Horwich on meaning and use

Paul Horwich claims that theories of meaning ought to accommodate the commonsense intuition that meanings play a part in explaining the use of words. Further, he argues that the view that best does so is that according to which the meaning of a word is constituted by a disposition to accept, in some circumstances, sentences in which it features. I argue that if meanings are construed thus, they will in fact fail to explain the use of words. I also argue that if we insist, as Horwich does, on the commonsense assumption that meanings are a species of entity, all versions of the view that meaning is constituted by our dispositions to use words will have to be rejected. I do not, however, claim that such theories ought to be rejected. My point is that they are incompatible with the requirements of commonsense. Further, I suggest that it is premature to impose such requirements on theories of meaning.     

Narratives,culture, and folk psychology

In this paper, I aim to determine to what extent contemporary cross-cultural and developmental research can shed light on the role that narrative practices might play in the development of folk psychology. In particular, I focus on the role of narrative practices in the development of false belief understanding, which has been regarded as a milestone in the development of folk psychology. Second, I aim to discuss possible cognitive procedures that may underlie successful performance in false belief tasks. Methodologically, I distinguish between two kinds of narrative practices: ‘mentalistic narrative practice’ (which involves an explicit reference to another person’s mental states), and ‘behavioral-contextual narrative practice’ (which involves an explicit reference to the (normative) behavior of another person in a specific socio-situational context). Whereas the former is more prevalent in Western cultures than in Eastern cultures, the latter is predominantly used by members of Eastern cultures. Mentalistic narrative practices correlate with cultural divergences in the development of false belief understanding throughout ontogeny but do not seem to play the key role. The analysis shows that (i) conceptual change and the acquisition of mental state terms is essential for passing the false belief task, and that (ii) theory is likely to be the cognitive mechanism involved here such as proposed by Theory Theory. However, Hutto’s Narrative Practice Hypothesis trumps over Theory Theory to account for the varieties and ambiguities people typically meet when understanding each other in everyday life.     

Belief-desire reasoning as a process of selection

Human learning may depend upon domain specialized mechanisms. A plausible example is rapid, early learning about the thoughts and feelings of other people. A major achievement in this domain, at about age four in the typically developing child, is the ability to solve problems in which the child attributes false beliefs to other people and predicts their actions. The main focus of theorizing has been why 3-year-olds fail, and only recently have there been any models of how success is achieved in false-belief tasks. Leslie and Polizzi (Inhibitory processing in the false-belief task: Two conjectures. Developmental Science, 1, 247-254, 1998) proposed two competing models of success, which are the focus of the current paper. The models assume that belief-desire reasoning is a process which selects a content for an agent's belief and an action for the agent's desire. In false belief tasks, the theory of mind mechanism (ToMM) provides plausible candidate belief contents, among which will be a 'true-belief.' A second process reviews these candidates and by default will select the true-belief content for attribution. To succeed in a false-belief task, the default content must be inhibited so that attention shifts to another candidate belief. In traditional false-belief tasks, the protagonist's desire is to approach an object. Here we make use of tasks in which the protagonist has a desire to avoid an object, about which she has a false-belief. Children find such tasks much more difficult than traditional tasks. Our models explain the additional difficulty by assuming that predicting action from an avoidance desire also requires an inhibition. The two processing models differ in the way that belief and desire inhibitory processes combine to achieve successful action prediction. In six experiments we obtain evidence favoring one model, in which parallel inhibitory processes cancel out, over the other model, in which serial inhibitions force attention to a previously inhibited location. These results are discussed in terms of a set of simple proposals for the modus operandi of a domain specific learning mechanism. The learning mechanism is in part modular--the ToMM--and in part penetrable--the Selection Processor (SP). We show how ToMM-SP can account both for competence and for successful and unsuccessful performance on a wide range of belief-desire tasks across the preschool period. Together, ToMM and SP attend to and learn about mental states.     

On Doubt

Despite the prominence of doubt in philosophy since Descartes, the published philosophical literature includes no extended treatment of the nature of doubt. In this paper, I summarize the main contributions that have been made to the subject and then develop a commonsense functionalist account of doubt by specifying (a significant part of) the functional role of doubt that something is the case. After adding two further wrinkles, I show how the resulting account can be used to address the questions of how doubt is related to belief and whether suspension of judgment can be identified with (some appropriate level or levels of) doubt. Although the account is partisan, it should hold interest for those who favor other positions in the philosophy of mind, since (a) much of the account can be taken on board by those in other camps, and (b) the paper demonstrates how a sufficiently detailed account of doubt can be put to work addressing longstanding questions of interest across philosophical sub-disciplines.     

