Triggers of Thought: Impressions within Hume’s Theory of Mind

2010 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Anik Waldow
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Associative Processes ◽  
Sensory Inputs ◽  
The World ◽  
Theories Of Meaning ◽  
Conceptual Resources

This essay argues that Humean impressions are triggers of associative processes, which enable us to form stable patterns of thought that co-vary with our experiences of the world. It will thus challenge the importance of the Copy Principle by claiming that it is the regularity with which certain kinds of sensory inputs motivate certain sets of complex ideas that matters for the discrimination of ideas. This reading is conducive to Hume’s account of perception, because it avoids the impoverishment of conceptual resources so typical for empiricist theories of meaning and explains why ideas should be based on impressions, although impressions cannot be known to mirror matters of fact. Dieser Aufsatz argumentiert dafür, dass humesche Eindrücke („impressions“) Auslöser von assoziativen Prozessen sind, welche es uns ermöglichen, stabile Denkmuster zu bilden, die mit unseren Erfahrungen der Welt kovariant sind. Der Aufsatz stellt somit die Wichtigkeit des Kopien-Prinzips in Frage, nämlich dadurch, dass behauptet wird, für die Unterscheidung der Ideen sei die Regelmäßigkeit maßgeblich, mit der gewisse Arten von sensorischen Eingaben gewisse Mengen von komplexen Ideen motivieren. Diese Lesart trägt zu einem Verständnis von Humes Auffassung der Wahrnehmung bei, da sie die Verarmung der begrifflichen Mittel, die für empiristische Theorien der Bedeutung so typisch ist, vermeidet und erklärt, warum Ideen auf Eindrücken basieren sollten, obwohl Eindrücke nicht als Abbildungen von Tatsachen erkannt werden können.

scholarly journals Autistic Adults are Not Impaired at Maintaining or Switching Between Counterfactual and Factual Worlds: An ERP Study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather J. Ferguson ◽  
Lena Wimmer ◽  
Jo Black ◽  
Mahsa Barzy ◽  
David Williams
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Cognitive Flexibility ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Critical Word ◽  
Group Level ◽  
Contextual Cues ◽  
Brain Potential ◽  
The World ◽  
Autistic Adults ◽  
Set Up

AbstractWe report an event-related brain potential (ERP) experiment that tests whether autistic adults are able to maintain and switch between counterfactual and factual worlds. Participants (N = 48) read scenarios that set up a factual or counterfactual scenario, then either maintained the counterfactual world or switched back to the factual world. When the context maintained the world, participants showed appropriate detection of the inconsistent critical word. In contrast, when participants had to switch from a counterfactual to factual world, they initially experienced interference from the counterfactual context, then favoured the factual interpretation of events. None of these effects were modulated by group, despite group-level impairments in Theory of Mind and cognitive flexibility among the autistic adults. These results demonstrate that autistic adults can appropriately use complex contextual cues to maintain and/or update mental representations of counterfactual and factual events.

scholarly journals From Mind to Picture: A Systematic Review on Children’s and Adolescents’ Understanding of the Link between Artists and Pictures

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Romina Vivaldi ◽  
Richard P. Jolley ◽  
Sarah E Rose
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Review ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Web Of Science ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Child Psychology ◽  
Inclusion Criteria ◽  
Developmental Milestones ◽  
Italian Language ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

Pictorial symbols have multiple layers of meaning: not only do they represent objects, events and ideas about the world, they also represent the intentions of artists as well as other artist attributes (age, skill, originality and knowledge, mood, style and sentience). Although children’s developmental milestones of pictorial understanding have been the subject of a long-standing debate, their understanding of the relation between artists and pictures has often been neglected. The aim of this article was to conduct a systematic review on children’s and adolescents’ understanding of the relation between artists and pictures. PsycINFO and Web of Science databases were searched for English, Spanish, German, and Italian language empirical studies that examined this link in 2- to 18-year- olds. Forty-two citations (64 studies) from 14 different countries met the inclusion criteria. Results revealed the majority of the studies focused on the understanding of the artist’s intention. Although research on children’s and adolescents’ understanding of other attributes is scarce, and there were inconsistencies across the methodologies used, it seems that they first acknowledge intention and only later become more aware of how artist’s attributes are communicated through intention. The results of the review encourage subsequent research to provide a clearer conceptualised model of child and adolescent understanding of the artist-picture relationship. Such a model should be placed within a wider framework of the network of relationship between the artist, picture, world and beholder. Finally, consideration of how the development of understanding the artist-picture relationship is bi-directionally influenced with other developmental milestones in the child psychology is encouraged, particularly picture-production and theory of mind, and variations in atypical populations.

