Feeling and representing: Computational theory and the modularity of affect

In this paper I review some leading developments in the empirical theory of affect. I argue that (1) affect is a distinct perceptual representation governed system, and (2) that there are significant modular factors in affect. The paper concludes with the observation thatfeeler (affective perceptual system) may be a natural kind within cognitive science. The main purpose of the paper is to explore some hitherto unappreciated connections between the theory of affect and the computational theory of mind.     

What Are the Brain Mechanisms on Which Psychological Processes Are Based?

ABSTRACT— That the human brain is the organ of the mind is not in dispute, but we know remarkably little about the brain mechanisms underlying the mind. What are the functional structures and computational processes of the human brain that subserve cognition, emotion, and behavior? Given the complexity of the human brain, progress in understanding the functional organization and structure of the human brain depends on sophisticated theoretical specifications of the psychological representations and processes that differentiate two or more comparison conditions. Psychological scientists, therefore, are well positioned to lead the search for brain mechanisms underlying psychological processes. Doing so constitutes an expansion of the purview of psychological science beyond a science of behavior, and beyond a science of the mind, to include a science of the brain. Such an expansion of the mission of psychological science has implications for the infrastructure and training needs of the discipline.     

Keeping (Direct) Reference in Mind

This paper explores the psychological analogues of a cluster of arguments that have played an important role in motivating a now widespread, reference‐based approach in philosophy of language. What I will call the psychological analogues of Kripke‐style arguments provide a substantial motivation for a reference‐based approach to concepts. Insofar as such an approach is rarely given serious consideration, the availability of these arguments suggests the need for a rethinking of some foundational assumptions in philosophy of mind and other branches of the cognitive sciences.     

Extended music cognition

Discussions of extended cognition have increasingly engaged with the empirical and methodological practices of cognitive science and psychology. One topic that has received increased attention from those interested in the extended mind is music cognition. A number of authors have argued that music not only shapes emotional and cognitive processes, but also that it extends those processes beyond the bodily envelope. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the case for extended music cognition. Two accounts are examined in detail: Joel Krueger’s “musically extended emotional mind” and Tom Cochrane’s “expression and extended cognition.” Each account is evaluated using three “anti-extension” arguments. I argue that Krueger and Cochrane’s accounts offer important steps toward extended music cognition, but that each account remains underdeveloped in various ways. To supplement existing approaches, I propose a complementary extended computational approach to music cognition (ECMC). The claim is that music cognition forms part of an extended system in virtue of involving computational processes that range across environmental and in-the-head elements. The paper concludes by showing how the ECMC deals with each of the three anti-extension challenges and responds to objections.     

RELIGIOUS BELIEF AS ACQUIRED SECOND NATURE

Multiple authors in cognitive science of religion (CSR) argue that there is something about the human mind that disposes it to form religious beliefs. The dispositions would result from the internal architecture of the mind. In this article, I will argue that this disposition can be explained by various forms of (cultural) learning and not by the internal architecture of the mind. For my argument, I draw on new developments in predictive processing. I argue that CSR theories argue for the naturalness of religious belief in at least three ways; religious beliefs are adaptive; religious beliefs are the product of cognitive biases; and religious beliefs are the product of content biases. I argue that all three ideas can be integrated in a predictive coding framework where religious belief is learned and hence not caused by the internal architecture of the mind. I argue that the framework makes it doubtful that there are modular cognitive mechanisms for religious beliefs and that the human mind has a fixed proneness for religious belief. I also argue that a predictive coding framework can incorporate a larger role for cultural processes and allows for more flexibility.     

The Making of Mind

To understand how human beings come to have the mental faculties that they do, one would do well to consider the making of mind in at least two senses. First, an evolutionary perspective promises to specify what distinguishes Homo sapiens from nonhuman primate kin, and to set whatever is unique against a background of psychological abilities that we share with our ancestral relatives. Second, an account of individuals’ development from infancy onwards should enable one to see how humans’ species-specific biological endowment dovetails with what the environment provides to yield specifically human psychological capacities. In this article, I argue that to arrive at an overarching theoretical explanation, we should set the capacity to identify with the attitudes of other people at the very core of evolutionary and developmental accounts.     