Two flaws concerning belief accounts of implicit biases

The current scientific discourse offers two opposing viewpoints about the roots of implicit biases: are they belief states or subdoxastic attitudes? The goal of this paper is to show that belief accounts of implicit biases are (1) too demanding and (2) lack a satisfying reasoning theory. Firstly, I will outline the concept of attitude and its relation to implicit biases. Next, I will briefly outline Mandelbaum’s view, who gives a paradigmatic example of a belief account of implicit biases. Afterward, I will concern two flaws and discuss them in more detail. This shows that all current belief accounts of implicit biases do not emphasize these critical points enough, which makes them unsatisfying.     

Inhibitory processing in the false belief task: Two conjectures

Although it is well established that four-year-olds outperform three-year-olds on predicting behavior from false beliefs, this is only true when the false belief is coupled with a positive desire. Four-year-olds perform poorly in an otherwise standard false belief task when the protagonist's desire is to avoid rather than to approach a target. We account for this by assuming that the attribution of a false belief involves inhibitory processing. We present two versions of an inhibition model of successful belief-desire reasoning.     

A developmental shift in processes underlying successful belief-desire reasoning

Young children's failures in reasoning about beliefs and desires, and especially about false beliefs, have been much studied. However, there are few accounts of successful belief-desire reasoning in older children or adults. An exception to this is a model in which belief attribution is treated as a process wherein an inhibitory system selects the most likely content for the belief to be attributed from amongst several competing contents [Leslie, A. M., & Polizzi, P. (1998). Developmental Science, 1, 247-254]. We tested this model with an ‘avoidance false belief task’ in which subjects predict the behavior of a character, who wants to avoid an object but who is mistaken about which of three locations it is in. The task has two equally correct answers—in seeking to avoid the location where she mistakenly believes the object to be, the character might equally go to the location where the object actually is, or to the remaining empty location. However, the model predicts that subjects will prefer one of these answers, selecting the object's actual location over the empty location. This bias was confirmed in a series of five experiments with children aged between 4 and 8 years of age. A sixth experiment ruled out two rival explanations for children's biased responding. Two further experiments found the opposite bias in adults. These findings support one selection model as an account of belief-desire reasoning in children, and suggest that a different model is needed for adults. The process of selecting contents for mental state attributions shows a developmental shift between 8 years of age and adulthood.     

Do Consequentialists Have One Thought Too Many?

In this paper I defend consequentialism against the objection that consequentialists are alienated from their personal relationships through having inappropriate motivational states. This objection is one interpretation of Williams' claim that consequentialists will have "one thought too many". Consequentialists should cultivate dispositions to act from their concern for others. I argue that having such a disposition is consistent with a belief in consequentialism and constitutes an appropriate attitude to personal relationships. If the consequentialist has stable beliefs that friendship is justifiable in consequentialist terms, that friendship requires acting from concern for others, and furthermore if the consequentialist finds that she is concerned for others, then she will be able to form a disposition which involves acting from her concern for others without having one thought too many.     

5～8岁儿童二级信念-愿望推理能力的发展

该研究依据信念(正确-错误)和愿望(接近-回避)对儿童的二级信念-愿望推理能力进行了细分,并据此设计了四个二级信念-愿望任务,探讨了480名5～8岁儿童在四个任务上的表现。结果发现,对儿童而言,不同的二级信念-愿望任务的难度不同,由易到难的顺序依次为:二级真实信念接近愿望、二级错误信念接近愿望、二级真实信念回避愿望、二级错误信念回避愿望。     

Mechanisms of belief-desire reasoning. Inhibition and bias

Biases in reasoning can provide insight into underlying processing mechanisms. We demonstrate a new bias in children's belief-desire reasoning. Children between 4 and 8 years of age were told a story in which a character was mistaken about which of three boxes contained some object. The character wanted to go to one of the boxes, but only if it did not contain the object. In this scenario, the character would be expected to avoid the box where she falsely believed the object to be, but might go to either of the remaining boxes. Though the character was equally likely to go to either box, children were biased to predict that the character would go to the box that contained the object. In a control task, the character had the same desire but did not have a false belief; in this case, children showed no bias, choosing the two correct answers equally often. The observed pattern of bias was predicted by a developmental model of belief-desire reasoning. Competent belief-desire reasoning depends on a process of selection by inhibition in which the best belief content emerges from a set of candidates.     

