Minding One's Cognitive Systems: When Does a Group of Minds Constitute a Single Cognitive Unit?

Episteme ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 177-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Rupert
Keyword(s):  
Social Epistemology ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Cognitive Systems ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Tentative Conclusion ◽  
Group Minds ◽  
The Social ◽  
Group Mind ◽  
Number Of Authors

The possibility of group minds or group mental states has been considered by a number of authors addressing issues in social epistemology and related areas (Goldman 2004, Pettit 2003, Gilbert 2004, Hutchins 1995). An appeal to group minds might, in the end, do indispensable explanatory work in the social or cognitive sciences. I am skeptical, though, and this essay lays out some of the reasons for my skepticism. The concerns raised herein constitute challenges to the advocates of group minds (or group mental states), challenges that might be overcome as theoretical and empirical work proceeds. Nevertheless, these hurdles are, I think, genuine and substantive, so much so that my tentative conclusion will not be optimistic. If a group mind is supposed to be a single mental system having two or more minds as proper parts, the prospects for group minds seem dim–or so I will argue.

Satu Kahkonen and Anthony Lanyi. Institutions, Incentives, and Economic Reforms in India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2000. 516 pages. Hardback. Price Indian Rs 595.00.

2001 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-74
Author(s):  
Attiya Y. Javed
Keyword(s):  
Reform Process ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Social Rules ◽  
Reform Agenda ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Rural Governance ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Economic Landscape ◽  
Number Of Authors

The economic reform process began in India in 1991. However, the reform agenda is still far from its goals as is evident from low per capita income. Thus, this reform effort has not produced the desired outcome of a faster rate of economic and social development in a meaningful way. It is the premise of this volume that to transform the social and economic landscape, the proposed reforms should be broadbased and multi-pronged which take into account incentives for the stockholders in both the private and public sectors. The institutions are the rules that govern economy and include the fundamental legal, political, and social rules that establish the basis for production, exchange, and distribution. The two editors of this volume have received contributions from a number of authors and the wide range of papers are grouped under five main headings: political economy of reforms, reforming public goods delivery, reform issues in agriculture and rural governance, and reforming the district and financial sector.

Does context matter? Effects of robot appearance and reliability on social attention differs based on lifelikeness of gaze task

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdulaziz Abubshait ◽  
Patrick P. Weis ◽  
Eva Wiese
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Physical Appearance ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social Attention ◽  
Social Cues ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Mind Perception ◽  
The Social ◽  
Behavioral Features

Social signals, such as changes in gaze direction, are essential cues to predict others’ mental states and behaviors (i.e., mentalizing). Studies show that humans can mentalize with non-human agents when they perceive a mind in them (i.e., mind perception). Robots that physically and/or behaviorally resemble humans likely trigger mind perception, which enhances the relevance of social cues and improves social-cognitive performance. The current ex-periments examine whether the effect of physical and behavioral influencers of mind perception on social-cognitive processing is modulated by the lifelikeness of a social interaction. Participants interacted with robots of varying degrees of physical (humanlike vs. robot-like) and behavioral (reliable vs. random) human-likeness while the lifelikeness of a social attention task was manipulated across five experiments. The first four experiments manipulated lifelikeness via the physical realism of the robot images (Study 1 and 2), the biological plausibility of the social signals (Study 3), and the plausibility of the social con-text (Study 4). They showed that humanlike behavior affected social attention whereas appearance affected mind perception ratings. However, when the lifelikeness of the interaction was increased by using videos of a human and a robot sending the social cues in a realistic environment (Study 5), social attention mechanisms were affected both by physical appearance and behavioral features, while mind perception ratings were mainly affected by physical appearance. This indicates that in order to understand the effect of physical and behavioral features on social cognition, paradigms should be used that adequately simulate the lifelikeness of social interactions.

Mental state dynamics explain the origin of mental state concepts

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Allen Thornton ◽  
Milena Rmus ◽  
Diana Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Artificial Neural Network ◽  
Mental State ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social World ◽  
The Social ◽  
Artificial Neural ◽  
Ebb And Flow

People’s thoughts and feelings ebb and flow in predictable ways: surprise arises quickly, anticipation ramps up slowly, regret follows anger, love begets happiness, and so forth. Predicting these transitions between mental states can help people successfully navigate the social world. We hypothesize that the goal of predicting state dynamics shapes people’ mental state concepts. Across seven studies, when people observed more frequent transitions between a pair of novel mental states, they judged those states to be more conceptually similar to each other. In an eighth study, an artificial neural network trained to predict real human mental state dynamics spontaneously learned the same conceptual dimensions that people use to understand these states: the 3d Mind Model. Together these results suggest that mental state dynamics explain the origins of mental state concepts.

