A Logic for Reasoning about Relative Similarity

A similarity relation is a reflexive and symmetric binary relation between objects. Similarity is relative: it depends on the set of properties of objects used in determining their similarity or dissimilarity. A multi-modal logical language for reasoning about relative similarities is presented. The modalities correspond semantically to the upper and lower approximations of a set of objects by similarity relations corresponding to all subsets of a given set of properties of objects. A complete deduction system for the language is presented.     

Computational models of the “active self” and its disturbances in schizophrenia

The notion that self-disorders are at the root of the emergence of schizophrenia rather than a symptom of the disease, is getting more traction in the cognitive sciences. This is in line with philosophical approaches that consider an enactive self, constituted through action and interaction with the environment. We thereby analyze different definitions of the self and evaluate various computational theories lending to these ideas. Bayesian and predictive processing are promising approaches for computational modeling of the “active self”. We evaluate their implementation and challenges in computational psychiatry and cognitive developmental robotics. We describe how and why embodied robotic systems provide a valuable tool in psychiatry to assess, validate, and simulate mechanisms of self-disorders. Specifically, mechanisms involving sensorimotor learning, prediction, and self-other distinction, can be assessed with artificial agents. This link can provide essential insights to the formation of the self and new avenues in the treatment of psychiatric disorders.     

Building phrases in language production: An MEG study of simple composition

Although research on language production has developed detailed maps of the brain basis of single word production in both time and space, little is known about the spatiotemporal dynamics of the processes that combine individual words into larger representations during production. Studying composition in production is challenging due to difficulties both in controlling produced utterances and in measuring the associated brain responses. Here, we circumvent both problems using a minimal composition paradigm combined with the high temporal resolution of magnetoencephalography (MEG). With MEG, we measured the planning stages of simple adjective–noun phrases (‘red tree’), matched list controls (‘red, blue’), and individual nouns (‘tree’) and adjectives (‘red’), with results indicating combinatorial processing in the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and left anterior temporal lobe (LATL), two regions previously implicated for the comprehension of similar phrases. These effects began relatively quickly (∼180 ms) after the presentation of a production prompt, suggesting that combination commences with initial lexical access. Further, while in comprehension, vmPFC effects have followed LATL effects, in this production paradigm vmPFC effects occurred mostly in parallel with LATL effects, suggesting that a late process in comprehension is an early process in production. Thus, our results provide a novel neural bridge between psycholinguistic models of comprehension and production that posit functionally similar combinatorial mechanisms operating in reversed order.     

A processing fluency explanation of bias against migrants

This research investigated whether people are biased against migrants partly because they find migrants more difficult to cognitively process than nonmigrants. In Study 1, 181 undergraduate students evaluated migrant and nonmigrant members of two minimal groups and reported the difficulty that they experienced in thinking about each type of target. Participants rated migrants less positively than nonmigrants, and difficulty ratings partially mediated this effect. Study 2 (N = 191) replicated these findings and demonstrated similar findings for individuals who had been excluded from minimal groups. This evidence implies that migrant bias can be explained partly in terms of the difficulty that people have in processing information about migrants, and that it is related to migrants’ exclusion from their original group.     

Whiteheadian Societies and Peirce's Law of Mind: Actuality and Potentiality in the Cosmic Process

Abstract

A more suitable philosophical position to counter the claims of scientific materialism re the nature of physical reality can possibly be found in combining the metaphysics of A.N. Whitehead and C.S. Peirce. Peirce postulated a habit-forming tendency or inbuilt potentiality of the cosmic process as a whole to move over time toward ever greater organization and more complex structure. But he is vague on how “the law of the mind” applies to nature below the level of human self-awareness. Whitehead's notion of actual entities (momentary self-constituting subjects of experience) as the “final real things of which the world is made up” logically allows for some primitive form of subjectivity with the requisite potentiality for habit-formation at all levels of existence and activity within nature. In addition, Whitehead's notion of structured societies made up of subsocieties with a “regnant” subsociety seems philosophically to justify the new emphasis on bottom-up rather than top-down causation in the emergence of more complex levels of existence and activity within the life-sciences.     

