabeth Spelke's What babies know, volume 1 (2022) Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Barbu Revencu, Gergely Csibra
Spelke's book defends two hypotheses about human cognition. First, humans and other species are endowed with core knowledge systems—innate computational structures that use abstract concepts to represent various aspects of the environment. Second, humans, and only humans, acquire natural languages, whose syntax and compositional semantics allow them to construct new concepts by combining the outputs
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Pluralism about introspection Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Kateryna Samoilova Franco
If we can and do have some self-knowledge, how do we acquire it? By examining the ways in which we acquire self-knowledge—by introspection—we can try shedding some light onto the nature and the breadth of self-knowledge, as others have tried to do with other forms of knowledge. My aim is to show that introspection involves multiple (that is, at least two) distinct processes, a view I call “pluralism
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Design and syntax in pictures Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Robert Hopkins
Many attempts to define depiction appeal to viewers' perceptual responses. Such accounts are liable to give a central role in determining depictive content to picture features responsible for the response, design. A different project is to give a compositional semantics for depictive content. Such attempts identify syntax: picture features systematically responsible for the content of the whole. Design
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Interpersonal connection Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-09-19 James Laing
We are social animals that seek to connect with others of our kind. However, this common thought stands in need of elaboration. In this article, I argue for three theses. First, that we pursue certain forms of communicative interaction for their own sake insofar as they are ways of connecting with another. Second, that interpersonal connection is a metaphysically primitive emotional relation which
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Polysemy does not exist, at least not in the relevant sense Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-08-19 Gabor Brody, Roman Feiman
Based on the existence of polysemy (e.g., lunch can refer to both food and events), it is argued that central tenets of externalist semantics and Fodorian concept atomism, an externalist theory on which words lack semantic structure, are unsound. We evaluate the premise that these arguments rely on—that polysemous words have separate, finer-grained senses. We survey the evidence across psychology and
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Does the mind care about whether a word is abstract or concrete? Why concreteness is probably not a natural kind Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-07-20 Guido Löhr
Many psychologists currently assume that there is a psychologically real distinction to be made between concepts that are abstract and concepts that are concrete. It is for example largely agreed that concepts and words are more easily processed if they are concrete. Moreover, it is assumed that this is because these words and concepts are concrete. It is thought that interesting generalizations can
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Conceptual engineering, predictive processing, and a new implementation problem Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Guido Löhr, Christian Michel
According to predictive processing, an increasingly influential paradigm in cognitive science, the function of the brain is to minimize the prediction error of its sensory input. Conceptual engineering is the practice of assessing and changing concepts or word meanings. We contribute to both strands of research by proposing the first cognitive account of conceptual engineering, using the predictive
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Cross-cultural variation and perspectivalism: Alignment of two red herrings? Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-07-18 Jincai Li
In this brief reply I respond to criticisms of my book, The referential mechanism of proper names, from Michael Devitt and Nicolo D'Agruma. I focus on the question of whether the perspectivism advocated in the book explains the empirical results there detailed.
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Creating a large language model of a philosopher Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Eric Schwitzgebel, David Schwitzgebel, Anna Strasser
Can large language models produce expert-quality philosophical texts? To investigate this, we fine-tuned GPT-3 with the works of philosopher Daniel Dennett. To evaluate the model, we asked the real Dennett 10 philosophical questions and then posed the same questions to the language model, collecting four responses for each question without cherry-picking. Experts on Dennett's work succeeded at distinguishing
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Motivating empathy Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-07-12 Shannon Spaulding
Critics of empathy argue that empathy is exhausting, easily manipulated, exacerbates rather than relieves conflict, and is too focused on individual experiences. Apparently, empathy not only fails to stop negative acts like sadism, bullying, and terrorism, it motivates and promotes such acts. These scholars argue that empathy will not save us from partisanship and division. In fact, it might make us
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Why the performance of habit requires attention Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Laura Bickel
This article argues that every performance of habit-driven action requires attention. I begin by revisiting the conception of habit-driven actions as reducible to automatically performed responses to stimuli. On this conception, habitual actions are a counterexample to Wayne Wu's action-centered theory of attention. Using the biased competition model of attention, and building on findings from affective
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The rejection game Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-07-04 Luca Incurvati, Giorgio Sbardolini
We introduce the rejection game, designed to formalize the interaction between interlocutors in a Stalnakerian conversation: a speaker who asserts something and a listener who may accept or reject. The rejection game is similar to other signalling games known to the literature in economics and biology. We point out similarities and differences, and propose an application in linguistics. We uncover
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Mental simulation and language comprehension: The case of copredication Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-06-19 Michelle Liu
