Pragmatics and Semiotics

Meaning is determined by both immanent and transcendent semiotic structuring : it is both conceptual and contextual. The recursion of semiosis makes it possible to understand and theorize this open but non-chaotic relation between minimal, medial, and maximal sign structures and the experiential lifeworld that infuses social systems with meaning and lets cultural, semiosic, and mental content develop as a continuity. Semiotics and pragmatics are interconnected, and their bonds are indissoluble ; if cut off, pragmatics would become a part of psychology and semiotics a specialty of linguistics. The cognitive theory of mental spaces and conceptual blending needed a semiotic and, as suggested in the article, a semio-pragmatic grounding in order to grow out of its initial format as a philosophical daydream. The model explained here shows how situational and experiential contributions intervene in the sense-making.

Sharing Our Concepts with Machines

As AI systems become increasingly competent language users, it is an apt moment to consider what it would take for machines to understand human languages. This paper considers whether either language models such as GPT-3 or chatbots might be able to understand language, focusing on the question of whether they could possess the relevant concepts. A significant obstacle is that systems of both kinds interact with the world only through text, and thus seem ill-suited to understanding utterances concerning the concrete objects and properties which human language often describes. Language models cannot understand human languages because they perform only linguistic tasks, and therefore cannot represent such objects and properties. However, chatbots may perform tasks concerning the non-linguistic world, so they are better candidates for understanding. Chatbots can also possess the concepts necessary to understand human languages, despite their lack of perceptual contact with the world, due to the language-mediated concept-sharing described by social externalism about mental content.

Evidence Synthesis Indicates Contentless Experiences in Meditation are Neither Truly Contentless Nor Identical

Contentless experience involves an absence of mental content such as thoughts, perceptions, and mental images. In academic work it has been traditionally treated as including states like those aimed for in Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation. We have used evidence synthesis to select and review 135 expert texts from within the three traditions. In this paper we identify the features of contentless experience referred to in the expert texts and determine whether the experiences are the same or different across the practices with respect to each feature. We identify 65 features reported or implied in one or more practices, with most being reported or implied in all three. While there are broad similarities in the experiences across the traditions, we find that there are differences with respect to four features and possibly many others. The main difference identified is that Shamatha involves substantially greater attentional stability and vividness. Another key finding is that numerous forms of content are present in the experiences, including wakefulness, naturalness, calm, bliss/joy, and freedom. The findings indicate that meditation experiences described as contentless in the academic literature can in fact involve considerable variation, and that in many and perhaps most cases these experiences are not truly contentless. This challenges traditional understandings in academic research that in these so-called contentless experiences all content is absent, and that the experiences are therefore an identical state of pure consciousness or consciousness itself. Implications for neuroscientific and clinical studies and for basic understandings of the practices are discussed.

The Path to Contentless Experience in Meditation: An Evidence Synthesis Based on Expert Texts

In contentless experience (sometimes termed pure consciousness) there is an absence of mental content such as thoughts, perceptions, and mental images. The path to contentless experience in meditation can be taken to comprise the meditation technique, and the experiences (“interim-states”) on the way to the contentless “goal-state/s”. Shamatha, Transcendental, and Stillness Meditation are each said to access contentless experience, but the path to that experience in each practice is not yet well understood from a scientific perspective. We have employed evidence synthesis to select and review 135 expert texts from those traditions. In this paper we describe the techniques and interim-states based on the expert texts and compare them across the practices on key dimensions. Superficially, Shamatha and Transcendental Meditation appear very different to Stillness Meditation in that they require bringing awareness to a meditation object. The more detailed and systematic approach taken in this paper indicates that posturally Shamatha is closer to Stillness Meditation, and that on several other dimensions Shamatha is quite different to both other practices. In particular, Shamatha involves greater measures to cultivate attentional stability and vividness on an object, greater focusing, less tolerance of mind-wandering, more monitoring, and more deliberate doing/control. Achieving contentless experience in Shamatha is much slower, more difficult, and less frequent. The findings have important implications for consciousness, neuroscientific, and clinical research and practice.

