Goal attribution without agency cues: the perception of 'pure reason' in infancy.

The proper domain of naive psychological reasoning is human action and human mental states but such reasoning is frequently applied to non-human phenomena as well. The studies reported in this paper test the validity of the currently widespread belief that this tendency is rooted in the fact that naive psychological reasoning is initially restricted to, and triggered by, the perception of self-initiated movement of agents. We report three habituation experiments which examine the necessary conditions under which infants invoke a psychological principle, namely the principle of rational action, to interpret behaviour as goal directed action. Experiment 1 revealed that the principle of rational action already operates at 9 (but not yet at 6) months of age. Experiment 2 demonstrated that perceptual cues indicating agency, such as self-propulsion, are not necessary prerequisites for interpreting behaviour in terms of the principle of rational action. Experiment 3 confirmed that this effect cannot be attributed to generalisation of agentive properties from one object to another. These results suggest that the domain of naive psychology is initially defined only by the applicability of its core principles and its ontology is not restricted to (featurally identified) object kinds such as persons, animates, or agents. We argue that in its initial state naive psychological reasoning is not a cue-based but a principle-based theory.     

Gendered Racism and Mental Health among Young Adult U.S. Black Women: The Moderating Roles of Gendered Racial Identity Centrality and Identity Shifting

Sex Roles - Black women are uniquely located at the intersection of two marginalized identities which puts them at risk of experiencing a combined discrimination known as gendered racism. Among...     

Lambek Calculus with Conjugates

Studia Logica - We study an expansion of the Distributive Non-associative Lambek Calculus with conjugates of the Lambek product operator and residuals of those conjugates. The resulting logic is...     

Blame it on me

Journal of Philosophical Logic - In this paper, we develop a formalisation of the main ideas of the work of Van de Poel on responsibility. Using the basic concepts through which the meanings of...     

“2 x 3” primes naming “6”: Evidence from masked priming

It is a common assumption for multiplication-solving models that single-digit multiplications are automatically retrieved. However, the experimental evidence for this is based on paradigms under suspicion. In this research, we employed a new procedure with the aim of assessing the automatic retrieval of multiplication more directly. In two experiments, multiplication automatism was studied using briefly presented primes (stimulus onset asynchrony = 48 msec) in a number-naming task. In Experiment 1, in the congruent conditions, the target and the prime were the same numbers (e.g., prime, 6; target, 6) or the target was the solution to the multiplication prime (e.g., prime, 2×3=; target, 6). In the incongruent conditions, no relationship existed between the primes and the targets (e.g., prime, 32; target, 6; or prime, 4×8=; target, 6). Experiment 2 explored the relevance of the equal sign for the multiplication-priming effect. Data showed that naming was faster when the solution of the multiplication prime matched the target, as compared with the incongruent condition (multiplication-priming effect), and that these effects were found irrespective of the presence of the equal sign. The fact that this priming effect was found even though the participants were unaware of the presentation of the primes supports the automatic character of single-digit multiplication. We conclude by arguing that this procedure is highly valuable for exploring the mechanisms involved in simple arithmetic solving.     

Introspective forgetting

We model the forgetting of propositional variables in a modal logical context where agents become ignorant and are aware of each others’ or their own resulting ignorance. The resulting logic is sound and complete. It can be compared to variable-forgetting as abstraction from information, wherein agents become unaware of certain variables: by employing elementary results for bisimulation, it follows that beliefs not involving the forgotten atom(s) remain true. The work for this publication was mainly carried out while Hans van Ditmarsch was associated to: Institut de Recherche en Informatique, Université Paul Sabatier, France.     

Propositions and the Substitution Anomaly

The Substitution Anomaly is the failure of intuitively coreferential expressions of the corresponding forms “that S” and “the proposition that S” to be intersubstitutable salva veritate under certain ‘selective’ attitudinal verbs that grammatically accept both sorts of terms as complements. The Substitution Anomaly poses a direct threat to the basic assumptions of Millianism, which predict the interchangeability of “that S” and “the proposition that S”. Jeffrey King has argued persuasively that the most plausible Millian solution is to treat the selective attitudinal verbs as lexically ambiguous, having distinct meanings associated with the different sorts of complement terms. In opposition this approach, I argue that there are independent reasons for maintaining the univocality of these verbs and that this can be done while accommodating the Substitution Anomaly and without sacrificing the transparency of the relevant attitude ascriptions. In particular, I show how, by employing an extended version of Edward Zalta’s system of intensional logic for abstract objects, one can construct for a regimented fragment ? of English containing the relevant vocabulary a semantical theory ? which (a) treats ?’s selective attitudinal verbs as univocal, (b) regards genuine terms as occurring transparently under such verbs in sentences of ?, and yet (c) predicts the occurrence of the Substitution Anomaly in ?.