Fodor's nativism

Conclusion The upshot of all this is that very many lexical concepts arenot triggered. Not is triggering is a brute-causal, non cognitive process. Concepts, by and large, are not acquired through the inductive confirmation of definitions. I think Fodor is right about that. But the experience that leads to their acquisition is not arbitrary, and is cognitively processed. It's not just switching on a little cognitive machine already there, or kick-starting an endogenously controlled process.     

Demography and cultural complexity

Synthese - This paper begins by calling attention to a puzzling feature of our deep past: an apparent mis-match between morphological evolution in our lineage, including the expansion of our brain...     

Minds: extended or scaffolded?

This paper discusses two perspectives, each of which recognises the importance of environmental resources in enhancing and amplifying our cognitive capacity. One is the Clark–Chalmers model, extended further by Clark and others. The other derives from niche construction models of evolution, models which emphasise the role of active agency in enhancing the adaptive fit between agent and world. In the human case, much niche construction is epistemic: making cognitive tools and assembling other informational resources that support and scaffold intelligent action. I shall argue that extended mind cases are limiting cases of environmental scaffolding, and while the extended mind picture is not false, the niche construction model is a more helpful framework for understanding human action.     

How to think about the Modularity of Mind-Reading

It has been suggested that the fixation of beliefs about people's beliefs, desires and intentions is modularized. We argue that this is unlikely. We argue that there is modularity lower down: social-intentional 'markers' are produced by an encapsulated mechanism intermediate between perception and belief-fixation, and that these markers make a distinctive contribution to the fixation of beliefs about the mental. But belief fixation itself is not modular. Finally, we suggest some complications to our simple picture, and some ways in which our thesis might shed light on pathologies of social understanding.