Moral Distress as a Symptom of Dirty Hands

The experience of ‘moral distress’ is an increasing focal point of contemporary medical and bioethics literature, yet it has received little attention in discussions intersecting with ethical theory. This is unfortunate, as it seems that the peculiar phenomenon may well help us to better understand a number of issues bearing both practical and theoretical significance. In this article, I provide a robust psychological profile of moral distress in order to shed a newfound light upon the longstanding problem of ‘dirty hands’. I argue that moral distress offers evidence of the existence of dirty hands situations. By examining moral distress and its relationship to cases of dirty hands, it appears that few of us are completely immune to susceptibility to these sorts of troubling experiences. With this concern in mind, I provide various recommendations to help alleviate our morally distressing personal and professional lives.

     

Context is Everything (in Emotion Research)

As in many areas of psychological inquiry, context matters for how emotion is experienced, expressed, perceived, and regulated. While this may sound like a truism, emotion research does not always directly theorize, manipulate, or measure emotion with context in mind. To facilitate this process, we present a framework of contextual features that shape emotion‐related processes, and highlight several key factors that have been shown to matter in emotion research. We make four recommendations which we believe will help to better integrate context in emotion science. We argue that a deeper collective understanding, interrogation, and integration of context will propel the field forward theoretically and methodologically, and enhance researchers' ability to probe the mechanisms of human psychological experience. While our focus is on emotion research, we believe that the context framework and associated recommendations will also be useful to other fields of social psychological and personality science.     

Behaviorism and mentalism: Is there a third alternative?

Behaviorism and mentalism are commonly considered to be mutually exclusive and conjunctively exhaustive options for the psychological explanation of behavior. Behaviorism and mentalism do differ in their characterization of inner causes of behavior. However, I argue that they are not mutually exclusive on the grounds that they share important foundational assumptions, two of which are the notion of an innerouter split and the notion of control. I go on to argue that mentalism and behaviorism are not conjunctively exhaustive either, on the grounds that dropping these common foundational assumptions results in a distinctively different framework for the explanation of behavior. This third alternative, which is briefly described, is a version of non-individualism.     

Schizophrenia and the Scaffolded Self

A family of recent externalist approaches in philosophy of mind argues that our psychological capacities are synchronically and diachronically “scaffolded” by external (i.e., beyond-the-brain) resources. I consider how these “scaffolded” approaches might inform debates in phenomenological psychopathology. I first introduce the idea of “affective scaffolding” and make some taxonomic distinctions. Next, I use schizophrenia as a case study to argue—along with others in phenomenological psychopathology—that schizophrenia is fundamentally a self-disturbance. However, I offer a subtle reconfiguration of these approaches. I argue that schizophrenia is not simply a disruption of ipseity or minimal self-consciousness but rather a disruption of the scaffolded self, established and regulated via its ongoing engagement with the world and others. I conclude by considering how this scaffolded framework indicates the need to consider new forms of intervention and treatment.

     

Refining the Inferential Model of Scientific Understanding

In this article, I use a mental models computational account of representation to illustrate some details of my previously presented inferential model of scientific understanding. The hope is to shed some light on possible mechanisms behind the notion of scientific understanding. I argue that if mental models are a plausible approach to modelling cognition, then understanding can best be seen as the coupling of specific rules. I present our beliefs as ‘ordinary’ conditional rules, and the coupling process as one where the consequent of one ordinary rule (OR) matches and activates the antecedent of the rule to which it is coupled in virtue of the activation of an intermediate ‘inference’ rule. I argue that on this approach knowledge of an explanation is the activation of ORs in a cognitive hierarchy, while understanding is achieved when those activated ORs are also coupled via correct inference rules. I do not directly address issues regarding the plausibility of mental models themselves. This article should therefore be seen as an exercise in refining the inferential model within an already presupposed computational setting, not one of arguing for the psychological adequacy of computational approaches.     