Processing ambiguous Spanish se in a minimal chain

The recovery of pieces of information that are not linguistically expressed is a constant feature of the process of language comprehension. In the processing literature, such missing information is generally referred to as “gaps”. Usually, one resolves gaps by finding “fillers” in either the sentence or the context. For instance, in Peter seemed to be upset, Peter is really the subject of being upset but appears as surface subject of seems. Sometimes constituents move, leaving gaps behind. Various Romance languages such as Spanish or Italian have a grammatical particle se/si, which, as it is extremely ambiguous, licenses different sorts of gaps. In Spanish, se can encode at least reflexive, impersonal, and passive meanings. In an eye-tracking experiment we contrast reflexive structures containing postverbal subjects with impersonal structures with no subjects (GAP se vendó apresuradamente el corredor/“the runner bandaged himself hurriedly” vs. GAP se vendó apresuradamente al corridor/“(someone) bandaged the runner hurriedly”). In a second manipulation we contrast the presence of an extra argument with se-passives (GAP se vendó el tobillo el corredor/“the runner bandaged his ankle” vs. GAP se vendó el tobillo al corridor/“the runner's ankle was bandaged”). Our comparisons involve contrasting standard transitive structures with nonstandard word order (postverbal subject and a preverbal subject gap) against inherently complex and less habitual structures such as impersonals (with no subject) or se-passives (with subjects in canonical object position). We evaluate the minimal chain principle (de Vincenzi, 1991 De Vincenzi, M. 1991. Syntactic parsing strategies in Italian, Dordrecht, , The Netherlands: Kluwer. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]), according to which displacement is costly because it entails complex (derivational) “chains” that must be undone before phrasal packaging can commence. We show the minimal chain principle to be essentially correct when contrasting more complex but more frequent structures with less complex but less frequent structures. A noteworthy feature of this research is that the gaps appear before the fillers in the structures that we analyse.     

Children's understanding of human and super-natural mind

Barrett, Richert, and Driesenga [Barrett, J. L., Richert, R. A., & Driesenga, A. (2001). God's beliefs versus mother's: The development of nonhuman agents concepts. Child Development, 72(1), 50–65] have suggested that children are able to conceptualize the representational properties held by certain super-natural entities, such as God, before they achieve representational understanding of the human mind. The two experimental conditions of the present study aimed at cross-checking the above suggestion. One hundred and twenty children aged from 3 to 7 years were involved in both conditions. In the first, a modified perspective-taking and appearance-reality task, similar to that adopted in Barrett et al.'s study, was used. The task in the second addressed another aspect of representational understanding of the human mind, that is, the early emerging of the rule that knowledge is constrained by perception. The results of the study showed that younger children systematically treat God as a human protagonist regarding the representational properties they possess. Moreover, it was found that children are able to reason, accurately, about God's representational properties, only upon reaching their 5th year of age, when their representational understanding of the human mind becomes stable and robust.     

Quine’s Eliminativism and the Crystal Spheres

Quine’s eliminativist theory has largely been ignored by the philosophical community. This is highly regrettable because Quine’s theory is probably close to correct. Now, the probable correctness of Quine’s theory has an important consequence since, according to the theory, there are no mental entities (events, states, phenomena, properties, etc.) nor do such entities play any role in a scientific account of the relevant phenomena. But the hundreds or probably thousands of publications that deal with issues such as mental causation, the nature of qualia, supervenience of the mental, or multiple realizability, presume the existence of, or at least attribute a positive role to, mental entities. The probable correctness of Quine’s theory therefore suggests that all these publications are worthless and reading them is a waste of time just as reading studies about how crystal spheres can move planets is considered nowadays a waste of time.

The Myth of Reductive Extensionalism

Extensionalism, as I understand it here, is the view that physical reality consists exclusively of extensional entities. On this view, intensional entitities must either be eliminated in favor of an ontology of extensional entities, or be reduced to such an ontology, or otherwise be admitted as non-physical. In this paper I argue that extensionalism is a misguided philosophical doctrine. First, I argue that intensional phenomena are not confined to the realm of language and thought. Rather, the ontology of such phenomena is intimately entwined with the ontology of properties. After providing some evidence to the popularity of extensionalism in contemporary analytic philosophy, I investigate the motivating reasons behind it. Considering several explanations, I argue that the main motivating reason is rooted in the identification of matter with extension, an identification which is one of the hallmarks of the mechanistic conception of nature inherited from the founding fathers of our modern scientific outlook. I then argue that such a conception is not only at odds with a robust ontology of properties but is also at odds with our best contemporary physics. Rather than vindicating extensionalism contemporary science undermines the position, and the lesson to be drawn from this surprising fact is that extensionalism needs no longer be espoused as a regulative ideal of naturalistic philosophy. I conclude by showing that the ontological approach to intensional phenomena advocated throughout the paper also gains support from an examination of the historical context within which ‘intension’ was first introduced as a semantic notion.