People represent their own mental states more distinctly than others’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Allen Thornton ◽  
Miriam E. Weaverdyck ◽  
Judith Mildner ◽  
Diana Tamir
Keyword(s):  
Mental State ◽  
Social Distance ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Direct Access ◽  
Social Brain ◽  
Privileged Access ◽  
Behavioral Studies ◽  
The Social ◽  
External Cues

One can never know the internal workings of another person – one can only infer others’ mental states based on external cues. In contrast, each person has direct access to the contents of their own mind. Here we test the hypothesis that this privileged access shapes the way people represent internal mental experiences, such that they represent their own mental states more distinctly than the states of others. Across four studies, participants considered their own and others’ mental states; analyses measured the distinctiveness of mental state representations. Two neuroimaging studies used representational similarity analyses to demonstrate that the social brain manifests more distinct activity patterns when thinking about one’s own states versus others’. Two behavioral studies support these findings. Further, they demonstrate that people differentiate between states less as social distance increases. Together these results suggest that we represent our own mind with greater granularity than the minds of others.

The Social Consequences of Phubbing

2020 ◽  
pp. 157-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mariek Vanden Abeele
Keyword(s):  
Literature Review ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Expectancy Violations ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Comprehensive Literature Review ◽  
The Social

Recent empirical work suggests that phubbing, a term used to describe the practice of snubbing someone with a phone during a face-to-face social interaction, harms the quality of social relationships. Based on a comprehensive literature review, this chapter presents a framework that integrates three concurrent mechanisms that explain the relational impact of phubbing: expectancy violations, ostracism, and attentional conflict. Based on this framework, theoretically grounded propositions are formulated that may serve as guidelines for future research on these mechanisms, the conditions under which they operate, and a number of potential issues that need to be considered to further validate and extend the framework.

Testimonial Smothering and Domestic Violence Disclosure in Clinical Contexts

Episteme ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Jack Warman
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Social Epistemology ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Health Sciences ◽  
Epistemic Injustice ◽  
Global Public Health ◽  
Personal Histories ◽  
Domestic Violence And Abuse

Abstract Domestic violence and abuse (DVA) are at last coming to be recognised as serious global public health problems. Nevertheless, many women with personal histories of DVA decline to disclose them to healthcare practitioners. In the health sciences, recent empirical work has identified many factors that impede DVA disclosure, known as barriers to disclosure. Drawing on recent work in social epistemology on testimonial silencing, we might wonder why so many people withhold their testimony and whether there is some kind of epistemic injustice afoot here. In this paper, I offer some philosophical reflections on DVA disclosure in clinical contexts and the associated barriers to disclosure. I argue that women with personal histories of DVA are vulnerable to a certain form of testimonial injustice in clinical contexts, namely, testimonial smothering, and that this may help to explain why they withhold that testimony. It is my contention that this can help explain the low rates of DVA disclosure by patients to healthcare practitioners.

scholarly journals Introduction: Computer Simulations in Social Epistemology

Episteme ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Igor Douven
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Computer Simulations ◽  
Social Epistemology ◽  
Formal Analysis ◽  
Housing Prices ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Friendship Networks ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Social ◽  
Methodological Status

Over recent decades, computer simulations have become a common tool among practitioners of the social sciences. They have been utilized to study such diverse phenomena as the integration and segregation of different racial groups, the emergence and evolution of friendship networks, the spread of gossip, fluctuations of housing prices in an area, the transmission of social norms, and many more. Philosophers of science and others interested in the methodological status of these studies have identified a number of distinctive virtues of the use of computer simulations. For instance, it has been generally appreciated that as simulations require the formulation of an explicit algorithm, they foster precision and clarity about whatever conceptual issues are involved in the study. The value of computer simulations as a heuristic tool for developing hypotheses, models, and theories has also been recognized, as has been the fact that they can serve as a substitute for real experiments. This is especially useful in the social domain, given that human beings cannot be freely manipulated at the discretion of the experimenter (for both points, see Hartmann 1996). However, the main virtue of computer simulations is generally believed to be that they are able to deal with the complexities that arise when many elements interact in a highly dynamic system and which often evade an exact formal analysis (see, e.g., Humphreys 1991).

scholarly journals Conceptual Development and Dynamic Realism

2013 ◽  
pp. 133-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanne Andersen
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Development ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Family Resemblance ◽  
X Rays ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Basic Features

This paper focuses on Thomas S. Kuhn's work on taxonomic concepts and how it relates to empirical work from the cognitive sciences on categorization and conceptual development. I shall first review the basic features of Kuhn's family resemblance account and compare to work from the cognitive sciences. I shall then show how Kuhn's account can be extended to cover the development of new taxonomies in science, and I shall illustrate by a detailed case study that Kuhn himself mentioned only briefly in his own work, namely the discovery of X-rays and radioactivity.

scholarly journals Emergent Individuals and the Resurrection

2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy O'Connor ◽  
Jonathan D. Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Orthodox Christian ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Number Of Authors

We present an original emergent individuals view of human persons, on which persons are substantial biological unities that exemplify metaphysically emergent mental states. We argue that this view allows for a coherent model of identity-preserving resurrection from the dead consistent with orthodox Christian doctrine, one that improves upon alternatives accounts recently proposed by a number of authors. Our model is a variant of the “falling elevator” model advanced by Dean Zimmerman that, unlike Zimmerman’s, does not require a closest continuer account of personal identity. We end by raising some remaining theological concerns. 

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