Belief attribution in science: Folk psychology under theoretical stress

Some eliminativists have predicted that a developed neuroscience will eradicate the principles and theoretical kinds (belief, desire, etc.) implicit in our ordinary practices of mental state attribution. Prevailing defenses of common-sense psychology infer its basic integrity from its familiarity and instrumental success in everyday social commerce. Such common-sense defenses charge that eliminativist arguments are self-defeating in their folk psychological appeal to the belief that eliminativism is true. I argue that eliminativism is untouched by this simple charge of inconsistency, and introduce a different dialectical strategy for arguing against the eliminativist. In keeping with the naturalistic trend in the sociology and philosophy of science, I show that neuroscientists routinely rely on folk psychological procedures of intentional state attribution in applying epistemically reliable standards of scientific evaluation. These scientific contexts place ordinary procedures of attribution under greater stress, producing evidence of folk psychological success that is less equivocal than the evidence in mundane settings. Therefore, the dependence of science on folk psychology, when combined with an independently plausible explanatory constraint on reduction and an independently motivated notion of theoretical stress, allows us to reconstitute the charge of (neurophilic) eliminativist inconsistency in a more sophisticated form.This research was supported by a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship (RCD87-58409). I completed the paper during an enjoyable year as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Bryn Mawr College. I am indebted to Richard Boyd, Sydney Shoemaker, and Robert Stalnaker for their detailed appraisals of the ideas presented here. I am especially grateful to Richard Boyd for many long conversations and specific suggestions. Anthony Appiah, Paul Churchland, Phil Gasper, Frank Keil, Dick Moran, Dave Reichling, Frank Wilson, and Rob Wilson improved the final product either through comments, conversation, or both. Finally, two anonymous referees for Synthese provided very useful recommendations for improvement.     

The extended mind: born to be wild? A lesson from action-understanding

The extended mind hypothesis (Clark and Chalmers in Analysis 58(1):7–19, 1998; Clark 2008) is an influential hypothesis in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. I argue that the extended mind hypothesis is born to be wild. It has undeniable and irrepressible tendencies of flouting grounding assumptions of the traditional information-processing paradigm. I present case-studies from social cognition which not only support the extended mind proposal but also bring out its inherent wildness. In particular, I focus on cases of action-understanding and discuss the role of embodied intentionality in the extended mind project. I discuss two theories of action-understanding for exploring the support for the extended mind hypothesis in embodied intersubjective interaction, namely, simulation theory and a non-simulationist perceptual account. I argue that, if the extended mind adopts a simulation theory of action-understanding, it rejects representationalism. If it adopts a non-simulationist perceptual account of action-understanding, it rejects the classical sandwich view of the mind.     

Dualism in medicine,Christian theology,and the aging

Distinguishing a person's soul or mind from a person's body describes dualism, the philosophical premise that fails to integrate the person as one, but instead leaves the person as two, usually as souland body or as mindand body. In dualism, one tends to think of the soul or the mind as the person and the body as an appendage. I argue that 1) dualism is rampant in medicine; 2) that Christian theology has fundamentally opposed it, and 3) that cultural dualism today threatens the aging in particular. To deal with this threat, I argue that the moral task of being human is to become one in mind and body. That is, I argue that the unity of the person which is the unity of the mind and body is not really a metaphysical given, but rather the goal or end of being human.     

But what then am I,this inexhaustible,unfathomable historical self? Or,upon what ground may one commit empiricism?

This essay examines the perspective from which Bas van Fraassen, in his book, The Empirical Stance, explains the project of empiricism. I argue that this perspective is a robustly transcendental perspective, which suggests that the tradition of empiricism lacks the resources to explain itself. I offer an alternative history of epistemic voluntarism in twentieth-century philosophy to the history van Fraassen himself provides, one that finds the novelty in van Fraassen’s own views to be precisely his reintroduction of the knowing mind into the tradition of analytic philosophy of science.     

