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Speaker's reference, semantic reference, sneaky reference Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-03-21 Eliot Michaelson
According to what is perhaps the dominant picture of reference, what a referential term refers to in a context is determined by what the speaker intends for her audience to identify as the referent. I argue that this sort of broadly Gricean view entails, counterintuitively, that it is impossible to knowingly use referential terms in ways that one expects or intends to be misunderstood. Then I sketch
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A new empirical challenge for local theories of consciousness Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-03-17 Matthias Michel, Adrien Doerig
Local theories of consciousness state that one is conscious of a feature if it is adequately represented and processed in sensory brain areas, given some background conditions. We challenge the core prediction of local theories based on long‐lasting postdictive effects demonstrating that features can be represented for hundreds of milliseconds in perceptual areas without being consciously perceived
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Objectivity, perceptual constancy, and teleology in young children Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-03-17 Uwe Peters
Can young children such as 3‐year‐olds represent the world objectively? Some prominent developmental psychologists—such as Perner and Tomasello—assume so. I argue that this view is susceptible to a prima facie powerful objection: To represent objectively, one must be able to represent not only features of the entities represented but also features of objectification itself, which 3‐year‐olds cannot
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Experiments on causal exclusion Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-03-16 Thomas Blanchard, Dylan Murray, Tania Lombrozo
Intuitions play an important role in the debate on the causal status of high‐level properties. For instance, Kim has claimed that his “exclusion argument” relies on “a perfectly intuitive … understanding of the causal relation.” We report the results of three experiments examining whether laypeople really have the relevant intuitions. We find little support for Kim's view and the principles on which
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Going on as one ought: Kripke and Wittgenstein on the normativity of meaning Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-03-08 Hannah Ginsborg
Kripke's thesis that meaning is normative is typically interpreted, following Boghossian, as the thesis that meaningful expressions allow of true or warranted use. I argue for an alternative interpretation centered on Wittgenstein's conception of the normativity involved in “knowing how to go on” in one's use of an expression. Meaning is normative for Kripke because it justifies claims, not to be saying
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The perceived unity of time Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-03-07 Gerardo Viera
While we perceive events in our environment through multiple sensory systems, we nevertheless perceive all of these events as occupying a single unified timeline. Time, as we perceive it, is unified. I argue that existing accounts of the perceived unity of time fail. Instead, the perceived unity of time must be constructed by integrating our initially fragmented timekeeping capacities. However, existing
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Solipsistic sentience Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-03-07 Jordan C. V. Taylor
This article examines the nature of affective states across biological taxa. It argues that affect constitutes a primary form of consciousness. Creatures capable of affect are sentient of their bodily states and can behave in ways intended to maintain or restore them to a homeostatic range. After reviewing and critiquing neurobiological and philosophical theories of the evolution of consciousness,
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Polysemy: Pragmatics and sense conventions Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Robyn Carston
Polysemy, understood as instances of a single linguistic expression having multiple related senses, is not a homogenous phenomenon. There are regular (apparently, rule‐based) cases and irregular (resemblance‐based) cases, which have different processing profiles. Although a primary source of polysemy is pragmatic inference, at least some cases become conventionalised and linguistically encoded. Three
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Semantic polysemy and psycholinguistics Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-01-27 Michael Devitt
The paper urges that polysemous phenomena are typically semantic not pragmatic. The part of a message sent by a polysemous expression is typically one of its meanings encoded in the speaker's language and not the result of pragmatic modification. The hearer receives that part of the message by a process of disambiguation, by detecting which item in the lexicon the speaker has selected. This is the
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Polysemy and thought: Toward a generative theory of concepts Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-27 Jake Quilty‐Dunn
Most theories of concepts take concepts to be structured bodies of information used in categorization and inference. This paper argues for a version of atomism, on which concepts are unstructured symbols. However, traditional Fodorian atomism is falsified by polysemy and fails to provide an account of how concepts figure in cognition. This paper argues that concepts are generative pointers, that is
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Integration, lateralization, and animal experience Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-01-18 Peter Godfrey‐Smith
Many vertebrate animals approximate, to various degrees, the “split‐brain” condition that results from surgery done in humans to treat severe epilepsy, with very limited connection between the left and right sides of the upper parts of the brain. The split‐brain condition has been the topic of extensive philosophical discussion, because it appears, in some circumstances, to give rise to two minds within