scholarly journals Alethic Deflationism and Normativity: A Critique

2018 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 292
Author(s):  
Massimo Dell'Utri
Keyword(s):  
Final Analysis ◽  
Normative Concept ◽  
Paul Horwich ◽  
The World ◽  
Conceptual Resources ◽  
The Way

The paper starts by highlighting that virtually nobody would object to claims such as “to regard an assertion or a belief or a thought as true or false is to regard it as being right or wrong”—a claim that shows that truth is intrinsically normative. It is well known that alethic deflationists deny this. Paul Horwich, for instance, maintains that nothing shows that TRUTH is a normative concept in the way that OUGHT is. By relying on a distinction among dimensions of normativity I will try to pinpoint the weakness of Horwich’s argument in the fact that he works with a strong, uncalled-for, interpretation of normativity, whereas a weaker interpretation is more than enough. However, the impression might persist that a different understanding of the normativity of truth on the part of deflationists could eventually show the compatibility between alethic deflationism and normativity. The remaining part of the paper is devoted to contend that this is a wrong impression. Accordingly, it is stated that the normativity exerted by truth is ascribable in the final analysis to the world, and the provocative claim is defended that alethic deflationism lacks the conceptual resources to account for the relation between language and the world.***Deflacionismo Alético e Normatividade: Uma Crítica***O artigo começa destacando que praticamente ninguém se opõe a reivindicações como "considerar uma afirmação, uma crença ou um pensamento como verdadeiro ou falso é considerá-lo como correto ou errado" - uma afirmação que mostra que a verdade é intrinsecamente normativa. Sabe-se que os deflacionistas aléticos negam isso. Paul Horwich, por exemplo, sustenta que nada mostra que a verdade é um conceito normativo da maneira que deveria ser. Ao confiar em uma distinção entre as dimensões da normatividade, tentarei identificar a fraqueza do argumento de Horwich no fato de que ele trabalha com uma interpretação de normatividade forte, desnecessária, quando uma interpretação mais fraca seria mais do que suficiente. No entanto, a impressão pode persistir de que uma compreensão diferente da normatividade da verdade por parte dos deflacionistas poderia eventualmente mostrar a compatibilidade entre o deflacionismo e a normatividade alética. A parte restante do artigo dedica-se a afirmar que esta é uma impressão errada. Por conseguinte, afirma-se que a normatividade exercida pela verdade é imputável, em última análise, ao mundo, e a reivindicação provocativa é defendida de que o deflacionismo alético não possui os recursos conceituais para explicar a relação entre a linguagem e o mundo.

Mental Mechanisms

Mind-Society ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 22-47
Author(s):  
Paul Thagard
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Appraisal ◽  
Mental Representations ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Sensory Inputs ◽  
The World ◽  
Sensory Motor ◽  
Human Thinking ◽  
High Level

Psychological explanations based on representations and procedures can be deepened by showing how they emerge from neural mechanisms. Neurons represent aspects of the world by collective patterns of firing. These patterns can be bound into more complicated patterns that can transcend the limitations of sensory inputs. Semantic pointers are a special kind of representation that operates by binding neural patterns encompassing sensory, motor, verbal, and emotional information. The semantic pointer theory applies not only to the ordinary operations of mental representations like concepts and rules but also to the most high-level kinds of human thinking, including language, creativity, and consciousness. Semantic pointers also encompass emotions, construed as bindings that combine cognitive appraisal with physiological perception.

Semantics, teleological (teleosemantics)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Godfrey-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Biological Concept ◽  
The World ◽  
Internal States ◽  
Concept Of Function ◽  
Theories Of Meaning

Teleological/biological theories of meaning use a biological concept of function to explain how the internal states of organisms like ourselves can represent conditions in the world. These theories are controversial, as they have the consequence that an organism’s history affects the content of its present thoughts. These theories have advantages over other naturalistic theories of meaning in the task of explaining the possibility of error and unreliable representation.

