Development of social role understanding

The concepts of social roles and role intersections have been used to explain adults' social competence. However, children's social competence in terms of developing role concepts has not been systematically delineated. After a brief review of the few developmental studies that have been performed in this area, a systematic developmental sequence of role understanding in children from 1 to 13 years of age is discussed and a method for assessing such sequences is described. The sequence, which was based on K. W. Fischer's (1980, Psychological Review, 87, 477–531) construction-inclusion model of conceptual skill development, was tested in several studies using two sets of social roles and tasks and was found to be highly scalable and age related. The significance of role concept development is also discussed as it relates to the development of social competence in other domains.     

What's left is closer to right : A response to keating

The present paper attempts to respond to criticisms made by Keating (1988, Developmental Review, 8, 376–384) regarding the present author's earlier paper which described a recasted model of formal operations ( Byrnes, 1988, Developmental Review, 8, 66–87). This earlier paper made a distinction between conceptual and procedural knowledge at the level of formal operations, and presented evidence supporting this recasted model. Keating (1988) argues that the recasted model fails to capture what Piaget originally intended, that it fails to incorporate a procedural knowledge component, and that there is some question as to what would constitute empirical support for the model. The present paper discusses each of these criticisms and others in turn, and clarifies earlier arguments.     

Toward a theory of verbal behavior

This paper is a reply to an accompanying set of six commentaries by Sidman; Hayes and Barnes; Schusterman, Kastak, and Reichmuth; Tonneau and Sokolowski; Lowenkron; and Moerk. Those commentaries were prompted by our article “On the Origins of Naming and Other Symbolic Behavior” (1996), which was, in turn, followed by 26 commentaries and a reply. In the course of the present reply, we further develop the naming account to embrace more complex verbal relations such as same, different, more, and less. We also examine what we see as the lack of conceptual coherence in equivalence theories, including relational frame theory, and the disparities between these accounts and the findings from empirical research.     

Construction, reconstruction, deconstruction: The fall of the Soviet Union from the point of view of conceptual history

The fall of the Soviet Union is analysed in conceptual terms, drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte. The author seeks to interpret the instrumental role of the concepts perestrojka, glasnost′, reform, revolution, socialist pluralism, and acceleration in the Soviet collapse. The semantics and pragmatics are related to a wider intellectual and political context, and the conceptual perspective is used to help explain the progress of events. The author argues that the common notion of the reform policy concepts as clichés is not valid.

Sortals for Dummies

Advocates of sortal essentialism have argued that concepts like “thing” or “object” lack the unambiguous individuative criteria necessary to play the role of genuine sortals in reference. Instead, they function as “dummy sortals” which are placeholders or incomplete designations. In disqualifying apparent placeholder sortals, however, these philosophers have posed insuperable problems for accounts of childhood conceptual development. I argue that recent evidence in psychology demonstrates that children do possess simple or basic sortals of physical objects or things. I contend that these concepts provide the genuine individuative criteria necessary for reference. As a consequence, sortalism can be made compatible with the developmental facts of conceptual development.

Thinking as the control of imagination: a conceptual framework for goal-directed systems

This paper offers a conceptual framework which (re)integrates goal-directed control, motivational processes, and executive functions, and suggests a developmental pathway from situated action to higher level cognition. We first illustrate a basic computational (control-theoretic) model of goal-directed action that makes use of internal modeling. We then show that by adding the problem of selection among multiple action alternatives motivation enters the scene, and that the basic mechanisms of executive functions such as inhibition, the monitoring of progresses, and working memory, are required for this system to work. Further, we elaborate on the idea that the off-line re-enactment of anticipatory mechanisms used for action control gives rise to (embodied) mental simulations, and propose that thinking consists essentially in controlling mental simulations rather than directly controlling behavior and perceptions. We conclude by sketching an evolutionary perspective of this process, proposing that anticipation leveraged cognition, and by highlighting specific predictions of our model.

Is gerontology a branch of astrology? The role of advanced age in scientific explanation

Although gerontologists have been troubled by meta-scientific problems such as the proper definition of their discipline, the nature of time and age, and the lack of a nonarbitrary distinction between the old and the not old [e.g., Baltes & Goulet (1970) In Life-span developmental psychology (pp. 4–23). New York: Academic Press; Birren (1959) In Handbook of aging and theindividual (pp. 3–42). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; McKee (1982) Philosophical foundations of gerontology. New York: Human Sciences Press; Reese & Overton (1970) In Life-span developmental psychology (pp. 116–149). New York: Academic Press; Wohlwill (1970) Psychological Review, 77, 49–647], philosophers of science have paid little attention to the meta-scientific problems of gerontology. In this paper some philosophical problems in gerontology are examined through an analysis of the nature of scientific explanation. An argument is presented that claims that gerontology avoids many of the meta-scientific problems associated with time and advanced chronological age because these terms will tend to be obviated or “screened off” in scientific explanations in gerontology.     