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Non‐human consciousness and the specificity problem: A modest theoretical proposal Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-01-18 Henry Shevlin
Most scientific theories of consciousness are challenging to apply outside the human case insofar as non‐human systems (both biological and artificial) are unlikely to implement human architecture precisely, an issue I call the specificity problem. After providing some background on the theories of consciousness debate, I survey the prospects of four approaches to this problem. I then consider a fifth
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Insightful artificial intelligence Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-01-18 Marta Halina
In March 2016, DeepMind's computer programme AlphaGo surprised the world by defeating the world‐champion Go player, Lee Sedol. AlphaGo exhibits a novel, surprising and valuable style of play and has been recognised as “creative” by the artificial intelligence (AI) and Go communities. This article examines whether AlphaGo engages in creative problem solving according to the standards of comparative
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Perceiving commitments: When we both know that you are counting on me Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-01-15 Francesca Bonalumi, John Michael, Christophe Heintz
Can commitments be generated without promises or gestures conventionally interpreted as such? We hypothesized that people believe that commitments are in place when one agent has led a recipient to rely on her to do something, even without a commissive speech act or any action conventionalized as such, and this is mutual knowledge. To probe this, we presented participants with online vignettes describing
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Normative inferentialism on linguistic understanding Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-01-15 Matej Drobňák
The aim of this paper is to establish a specific view of linguistic understanding based on the framework of normative inferentialism. Normative inferentialism is presented as an overspecification (rich) account of meaning—the meaning of a sentence is understood as a cluster of context‐dependent contents. The standard psychological mechanism responsible for reaching understanding of an utterance depends
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Weak neo‐Whorfianism and the philosophy of time Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-01-15 Heather Dyke
According to a thesis I call the linguistic assumption, the structure of language is a guide to the fundamental nature of reality. It is deployed in the metaphysical debate over the nature of time. In that debate, it is more radical than the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and should be rejected. A weak interpretation of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis makes the empirical claim that speakers of different languages
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Do we see facts? Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-01-14 Alfredo Vernazzani
Philosophers of perception frequently assume that we see actual states of affairs, or facts. Call this claim factualism. In his book, William Fish suggests that factualism is supported by phenomenological observation as well as by experimental studies on multiple object tracking and dynamic feature‐object integration. In this paper, I examine the alleged evidence for factualism, focusing mainly on
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Context as knowledge Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2021-01-05 Torfinn Thomesen Huvenes, Andreas Stokke
It has been argued that common ground information is unsuited to the role that contexts play in the theory of indexical and demonstrative reference. This paper explores an alternative view that identifies shared information with what is common knowledge among the participants. We argue this view of shared information avoids the problems for the common ground approach concerning reference while preserving
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Normative folk psychology and decision theory Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-31 Joe Dewhurst, Christopher Burr
Our aim in this paper is to explore two possible directions of interaction between normative folk psychology and decision theory. In one direction, folk psychology plays a regulative role that constrains practical decision‐making. In the other direction, decision theory provides novel tools and norms that shape folk psychology. We argue that these interactions could lead to the emergence of an iterative
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Representing shape in sight and touch Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-29 E. J. Green
We represent shape in both sight and touch, but how do these abilities relate to one another? This issue has been discussed in the context of Molyneux's question of whether someone born blind could, upon being granted sight, identify shapes visually. Some have suggested that we might look to real‐world cases of sight restoration to illuminate the relation between visual and tactual shape representations
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Experiential holism in time Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-29 Philippe Chuard
Temporally extended experiences, experiential holists have it, are not reducible to successions of their temporal parts because some whole experiences determine their parts (in some way). This paper suggests, first, that some forms of experiential holism are in fact consistent with the rival atomist view (that experiences are successions of their parts) and, second, that the main reasons advanced for
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Cumulative culture and complex cultural traditions Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-29 Andrew Buskell
Cumulative cultural evolution is often claimed to be distinctive of human culture. Such claims are typically supported with examples of complex and historically late‐appearing technologies. Yet by taking these as paradigm cases, researchers unhelpfully lump together different ways that culture accumulates. This article has two aims: (a) to distinguish four types of cultural accumulation: adaptiveness