Social Ontology as Convention

I will argue that social ontology is constituted as hierarchical and interlocking conventions of multifarious kinds. Convention, in turn, is modeled in a manner derived from that of David K. Lewis. Convention is usually held to be inadequate for models of social ontologies, with one primary reason being that there seems to be no place for normativity. I argue that two related changes are required in the basic modeling framework in order to address this (and other) issue(s): (1) a shift to an intentional model—among other reasons, in order to account for normativity—and (2) moving away from the belief-desire, propositional attitude, framework for understanding the intentional realm toward an interactive, pragmatic model of intentionality. These shifts provide natural approaches to: (1) understanding the normativities of social realities; (2) the sense in which social ontology is often constituted in implicit relations among the participants rather than elaborated and iterated explicit beliefs and desires; (3) and language.     

‘So you did what you wanted then’: Discourse analysis,personal agency,and psychotherapy

This paper explores issues concerning personal agency in discursive psychology and discourse analysis, with a particular emphasis on agency in terms of motivational accounts of the person. Issues are discussed in relation to the efficacy, acceptability, and accessibility of discourse analytic research for the practising psychotherapist. We suggest that such an approach may raise problems in four areas. First, we argue that without explicit theorization of the subject as language user, discourse analysis may be vulnerable to the charge of determinism. Second, theorization of the subject as language user may be required to account successfully for individual consistency and continuity of identity. Third, although claiming to critique commonsense notions of subjectivity, implicit dualist assumptions facilitate a reading of discursive psychology that is compatible with a motivational model of the person. Finally, we argue that discursive psychology itself implies a particular model of the strategically motivated language user. We conclude that, although these issues require clarification, discursive psychology and discourse analysis have much to offer psychotherapy research.     

Competence and performance in belief-desire reasoning across two cultures: the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about false belief?

There is a change in false belief task performance across the 3-5 year age range, as confirmed in a recent meta-analysis [Wellman, H. M., Cross, D., & Watson, J. (2001). Meta-analysis of theory mind development: The truth about false-belief. Child Development, 72, 655-684]. This meta-analysis identified several performance factors influencing success, including manipulations that highlight the salience of the initial belief content (such as asking where Sally will look first for the marble). However, because a proportion of variance in performance remained unexplained even when identified performance factors were controlled for, the authors concluded from the standpoint of a 'theory-theory' account that children's improvement is the result of conceptual change. Further, the meta-analysis showed that manipulations such as 'look first' improve performance only in children who are in the older part of the 3-5 year range, and thus plausibly operating with a 'transitional' theory of mind--just on the point of realizing conceptual change. Here, we present three studies systematically investigating the 'look first' manipulation which showed that: (i) the advantage for the look first question can be demonstrated in children across different cultures, (ii) look first has an effect that is additive to the improvement with age; there is no interaction such that older children gain more benefit from younger children, (iii) performance in younger children can be, but is not always, elevated to levels that are statistically above chance. These results challenge the theory-theory account and are discussed in terms of models of belief-desire reasoning in which both conceptual competence and performance factors play central roles.     

Belief-desire reasoning in the explanation of behavior: do actions speak louder than words?

The mechanisms underwriting our commonsense psychology, or 'theory of mind', have been extensively investigated via reasoning tasks that require participants to predict the action of agents based on information about beliefs and desires. However, relatively few studies have investigated the processes contributing to a central component of 'theory of mind' - our ability to explain the action of agents in terms of underlying beliefs and desires. In two studies, we demonstrate a novel phenomenon in adult belief-desire reasoning, capturing the folk notion that 'actions speak louder than words'. When story characters were described as searching in the wrong place for a target object, adult subjects often endorsed mental state explanations referencing a distracter object, but only when that object was approached. We discuss how this phenomenon, alongside other reasoning "errors" (e.g., hindsight bias; the curse of knowledge) can be used to illuminate the architecture of domain specific belief-desire reasoning processes.     

In defence of folk psychology

Conclusion Our argument has been that a commonsense functionalist approach to our folk conception of beliefs and desires shows that it is very likely that they exist, where commonsense functionalism is understood as implicitly defined by our folk practice in moving back and forth between behaviour, situations, and beliefs and desires. Completed neuroscience will indeed provide a complete story about when and why we do what we do, but will incorporate rather than eliminate beliefs and desires in this complete story. The irony is that our defence uses an account of folk psychology fully in accord with that provided by eliminativism's sympathizers when they insist that folk psychology is a theory. They see this insistence as opening the way for serious consideration of the possibility that folk psychology is radically mistaken. Any theory can be radically mistaken. But, of course, folk psychology is radically mistaken for a great many objects — the Taj Mahal, for instance. The Taj Mahal does not have beliefs and desires precisely because it does not satisfy the theory. Our point is that because the theory is a purely functional theory, the evidence that we satisfy it (and for that matter that the Taj Mahal does not) is peculiarly strong evidence.     