Relational Services

Recent research projects have looked for social innovations, i.e., people creating solutions outside the mainstream patterns of production and consumption. An analysis of these innovations indicates the emergence of a particular kind of service configuration—defined here as relational services—which requires intensive interpersonal relations to operate. Based on a comparative analysis between standard and relational services, we propose to the Service Design discipline an interpretative framework able to reinforce its ability to deal with the interpersonal relational qualities in services, indicating how these qualities can be understood and favored by design activities, as well as the limits of this design intervention. Martin Buber’s conceptual framework is presented as the main interpretative basis. Buber describes two ways of interacting (“I-Thou” and “I-It”). Relational services are those most favoring “I-Thou” interpersonal encounters.

Conceptual system and personality: A multivariate study of system stage and personality correlates

Conceptual system as a cognitive-developmental variable in personality has been assumed to relate to different cognitions of self and others and of interpersonal relations at each developmental stage. The assumed relationship between conceptual system and some personality variables was studied in a group of students (N = 85). The “This-I-Believe” test (TIB) [Harvey, O. J. System structure, adaptability and creativity. In O. J. Harvey (Ed.), Experience, structure, and adaptability. New York: Springer, 1966.] for assessing the developmental stage of the conceptual system was administered together with personality scales for traits assumed important in socialization. A modified TIB scoring procedure was used. Highly significant differences in personality were obtained by a MANOVA, using conceptual system for classification. One dimension accounted for discrimination. Measures assumed to relate to sensitivity for and conformity to a social environment contributed most to the discrimination.     

Career exploration in adulthood

The study described was designed to examine career exploration in the adult years, as seen from the perspective of decision-making behavior. Using conceptual models provided by H. B. Gelatt (Journal of Counseling Psychology, 1962, 9, 240–245) and D. V. Tiedeman (Personnel and Guidance Journal, 1961, 40, 15–21), two research questions were posed: (1) To what extent does exploration occur prior to more terminal career behaviors? and (2) To what extent are exploratory and terminal career decision modes interdependent? These questions were addressed by examining the series of decisions made by 95 subjects over a period of 18 years. The results supported the expectation that decisions made at earlier stages of development are more likely to be of an exploratory nature and that decisions made at later stages are more likely to be of a terminal nature. In addition, support was found for the hypothesis that decision-making strategies at various stages of development are interdependent.     

Finite rational self-deceivers

I raise three puzzles concerning self-deception: (i) a conceptual paradox, (ii) a dilemma about how to understand human cognitive evolution, and (iii) a tension between the fact of self-deception and Davidson’s interpretive view. I advance solutions to the first two and lay a groundwork for addressing the third. The capacity for self-deception, I argue, is a spandrel, in Gould’s and Lewontin’s sense, of other mental traits, i.e., a structural byproduct. The irony is that the mental traits of which self-deception is a spandrel/byproduct are themselves rational.

The Communicative Experience: Between Inexpressibile and Elusive

This is a commentary on Cornejo’s Intersubjectivity as co-phenomenology: from the holism to the being-in-the-world-with-others, co-phenomenology, in which meaning is defined as a construal of phenomenological experience, not an individual creation, but rather an intersubjective one. In this paper the basic question is how language expresses the world and things and, consequently, what vision of the world is expressed by language and what relationship it creates with the real. Language lives for and by this constant aspiration to say the inexpressible and it tries to express the driving inner movement of the real through references and interlacing, by multiplying the relational threads of meanings. For example, the phonetic gesture performs for the speaker and his listener a certain structuring of experience, a certain modulation of existence. This is a communicative dimension in which meaning is always a process. It is the situation of co-feeling between subjects, in which understanding is achieved, as defined by Cornejo in his essay. Words, vowels, phonemes from this analysis are not only the conceptual and the final sense of words, but also their emotional sense, are ways to sing the world and they represent the emotional essence.

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The Hennessy–Milner equivalence for continuous time stochastic logic with mu-operator

A continuous stochastic logic with a μ-operator μCSL is defined, and an interpretation through stochastic relations is proposed. We investigate morphisms for models of μCSL, showing that the associated congruences can be used for an investigation of bisimilarity. The Hennessy–Milner equivalence for μCSL is discussed, and it is shown that models are equivalent iff they are bisimilar, using a general criterion for bisimilarity from the theory of stochastic relations.     