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How can perceptual experiences explain uncertainty? Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-28 Susanna Siegel
Can perceptual experiences be states of uncertainty? We might expect them to be, if the perceptual processes from which they are generated, and the behaviors they help produce, take account of probabilistic information. Yet, it has long been presumed that perceptual experiences purport to tell us about our environment, without hedging or qualifying. Against this long‐standing view, I argue that perceptual
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The theory theory of metalinguistic disputes Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-28 Erich Rast
According to the theory theory of metalinguistic disputes, disagreements in metalinguistic disputes are based on diverging underlying theories, opinions, or world views. An adequate description of metalinguistic disagreement needs to consider the compatibility and topics of such theories. Although topic continuity can be spelled out in terms of measurement operations, it is argued that even metalinguistic
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Spatial experience and olfaction: A role for naïve topology Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-28 Bartek Chomanski
In this paper, I provide an account of the spatiality of olfactory experiences in terms of topological properties. I argue that thinking of olfactory experiences as making the subject aware of topological properties enables us to address popular objections against the spatiality of smells, and it makes sense of everyday spatial olfactory phenomenology better than its competitors. I argue for this latter
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Extended mind and artifactual autobiographical memory Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-28 Richard Heersmink
In this paper, I describe how artifacts and autobiographical memory are integrated into new systemic wholes, allowing us to remember our personal past in a more reliable and detailed manner. After discussing some empirical work on lifelogging technology, I elaborate on the dimension of autobiographical dependency, which is the degree to which we depend on an object to be able to remember a personal
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Self‐consciousness in autism: A third‐person perspective on the self Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-28 Sarah Arnaud
This paper suggests that autistic people relate to themselves via a third‐person perspective, an objective and explicit mode of access, while neurotypical people tend to access the different dimensions of their self through a first‐person perspective. This approach sheds light on autistic traits involving interactions with others, usage of narratives, sensitivity and interoception, and emotional consciousness
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Extended active inference: Constructing predictive cognition beyond skulls Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-02 Axel Constant, Andy Clark, Michael Kirchhoff, Karl J. Friston
Cognitive niche construction is the process whereby organisms create and maintain cause–effect models of their niche as guides for fitness influencing behavior. Extended mind theory claims that cognitive processes extend beyond the brain to include predictable states of the world. Active inference and predictive processing in cognitive science assume that organisms embody predictive (i.e., generative)
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That‐clauses: Some bad news for relationalism about the attitudes Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-12-01 Robert J. Matthews
Propositional relationalists about the attitudes claim to find support for their view in what they assume to be the dyadic relational logical form of the predicates by which we canonically attribute propositional attitudes. In this paper I argue that the considerations that they adduce in support of this assumption, specifically for the assumption that the that‐clauses that figure in these predicates
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Can the mind wander intentionally? Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-11-26 Samuel Murray, Kristina Krasich
Mind wandering is typically operationalized as task‐unrelated thought. Some argue for the need to distinguish between unintentional and intentional mind wandering, where an agent voluntarily shifts attention from task‐related to task‐unrelated thoughts. We reveal an inconsistency between the standard, task‐unrelated thought definition of mind wandering and the occurrence of intentional mind wandering
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Enhancing thoughts: Culture, technology, and the evolution of human cognitive uniqueness Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-11-24 Armin W. Schulz
Three facts are widely thought to be key to the characterization of human cognitive uniqueness (though a number of other factors are often cited as well): (a) humans are sophisticated cultural learners; (b) humans often rely on mental states with rich representational contents; and (c) humans have the ability and disposition to make and use tools. This article argues that (a)–(c) create a positive
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Rainbow's end: The structure, character, and content of conscious experience Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-10-29 Brandon Ashby
Separatism, representationalism, and phenomenal intentionalism are the primary views on the relationship between the phenomenality and intentionality of experience. I defend a novel position that is incompatible with separatism, can enrich representationalism and phenomenal intentionalism, but can also be accepted independently of those views. I call it phenomenal schematics: The phenomenal characters
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Against neuroclassicism: On the perils of armchair neuroscience Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-10-22 Alex Morgan