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.     

学前儿童朴素情绪理论的发展

对情绪的心理层面的理解是幼儿心理理论发展中出现得相对较迟的能力, 他们如何通过愿望和信念等不同的心理状态对人们的情绪做出判断？随着年龄的增长, 他们采用不同策略推测情绪的能力又发生了什么变化？本研究结合主人公愿望是否得到满足的状态, 通过利用图片故事个别测查的方法探查了90名3~5岁学前儿童在“内容错误信念”任务中对他人情绪的推测。结果显示, 年幼儿童、尤其是3岁幼儿的高兴情绪理解受其对情境是否满足愿望的认知的影响, 呈现出显著的“积极情绪偏差效应”; 学前儿童对情绪的认知表现出从不能采用信念—愿望策略到错误地采用信念—愿望策略、到正确采用信念—愿望策略的发展模式, 且其基于信念的情绪理解在一定程度上呈现出落后于其错误信念理解的“滞后效应”。结果还显示幼儿的惊奇情绪判断不仅由信念成分决定, 也受愿望理解的影响。这些结果突显出心理状态在儿童情绪理解中的重要作用, 揭示出学前儿童相对完整的朴素情绪理论发展模式。     

RESCUING RELIGIOUS NON‐REALISM FROM CUPITT

Don Cupitt's version of religious non‐realism based as it is on linguistic constructivism, radical relativism and the view that culture forms human nature has been attacked with devastating effect by realists in the last few years. I argue that there is another strand in Cupitt's thinking, his biological naturalism, that supports a different version of religious non‐realism and that he failed to see this possibility because of his global non‐realism and commitment to the strong programme in the sociology of scientific knowledge. Cupitt's biological naturalism should have led smoothly into evolutionary psychology, which has an account of religious belief that supports a non‐realist interpretation. Evolutionary psychology shows that religious beliefs are natural, normal and about matters of the deepest significance to humans. They gain their character from the operation of evolved structures of the mind and cannot be reduced to other sorts of belief. I argue that the form of religious non‐realism that emerges from taking biological naturalism seriously has a future because it respects the nature of religious belief and seeks to build on its capacity as a unique source of meaning in people's lives. There is also enough common ground with religious realism for there to be genuine dialogue between the two.     

In Defense of Trait‐Based Love

It is widely believed that a person's 1 traits can function as reasons for loving her. (Many a metropolitan rag, for instance, carries lonely hearts ads that attest to this belief with their laundry lists of coveted characteristics.) Notable contemporary work in the philosophy of love has taken the rejection of this premise as its point of departure. As far as I can tell, none of that work has engaged with a careful philosophical exposition of the view under discussion. In the following pages, I will defend the idea of trait‐based love against three of its critics and one of its advocates. I will discuss work on this topic by Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny and David Velleman, arguing that their criticisms fail and that the alternatives they offer to trait‐based love create more difficulties than they solve. What these authors have in common is a deflationary approach to love that reduces it to a beneficent disposition, a valuing relationship and a visceral form of moral regard, respectively. I will compare these to the multiplex, nuanced depiction of trait‐based love in Plato's Symposium. While it is plausible that love can motivate a beneficent disposition, develop in relationships and entails moral regard, I will argue that the attempt to reduce it to any of the foregoing fails. Frankfurt, Kolodny and Velleman reject trait‐based love in part because they think it would differ in unacceptable ways from the love most of us practice. Plato advocates the cultivation of a love that in some respects resembles the picture of trait‐based love the contemporary authors balk at. However, unlike those critics, he appreciates that trait‐based love need not resemble the ideal he proposes. His richer view of love accounts for elements such as need and feeling that the contemporary thinkers are driven to implausibly bracket as distractions. As I will try to show, the most compelling criticisms of Platonic love do not tell against its responsiveness to the loved one's traits. I will argue that trait‐based love is consistent with an intuitive picture of love and that this commonsense approach is more defensible than competing views in these texts. These authors' disagreements about what can count as reasons for love are bound up with the differences in what each takes love to be. Thus, in the course of arguing for trait‐based love, I will critically assess their various proposals as to the nature of love.