Computational Psychiatry Needs Time and Context

Why has computational psychiatry yet to influence routine clinical practice? One reason may be that it has neglected context and temporal dynamics in the models of certain mental health problems. We develop three heuristics for estimating whether time and context are important to a mental health problem: Is it characterized by a core neurobiological mechanism? Does it follow a straightforward natural trajectory? And is intentional mental content peripheral to the problem? For many problems the answers are no, suggesting that modeling time and context is critical. We review computational psychiatry advances toward this end, including modeling state variation, using domain-specific stimuli, and interpreting differences in context. We discuss complementary network and complex systems approaches. Novel methods and unification with adjacent fields may inspire a new generation of computational psychiatry. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology, Volume 73 is January 2022. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Social, Moral and Legal Rules, Biopolitics and the Covid-19 Crisis

The article relies on the social and legal perspective not only to better understand how norms are created and change through interactions among agents, but also to shed light on how norms are internalized in social practice. The article is organized as follows. Initially the article explores the basic assumption that deontic operators acquire their meaning via social conventions generating “personal rules” having a “mental content” which belongs to a wider “normative mind”, a mind that obviously encompasses all sorts of choices. The article then describes the different types of personal rules, distinguishing social, moral, and legal rules across the normative mind, focusing on social rules within institutions, conceived as sets of rules in equilibrium. The core of this study puts to the test the taxonomy of personal (social, moral, and legal) rules within the normative mind by exploring a situation of “dense normativity” addressed by a 2021 Lancet paper concerning findings about “tight–loose cultures” during the Covid-19 crisis, and, for the sake of explanation, focuses on one of the main normative constraints that epitomizes the challenge of the Covid-19 crisis to “tight–loose” cultures: the “wear-mask rule”. These observations can be extended to other normative constraints of that crisis, but in essence they parse the interplay between the different types of personal rules, which not only are social, but also moral and legal, drawing conclusions that complement the findings of the Lancet paper with some critical observations. The article critically concludes with remarks about the co-existence of different normative systems of personal rules in a context of biopolitics and suggests that individual morality appears to be the core of normativity to address collective threats such as those caused by the Covid-19 crisis.

Human but not robotic gaze facilitates action prediction

Interpreting the behaviour of autonomous machines will be a daily activity for future generations. Yet, surprisingly little is currently known about how people ascribe intentions to human-like and non-human-like agents or objects. In a series of six experiments, we compared people’s ability to extract non-mentalistic (i.e., where an agent is looking) and mentalistic (i.e., what an agent is looking at; what an agent is going to do) information from identical gaze and head movements performed by humans, human-like robots, and a non-human-like object. Results showed that people are faster to infer the mental content of human agents compared to robotic agents. Furthermore, the form of the non-human entity may differently engage mentalizing processes depending on how human-like its appearance is. These results are not easily explained by non-mentalizing strategies (e.g., spatial accounts), as we observed no clear differences in control conditions across the three different agents. Overall, results suggest that human-like robotic actions may be processed differently from both humans’ and objects’ behaviour. We discuss the extent to which these findings inform our understanding of the relevance of an agents’ or objects’ physical features in triggering mentalizing abilities and its relevance for human–robot interaction.

Gaze signals both cue direction and agent mental states

Although it is well established that humans spontaneously follow where others are looking, it remains debated if this gaze following behaviour occurs due to the gaze cue’sdirectional information (i.e., where an agent is attending) or the agent’s inferred mental state (i.e., what they are attending to). We tested this notion by assessing the combined anddissociated effects of the gaze cue direction and the agent’s mental content. Gazed-at target performance was compromised when cue direction and inferred mental content were dissociated relative to when they were combined. This effect was especially prominent for social relative to nonsocial cues. Thus, gaze signals include information about both the cue direction and the gazer’s mental content, communicating information about where gazed at items are located and what those items are.

Bargaining and descriptive content: prospects for a teleosemantic ethics

Teleosemantics is the view that mental content depends on etiological function. Moral adaptationism is the view that human morality is an evolved adaptation. Jointly, these two views offer new venues for naturalist metaethics. Several authors have seen, in the conjunction of these views, the promise of assigning naturalistically respectable descriptive content to moral judgments. One such author is Neil Sinclair, who has offered a blueprint for how to conduct teleosemantic metaethics with the help of moral adaptationism. In this paper, I argue that the prospects for assigning descriptive content to moral judgments on the basis of teleosemantics are bad. I develop my argument in dialogue with Sinclair’s paper and argue that, although Sinclair’s account of the evolution of morality is plausible, the teleosemantic account of the descriptive content of moral judgments which he bases thereon suffers from crucial shortcomings. I argue further that, given some minimal plausible assumptions about the evolution of morality made by Sinclair, no assignment of descriptive content is possible. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, the combination of moral adaptationism and teleosemantics suggests that moral judgments lack descriptive content.

Davidson on Pure Intending: A Non-Reductionist Judgement-Dependent Account

I will argue that Davidson's account of pure intending can be construed as a first-person-based judgement-dependent account of intention. For Davidson, pure intending to do φ is to make an all-out judgement that φing is desirable. On this anti-reductionist account, intention is treated as an irreducible state of the subject. I will draw a comparison between this account and Wright's and I will show that Davidson's account can be viewed as a non-reductionist judgement-dependent account along the lines suggested by Wright. I then explain how this account can help deal with various perplexities in Davidson's later view of meaning and mental content.