Neuroclassicism is the view that cognition is explained by “classical” computing mechanisms in the nervous system that exhibit a clear demarcation between processing machinery and read–write memory. The psychologist C. R. Gallistel has mounted a sophisticated defense of neuroclassicism by drawing from ethology and computability theory to argue that animal brains necessarily contain read–write memory
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A tribal mind: Beliefs that signal group identity or commitment Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-10-18 Eric Funkhouser
People are biased toward beliefs that are welcomed by their in‐group. Some beliefs produced by these biases—such as climate change denial and religious belief—can be fruitfully modeled by signaling theory. The idea is that the beliefs function so as to be detected by others and manipulate their behavior, primarily for the benefits that accrue from favorable tribal self‐presentation. Signaling theory
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Why I am not a literalist Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-11-21 Zoe Drayson
Carrie Figdor argues for literalism, a semantic claim about psychological predicates, on the basis of a scientific claim about the nature of psychological properties. I argue that her scientific claim is based on controversial interpretations of scientific modelling, and that even if it were correct it would not justify her claims that psychological predicates are undergoing radical conceptual change
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Against the mind package view of minds: Comments on Carrie Figdor's Pieces of mind Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-11-21 Eric Schwitzgebel
Carrie Figdor's Pieces of mind lays the groundwork for critiquing the mind package view of minds. According to the mind package view, psychological properties travel in groups, such that an entity either has the whole mind package or lacks mentality altogether. Implicit commitment to the mind package view makes it seem absurd to attribute some psychological properties (e.g., preferences) to entities
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What do plants and bacteria want? Commentary on Carrie Figdor's Pieces of mind Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-11-21 Edouard Machery
In Pieces of mind, Figdor examines how to interpret psychological predicates that scientists assign to entities that commonsensically do not have a mind such as neurons and plants. She claims that these predicates are used literally to refer to the same structures in humans and non‐human entities. I argue on the contrary that most uses of this kind are merely the extension of preexisting, possibly
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Why literalism is still the best game in town: Replies to Drayson, Machery, and Schwitzgebel Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-11-21 Carrie Figdor
I respond to the main criticisms raised by Schwitzgebel, Machery, and Drayson of the main arguments of Pieces of mind in favor of the position I call literalism. Schwitzgebel's mainly supportive commentary decries the Cartesian assumption that mindedness is an all or nothing affair. Machery claims that there is an alternative to literalism that is a better interpretation of the uses of psychological
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Semantics without semantic content Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-10-11 Daniel W. Harris
I argue that semantics is the study of the proprietary database of a centrally inaccessible and informationally encapsulated input–output system. This system's role is to encode and decode partial and defeasible evidence of what speakers are saying. Since information about nonlinguistic context is therefore outside the purview of semantic processing, a sentence's semantic value is not its content but
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Coming from a world without objects Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-10-07 Frauke Hildebrandt, Ramiro Glauer, Gregor Kachel
While research on object individuation assumes that even very young children are able to perceive objects as particulars, we argue that the results of relevant studies can be explained in terms of feature discrimination. We propose that children start out navigating the world with a feature‐based ontology and only later become able to individuate objects spatiotemporally. Furthermore, object individuation
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Are psychopaths moral‐psychologically impaired? Reassessing emotion‐theoretical explanations Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-09-22 Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen
Psychopathy has been theorized as a disorder of emotion, which impairs moral judgments. However, these theories are increasingly being abandoned as empirical studies show that psychopaths seem to make proper moral judgments. In this contribution, these findings are reassessed, and it is argued that prevalent emotion‐theories of psychopathy appear to operate with the unjustified assumption that psychopaths
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Conditionals: Truth, safety, and success Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-07-26 Hugh Mellor, Richard Bradley
Whether I take some action that aims at desired consequence C depends on whether or not I take it to be true that if I so act, I will bring C about and that if I do not, I will fail to. And the action will succeed if and only if my beliefs are true. We argue that two theses follow: (I) To believe a conditional is to be disposed to infer its consequent from the truth of its antecedent, and (II) The
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Weather predicates, binding, and radical contextualism Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-07-03 Paul Elbourne
The implicit content indicating location associated with “raining” and other weather predicates is a definite description meaning “the location occupied by x,” where the individual variable “x” can be referential or bound. This position has deleterious consequences for certain varieties of radical contextualism.