Empirical evidence suggests that perceptual-motor simulations are often constitutively involved in language comprehension. Call this “the simulation view of language comprehension”. This article applies the simulation view to illuminate the much-discussed phenomenon of copredication, where a noun permits multiple predications which seem to select different senses of the noun simultaneously. On the
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Reinforcement learning and artificial agency Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-05-12 Patrick Butlin
There is an apparent connection between reinforcement learning and agency. Artificial entities controlled by reinforcement learning algorithms are standardly referred to as agents, and the mainstream view in the psychology and neuroscience of agency is that humans and other animals are reinforcement learners. This article examines this connection, focusing on artificial reinforcement learning systems
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Losing the light at the end of the tunnel: Depression, future thinking, and hope Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-05-05 Juliette Vazard
Is the capacity to experience hope central to our ability to entertain desirable future possibilities in thought? The ability to project oneself forward in time, or to entertain vivid positive episodic future thoughts, is impaired in patients with clinical depression. In this article, I consider the causal relation between, on the one hand, the loss of the affective experience of hope in depressed
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Teleosemantics and the frogs Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Ruth Garrett Millikan
Some have thought that the plausibility of teleosemantics requires that it yield a determinate answer to the question of what the semantic “content” is of the “representation” triggered in the optic nerve of a frog that spots a fly. An outsize literature has resulted in which, unfortunately, a number of serious confusions and omissions that concern the way teleosemantics would have to work have appeared
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Vividness and content Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-03-02 Peter Fazekas
The notion of subjective vividness plays a fundamental role in comparing different conscious experiences, yet it is poorly understood and lacks proper definition. Philosophical reflection on this topic is especially scarce. This article proposes a novel account of vividness arguing that its standard operationalisation in psychology conflates two major modality-general dimensions along which experiences
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On the roles of false belief and recalcitrant fear in anorexia nervosa Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Somogy Varga, Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen
The DSM-5 highlights two essential psychological features of anorexia nervosa (AN): recalcitrant fear of gaining weight and body image disturbance. Prominent accounts grant false beliefs about body weight and shape a central role in the explanation of AN behavior. In this article, we propose a stronger emphasis on recalcitrant fear. We show that such fear can explain AN behavior without the intermediary
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Is meaning cognized? Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-01-25 David Balcarras
In this article, I defend an account of linguistic comprehension on which meaning is not cognized, or on which we do not tacitly know our language's semantics. On this view, sentence comprehension is explained instead by our capacity to translate sentences into the language of thought. I explain how this view can explain our capacity to correctly interpret novel utterances, and then I defend it against
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Distributed autobiographical memories, distributed self-narratives Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2023-01-25 Regina E. Fabry
Richard Heersmink argues that self-narratives are distributed across embodied organisms and their environment, given that their building blocks, autobiographical memories, are distributed. This argument faces two problems. First, it commits a fallacy of composition. Second, it relies on Marya Schechtman's narrative self-constitution view, which is incompatible with the distributed cognition framework
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Should credence be sensitive to practical factors? A cost–benefit analysis Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Jie Gao
According to evidentialist views, credence in a proposition p should be proportional to the degree of evidential support that one has in favor of p. However, empirical evidence suggests that our credences are systematically sensitive to practical factors. In this article, I provide a cost–benefit analysis of credences' practical sensitivity. The upshot of this analysis is that credences sensitive to
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In defense of epicycles: Embracing complexity in psychological explanations Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-12-07 Ansgar D. Endress
Is formal simplicity a guide to learning in humans, as simplicity is said to be a guide to the acceptability of theories in science? Does simplicity determine the difficulty of various learning tasks? I argue that, similarly to how scientists sometimes preferred complex theories when this facilitated calculations, results from perception, learning and reasoning suggest that formal complexity is generally
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How to think about higher-level perceptual contents Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-11-24 Daniel C. Burnston
The standard assumption for what perception must do in order to represent a “higher level” content—say, tiger—is that it must represent the kind as such. I argue that this “as such condition” is not constitutive of what it means for a content to be “higher-level”, and that embracing it produces a range of unfortunate dialectical consequences. After offering this critique, I give an alternative construal
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Assertion, denial, and the evolution of Boolean operators Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-11-22 Fausto Carcassi, Giorgio Sbardolini
Given current data, only a few binary Boolean operators are expressed in lexically simple fashion in the world's languages: and, or, nor. These do not occur in every combination, for example, nor is not observed by itself. To explain these cross-linguistic patterns, we propose an encoding of Boolean operators as update procedures to accept or reject information in a context. We define a measure of
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Backtracking through interventions: An exogenous intervention model for counterfactual semantics Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Jonathan Vandenburgh
Causal models show promise as a foundation for the semantics of counterfactual sentences. However, current approaches face limitations compared to the alternative similarity theory: they only apply to a limited subset of counterfactuals and the connection to counterfactual logic is not straightforward. This article addresses these difficulties using exogenous interventions, where causal interventions