Husserl’s Timaeus. Plato’s Creation Myth and the Phenomenological Concept of Metaphysics as the Teleological Science of the World

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 77-100
Author(s):  
Emiliano Trizio ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Phenomenology ◽  
Creation Myth ◽  
The World ◽  
Scientific Ideas ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Conceptual Resources

According to Husserl, Plato played a fundamental role in the development of the notion of teleology, so much so that Husserl viewed the myth narrated in the Timaeus as a fundamental stage in the long history that he hoped would eventually lead to a teleological science of the world grounded in transcendental phenomenology. This article explores this interpretation of Plato’s legacy in light of Husserl’s thesis that Plato was the initiator of the ideal of genuine science. It also outlines how Husserl sought conceptual resources within transcendental phenomenology to turn the key elements of Plato’s creation myth into rigorous scientific ideas.

scholarly journals Theories of Meaning for the Internet of Things

2021 ◽  
pp. 37-61
Author(s):  
Michael Färber ◽  
Yulia Svetashova ◽  
Andreas Harth
Keyword(s):  
Internet Of Things ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Situation Semantics ◽  
World Knowledge ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Possible World Semantics ◽  
The World ◽  
Theories Of Meaning ◽  
The Internet Of Things ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

AbstractIn this chapter, we consider the theoretical foundations for representing knowledge in the Internet of Things context. Specifically, we consider (1) the model-theoretic semantics (i.e., extensional semantics), (2) the possible-world semantics (i.e., intensional semantics), (3) the situation semantics, and (4) the cognitive/distributional semantics. Given the peculiarities of the Internet of Things, we pay particular attention to (a) perception (i.e., how to establish a connection to the world), (b) intersubjectivity (i.e., how to align world representations), and (c) the dynamics of world knowledge (i.e., how to model events). We come to the conclusion that each of the semantic theories helps in modeling specific aspects, but does not sufficiently address all three aspects simultaneously.

Using Argumentation to Develop Critical Thinking About Social Issues in the Classroom

2021 ◽  
pp. 508-522
Author(s):  
N. Leigh Boyd
Keyword(s):  
Critical Thinking ◽  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Real World ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
World Today ◽  
The World ◽  
Framework For Teaching ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Dialogic Argumentation

Thanks to the polarized nature of politics in the world today, students need to learn how to think critically about social issues. Argumentation can be both a type of critical thinking and a tool with which to teach students to think critically about social issues. This chapter lays out a framework for teaching students how to develop critical thinking about real world issues through the use of dialogic argumentation. The impact of dialogic argumentative activities in the classroom are discussed, particularly as they relate to the development of metacognition and theory of mind, as well as how they help students develop an “inner-locutor” that allows them to evaluate both their position and opposing positions. Finally, a model for how these elements contribute to students' value-loaded critical thinking about social issues is outlined.

The Brain from Inside Out

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
György Buzsáki
Keyword(s):  
Brain Research ◽  
Brain Structures ◽  
Fundamental Function ◽  
Sensory Inputs ◽  
Highly Active ◽  
Self Organized ◽  
The World ◽  
Cognitive Faculties ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Inside Out

The Brain from Inside Out takes a critical look at contemporary brain research and reminds us that theoretical framework does matter. Current technology-driven neuroscience is still largely fueled by an empiricist philosophy assuming that the brain’s goal is to perceive, represent the world, and learn the truth. An inevitable consequence of this framework is the assumption of a decision-making homunculus wedged between our perception and actions. In contrast, The Brain from Inside Out advocates that the brain’s fundamental function is to induce actions and predict the consequences of those actions to support the survival and prosperity of the brain’s host. Brains constantly test their hypotheses by producing actions rather than searching for the veridical objective world. Only actions can provide a second opinion about the relevance of the sensory inputs and provide meaning for and interpretation of those inputs. In this inside-out framework, it is not sensations that teach the brain and build up its circuits. Instead, the brain comes with a preconfigured and self-organized dynamics that constrains how it acts and views the world. Both its anatomical and physiological organizations are characterized by an enormous diversity which spans several orders of magnitude. The two ends of this continuous landscape give rise to apparently distinct qualitative features. A small core of strongly interconnected, highly active neurons provides fast and “good-enough” answers in needy situations by generalizations, whereas detailed and precise solutions rely on the contribution of the more isolated and sluggish majority. In this non-egalitarian organization, preexisting nonsense brain patterns become meaningful through action-based experience. The inside-out framework offers an alternative strategy to investigate how brain operations give rise to our cognitive faculties, as opposed to the outside-in approach that explores how our preconceived ideas map onto brain structures.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document