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Beyond the icon: Core cognition and the bounds of perception Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Sam Clarke
This paper refines a controversial proposal: That core systems belong to a perceptual kind, marked by the format of its representational outputs. Following Susan Carey, this proposal has been understood in terms of core representations having an iconic format, like certain paradigmatically perceptual outputs. I argue that they do not, but suggest that the proposal may be better formulated in terms
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Discordant knowing: A puzzle about insight in obsessive–compulsive disorder Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-07-02 Evan Taylor
This article discusses a puzzle arising from the phenomenon of insight in obsessive–compulsive disorder. “Insight” refers to an awareness or understanding of obsessive thoughts as false or irrational. I argue that a natural and plausible way of characterizing insight in OCD conflicts with several different possible explanations of the epistemic attitude underlying insight‐directed obsessive thought
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Why should syntactic islands exist? Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-06-30 Eran Asoulin
Sentences that are ungrammatical and yet intelligible are instances of what I call perfectly thinkable thoughts. I argue that the existence of perfectly thinkable thoughts is revealing in regard to the question of why syntactic islands should exist. If language is an instrument of thought as understood in the biolinguistics tradition, then a uniquely human subset of thoughts is generated in narrow
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Implicit bias, stereotype threat, and seeing‐as: An alternative to “alief” as an explanation of reason‐recalcitrant behaviours Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-06-25 Talia Morag
This paper examines the puzzling phenomenon of self‐directed implicit bias in the form of gender “stereotype threat” (ST). Bringing to light the empirical undecidability of which account of this phenomenon is best, whether a rational or an associationist explanation, the paper aims to strengthen the associationist approach by appeal to a new account of seeing‐as experiences. I critically examine “alief”
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Language without information exchange Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-06-22 Jessica Keiser
This paper attempts to revive a once‐lively program in the philosophy of language—that of reducing linguistic phenomena to facts about mental states and actions. I argue that recent skepticism toward this project is generated by features of traditional implementations of the project, rather than the project itself. A picture of language as essentially a mechanism for cooperative information exchange
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Pain, placebo, and cognitive penetration Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-06-17 Henry Shevlin, Phoebe Friesen
There is compelling evidence that pain experience is influenced by cognitive states. We explore one specific form of such influence, namely placebo analgesia, and examine its relevance for the cognitive penetration debate in philosophy of mind. We single out as important a form of influence on experience that we term radical cognitive penetration, and argue that some cases of placebo analgesia constitute
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How to ascribe beliefs to animals Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-06-16 Albert Newen, Tobias Starzak
In this article, we analyze and reject two versions of the content‐argument against animal beliefs, namely, the ontological argument from Davidson and the epistemological argument from Stich. One of the main defects of the strongest version of the argument is that it over‐intellectualizes belief ascriptions in humans and thus sets the comparative bar for belief ascriptions in animals too high. In the
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Much at stake in knowledge Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-06-08 Alexander Dinges, Julia Zakkou
Orthodoxy in the contemporary debate on knowledge ascriptions holds that the truth‐value of knowledge ascriptions is purely a matter of truth‐relevant factors. One familiar challenge to orthodoxy comes from intuitive practical factor effects. But practical factor effects turn out to be hard to confirm in experimental studies, and where they have been confirmed, they may seem easy to explain away. We
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Communication and representation understood as sender–receiver coordination Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-06-08 Ronald J. Planer, Peter Godfrey‐Smith