In Defence of Non-conceptual Content

In recent times, Evans’ idea that mental states could have non-conceptual contents has been attacked. McDowell (Mind and World, 1994) and Brewer (Perception and reason, 1999) have both argued that that notion does not have any epistemological role because notions such as justification or evidential support, that might relate mental contents to each other, must be framed in conceptual terms. On his side, Brewer has argued that instead of non-conceptual content we should consider demonstrative concepts that have the same fine grainess of non-conceptual contents while having conceptual structure. In what follows I will argue that, first, that the notion of demonstrative concept is not viable and, second, that there is an epistemological role for non-conceptual content.

Judging a book by its cover and its contents: the representation of polysemous and homophonous meanings in four-year-old children

Unlike homophonous meanings, which are semantically unrelated (e.g., the use of bat to refer to a baseball bat and a flying rodent), polysemous meanings are systematically related to one another (e.g., the use of book, CD, and video to refer to physical objects, as in ‘the leather book’, or to the intellectual content they contain, as in ‘the profound book’). But do perceived relations among polysemous meanings reflect the presence of generative lexical or conceptual structures that permit the meanings of these words to shift? If so, these structures may also support children’s early representations of polysemous meanings. In four studies, we demonstrate (1) that four-year-old children can understand both the concrete and abstract meanings of words like book, (2) that when taught a novel label for one of these meanings, children can readily understand an extension of that label to the other meaning, and (3) that extension does not occur between two homophonous meanings, which share a common phonological form but are otherwise unrelated. We conclude that the polysemous meanings of words like book rely on a common representational base early in development, and suggest that this may be the result of foundational, generative properties of the lexicon or conceptual system.     

A chronometric study of sentence processing in deaf children

It has been consistently reported the deaf children have tremendous problems in reading English sentences. Three experiments were conducted in the present study to investigate the nature of deaf children's reading inability. The first experiment looked into the letter-decoding process. It was found that deaf subjects took longer than normal-hearing subjects in encoding and decoding alphabetic letters. The second experiment employed a sentence-picture verification paradigm. The results showed that deaf subjects adopted a visual-imagery coding strategy rather than a general linguistic coding strategy as described by H. H. Clark and W. Chase (Cognitive Psychology, 1972, 3, 472–517) and by P. A. Carpenter and M. A. Just (Memory and Cognition, 1975, 3, 465–473). However, when the sentence was presented in manual signs (Experiment 3), deaf subjects' verification time showed that they adopted a general linguistic coding strategy. Thus, deaf subjects are capable of linguistic coding strategy, but they do not apply it to process printed English sentences. A second-language hypothesis was advanced to account for the obtained data. Deaf children's reading inability was also discussed from this perspective.     

The Two Faces of Evidentialism

In this paper I hope to demonstrate two different (and seemingly independent) ways of interpreting the tenets of evidentialism and show why it is important to distinguish between them. These two ways correspond to those proposed by Feldman (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 60, 667–695, 2000, Evidentialism: Essays in epistemology, Oxford University Press, 2004) and Adler (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 23, 267–285, 1999, Beliefs own ethics, MIT Press, 2002). Feldman’s way of interpreting evidentialism makes evidentialism a principle about epistemic justification, about what we ought to believe. Adler’s, on the other hand, makes evidentialism a principle about how we come to believe, what it is, broadly speaking, rational for us to believe. Having identified this difference, I consider two complaints levied against evidentialism, namely what I call the threshold problem and what I call the availability problem, and hope to show that: (a) only an independent, bracketed justification principle of evidentialism can deal with those problems; (b) the rationality principle of evidentialism is not in fact independent from the justification principle; (c) the rationality principle is hard to motivate; and that (d) in the final analysis the argument for the justification principle depends on the rationality principle. I thus conclude that although it may be convenient for evidentialists to treat these two principles as independent, such an independence cannot be maintained.

Kantian non-conceptualism

There are perceptual states whose representational content cannot even in principle be conceptual. If that claim is true, then at least some perceptual states have content whose semantic structure and psychological function are essentially distinct from the structure and function of conceptual content. Furthermore the intrinsically “orientable” spatial character of essentially non-conceptual content entails not only that all perceptual states contain non-conceptual content in this essentially distinct sense, but also that consciousness goes all the way down into so-called unconscious or subpersonal mental states. Both my argument for the existence of essentially non-conceptual content and my theory of its structure and function have a Kantian provenance.

The cognitive structure of surprise: looking for basic principles

We develop a conceptual and formal clarification of notion of surprise as a belief-based phenomenon by exploring a rich typology. Each kind of surprise is associated with a particular phase of cognitive processing and involves particular kinds of epistemic representations (representations and expectations under scrutiny, implicit beliefs, presuppositions). We define two main kinds of surprise: mismatch-based surprise and astonishment. In the central part of the paper we suggest how a formal model of surprise can be integrated with a formal model of belief change. We investigate the role of surprise in triggering the process of belief reconsideration. There are a number of models of surprise developed in the psychology of emotion. We provide several comparisons of our approach with those models.