Sellars on thoughts and beliefs

In this paper, I examine Wilfrid Sellars’ famous Myth of Jones. I argue the myth provides an ontologically austere account of thoughts and beliefs that makes sense of the full range of our folk psychological abilities. Sellars’ account draws on both Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ryle provides Sellars with the resources to make thoughts metaphysically respectable and Wittgenstein the resources to make beliefs rationally criticisable. By combining these insights into a single account, Sellars is able to see reasons as causes and, hence, to respect the full range of our folk psychological generalisations. This is achieved by modelling folk psychological practice on theoretical reasoning. But despite frequent misinterpretation, Sellars does not claim that thoughts and beliefs are theoretical concepts. Thus, folk psychological explanation is not theoretical, and hence, it is not replaceable by scientific theory. Hence, scientific concepts will not eliminate folk psychological concepts. Thus, Sellars avoids eliminativism.     

Hume's Foundational Project in the Treatise

In the Introduction to the Treatise Hume very enthusiastically announces his project to provide a secure and solid foundation for the sciences by grounding them on his science of man. And Hume indicates in the Abstract that he carries out this project in the Treatise. But most interpreters do not believe that Hume's project comes to fruition. In this paper, I offer a general reading of what I call Hume's ‘foundational project’ in the Treatise, but I focus especially on Book 1. I argue that in Book 1 much of Hume's logic is put in the service of the other sciences, in particular, mathematics and natural philosophy. I concentrate on Hume's negative thesis that many of the ideas central to the sciences are ideas that we cannot form. For Hume, this negative thesis has implications for the sciences, as many of the texts I discuss make evident. I consider and criticize different proposals for understanding these implications: the Criterion of Meaning and the ‘Inconceivability Principle’. I introduce what I call Hume's ‘No Reason to Believe’ Principle, which I argue captures more adequately the link Hume envisions between his logic, in particular his examination of ideas, and the other sciences.     

Semantics and the computational paradigm in cognitive psychology

There is a prevalent notion among cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind that computers are merely formal symbol manipulators, performing the actions they do solely on the basis of the syntactic properties of the symbols they manipulate. This view of computers has allowed some philosophers to divorce semantics from computational explanations. Semantic content, then, becomes something one adds to computational explanations to get psychological explanations. Other philosophers, such as Stephen Stich, have taken a stronger view, advocating doing away with semantics entirely. This paper argues that a correct account of computation requires us to attribute content to computational processes in order to explain which functions are being computed. This entails that computational psychology must countenance mental representations. Since anti-semantic positions are incompatible with computational psychology thus construed, they ought to be rejected. Lastly, I argue that in an important sense, computers are not formal symbol manipulators.     

Connectionism and the Philosophical Foundations of Cognitive Science

This is an overview of recent philosophical discussion about connectionism and the foundations of cognitive science. Connectionist modeling in cognitive science is described. Three broad conceptions of the mind are characterized, and their comparative strengths and weaknesses are discussed: (1) the classical computation conception in cognitive science; (2) a popular foundational interpretation of connectionism that John Tienson and I call "non-sentential computationalism"; and (3) an alternative interpretation of connectionism we call "dynamical cognition." Also discussed are two recent philosophical attempts to enlist connectionism in defense of eliminativism about folk psychology.     

Philosophers should prefer simpler theories

Recent years have seen considerable attention paid to the methodology of philosophy. The puzzle is simple—if philosophy is not an empirical discipline, how can one philosophical theory be rationally preferred over another? One answer to this question is that we should apply the theoretical virtues. Foremost among these theoretical virtues is simplicity—so perhaps we should prefer simpler philosophical theories to more complex ones. Huemer (Philos Q 59:216–236, 2009) objects that the reasons to prefer simpler theories in science do not apply in philosophy. I will argue that Huemer is mistaken—the arguments he marshals for preferring simpler theories in science can also be applied in philosophy. Like Huemer, I will focus on the philosophy of mind and the nominalism/Platonism debate. But I want to engage with the broader issue of whether simplicity is relevant to philosophy.