Modeling work by Brian Skyrms and others in recent years has transformed the theoretical role of David Lewis's 1969 model of signaling. The latter can now be understood as a minimal model of communication in all its forms. In this article, we explain how the Lewis model has been generalized, and consider how it and its variants contribute to ongoing debates in several areas. Specifically, we consider
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Representation in Cognitive Science: Replies Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-05-19 Nicholas Shea
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
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Probabilistic representations in perception: Are there any, and what would they be? Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-05-19 Steven Gross
Nick Shea's Representation in cognitive science commits him to representations in perceptual processing that are about probabilities. This commentary concerns how to adjudicate between this view and an alternative that locates the probabilities rather in the representational states’ associated “attitudes.” As background and motivation, evidence for probabilistic representations in perceptual processing
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Content is pragmatic: Comments on Nicholas Shea's Representation in cognitive science Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-05-19 Frances Egan
Nicholas Shea offers what he takes to be a naturalistic account of representational content in cognitive science. I argue that the account secures determinate content only by appeal to pragmatic considerations, and so it fails to respect naturalism. But that is fine, because representational content is not, strictly speaking, necessary for explanation in cognitive science. Even in Shea's own account
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Where meanings arise and how: Building on Shannon's foundations Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-05-19 Charles R. Gallistel
Information theory provides a quantitative conceptual framework for understanding the flow of information from the world into and through brains. It focuses our attention on the sets of possible messages a brain's anatomy and physiology enable it to receive. The meanings of the messages arise from the inferences licensed by the brain's processing of them. Different meanings arise at different levels
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Hypotheses that attribute false beliefs: A two‐part epistemology (Darwin + Akaike) Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-05-13 William Roche, Elliott Sober
Why expect organisms that have beliefs to have false beliefs? And if an organism occasionally occupies a neural state that encodes a perceptual belief, how do you evaluate hypotheses about the state's semantic content, where some of those hypotheses attribute beliefs that are sometimes false while others attribute beliefs that are always true? To address the first of these questions, we discuss evolution
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Visual indeterminacy and the puzzle of the speckled hen Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-05-06 Jessie Munton
I identify three aspects to the puzzle of the speckled hen: A general puzzle, an epistemic puzzle, and a puzzle for the representationalist. These puzzles rely on an underlying “pictorialist” assumption, that we visually perceive general, determinable properties only in virtue of determinate properties or more specific, local features of our visual experience. This assumption is mistaken: Visual perception
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The explanatory project of Gricean pragmatics Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-04-29 Lars Dänzer
The Gricean paradigm in pragmatics has recently been attacked for its alleged lack of explanatory import, based on the claim that it does not seek accounts of how utterance interpretation actually works, but merely of how it might work. This article rebuts this line of attack by offering a clear and detailed account of the explanatory project of Gricean pragmatics according to which the latter aims
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(Implicit) Knowledge, reasons, and semantic understanding Mind & Language (IF 1.275) Pub Date : 2020-04-27 Natalia Waights Hickman
This paper exploits recent work on the normative and constitutive roles of knowledge in practical rationality, to put pressure on the idea that speakers could communicate without exploiting linguistic knowledge. I defend cognitivism about meaning, the view that speakers have rationally accessible (i.e., implicit rather than tacit) knowledge of semantic facts and principles, and that this knowledge
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