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How language shapes our minds: On the relationship between generics, stereotypes and social norms Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Leda Berio, Kristina Musholt
In this article, we discuss the role of labels and generics referring to social kinds in mindshaping practices, arguing that they promote generalizations that foster essentialist thinking and carry a normative force. We propose that their cognitive function consists in both contributing to the formation and reinforcement of schemata and scripts for social interaction and in activating these schemata
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Notions of arbitrariness Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-10-24 Luca Gasparri, Piera Filippi, Markus Wild, Hans-Johann Glock
Arbitrariness is a distinctive feature of human language, and a growing body of comparative work is investigating its presence in animal communication. But what is arbitrariness, exactly? We propose to distinguish four notions of semiotic arbitrariness: a notion of opaque association between sign forms and semiotic functions, one of sign-function mapping optionality, one of acquisition-dependent sign-function
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The rational role of the perceptual sense of reality Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-10-19 Paweł Gładziejewski
Perceptual experience usually comes with “phenomenal force”, a strong sense that it reflects reality as it is. Some philosophers have argued that it is in virtue of possessing phenomenal force that perceptual experiences are able to non-inferentially justify beliefs. In this article, I introduce an alternative, inferentialist take on the epistemic role of phenomenal force. Drawing on Bayesian modeling
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The empirical status of semantic perceptualism Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-10-03 Fabrizio Calzavarini
Semantic perceptualism is the thesis that meaning experiences are forms of perceptual experiences. According to its defenders, this view is motivated not only by philosophical considerations, but also by empirical evidence. In the present article, I shall provide the first comprehensive and critical review of the empirical evidence in support of semantic perceptualism, including a detailed analysis
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A vessel without a pilot: Bodily and affective experience in the Cotard delusion of inexistence Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-09-20 Philip Gerrans
The initial cause of Cotard delusion is pervasive dyshomeostasis (dysregulation of basic bodily function).This explanation draws on interoceptive active inference account of self-representation. In this framework, the self is an hierarchical predictive model made by the brain to facilitate homeostatic regulation. The account I provide is an alternative to two factor accounts of the Cotard delusion
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A metacognitive account of phenomenal force Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Lu Teng
According to phenomenal conservatism or dogmatism, perceptual experiences can give us immediate justification for beliefs about the external world in virtue of having a distinctive kind of phenomenal character—namely phenomenal force. I present three cases to show that phenomenal force is neither pervasive among nor exclusive to perceptual experiences. The plausibility of such cases calls out for explanation
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How we talk about smells Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-08-30 Giulia Martina
Smells are often said to be ineffable, and linguistic research shows that languages like English lack a dedicated olfactory lexicon. Starting from this evidence, I propose an account of how we talk about smells in English. Our reports about the way things smell are comparative: When we say that something smells burnt or like roses, we characterise the thing's smell by noting its similarity to the characteristic
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Self-signs and intensional contexts Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-08-17 Ruth Garrett Millikan
Paradigm intensional contexts result from the unmarked use of referential expressions as “self-signs”, signs that refer to themselves as tokens, types, or members of Sellarsian “dot-quoted” kinds. Self-signing (but unquoted) linguistic expressions are more difficult to recognize than non-linguistic self-signs such as the color of a felt pen's casing that represents the color of ink inside. I will discuss
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Language and children's understanding of knowledge: Epistemic talk in early childhood Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-08-05 Derek E. Montgomery
Research on children's theory of mind often restricts conceptually meaningful talk about knowledge to instances where know references a corresponding mental state. This article offers a reappraisal of that view. From a social-pragmatic perspective, even nonreferential talk is meaningful when appropriately embedded in social routines. A synthesis of corpus data suggests children's early talk about knowledge
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The social epistemology of introspection Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-08-02 Elmar Unnsteinsson
I argue that introspection recruits the same mental mechanism as that which is required for the production of ordinary speech acts. In introspection, in effect, we intentionally tell ourselves that we are in some mental state, aiming thereby to produce belief about that state in ourselves. On one popular view of speech acts, however, this is precisely what speakers do when speaking to others. On this
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In search of the beat Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Tim Bayne, Iwan Williams
Beat perception has received very little attention from either philosophers of mind or philosophers of music. This neglect is unfortunate, for the topic is rich with philosophical interest. This article addresses two questions. The first concerns the nature of our experience of musical beat. Here, we argue that experiences of beat are forms of auditory perception. The second question concerns the nature
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Further thoughts on hierarchy and inequality Mind & Language (IF 2.325) Pub Date : 2022-07-19 Kim Sterelny
This paper responds to Birch and Buskell's thoughtful critique. In it, I defend my use of behavioural ecology. I argue, contra Birch and Buskell, that I can give a principled defence of the emergence of conventions for respecting property, modelling as a network of pairwise iterated PDs between incipient farmers. Second, I defend my scepticism about the power of cultural group selection to optimise