Medicine

All mental illnesses involve breakdowns in neural mechanisms for emotions that do not simply reduce to isolated mental, social, or chemical causes. The case of depression shows how illness results from the interaction of many causes that can be social, cognitive, neural, and molecular. Depression emerges from the interactions of mechanisms at all of these levels in a way that exemplifies emergence rather than simple reduction. Accordingly, treatment of depression often benefits from trying to repair mechanisms at multiple levels, most commonly by employing psychotherapy to make changes in mental representations and by employing antidepressants to change neurochemistry. Social cognitivism, the approach that integrates social, mental, neural, and molecular mechanisms, provides a new approach to explaining mental illness thanks to semantic pointer theories of cognition and communication.

History and International Relations

Historical explanation and the understanding of international relations can be enhanced by applying detailed psychological, neural, and social mechanisms to real-world events. By applying the method of social cognitive-emotional workups to the origins of World War I, this chapter shows the relevance of an integrated account of beliefs, concepts, values, rules, analogies, metaphors, emotions, inferences, and communication. The result transcends the limitations of purely narrative explanations in history and provides insight into why the field of international relations has lacked a satisfactory general theory. Explaining social changes in both groups and individuals requires understanding the communicative interactions of cognitive-emotional minds; the result is mechanistic-narrative explanation. Dealing with complex historical developments such as the outbreak of wars requires solution of the person–group problem.

Mental Mechanisms

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.

Anthropology

Descriptions of cultural practices can be enriched by understanding the cognitions and emotions occurring in the minds of the people enacting the practices. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is new enough that its historical developments and ongoing practices are well documented. To explain these developments and practices, this chapter describes the images, concepts, values, beliefs, rules, analogies, and emotions that are the most important mental representations operating in Mormon minds. These representations have a neural basis in semantic pointer processes of representation and binding, and they contribute to a variety of deductive, abductive, and emotional inferences. The social process by which Mormon beliefs and practices spread from one individual to another can best be understood as the results of semantic pointer communication carried out by interactions ranging from church rituals to missionary work.

Economics

The irrational exuberance of people in an economic bubble can be contrasted with the panicked despair of people in a crash by identifying their very different concepts, beliefs, rules, analogies, and emotions. Motivated inference encourages people to think that good times can only continue, whereas fear-driven inference disposes people to dread that bad times will only get worse. In bubbles, motivated inference and molecules such as testosterone and dopamine provide the feedback loop to encourage individuals to remain optimistic. In crashes, fear driven-inference and molecules such as cortisol promote pessimism. Bubbles, crashes, and other economic changes are not just matters of individual psychology because they are also social processes resulting from the communicative interactions of many people.

Social Mechanisms

Social mechanisms are systems of parts whose connections enable them to interact in ways that produce regular changes. In the social world, the main parts are individual people, but parts can also be groups formed out of those individuals. The interactions between individuals and groups are primarily verbal and nonverbal communication but can also include purely physical acts such as fighting and the inferences that people make about each other. There are many kinds of verbal communication using speaking and writing, and even more kinds of nonverbal communication by seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and moving. Interactions between people can occur in pairs or in larger groups where communication links multiple people. Semantic pointers suggest a novel way of understanding communication that accommodates both verbal and nonverbal processes.

Engineering

Creativity can be viewed as the outcome of interacting mental and social mechanisms. In individual designers, thinking is multimodal, depending on sensory, motor, and emotional representations in addition to words. Creativity works in minds that are capable of taking previously unconnected representations and combining them into ones that turn out to be new, valuable, and surprising. Well-functioning groups such as design teams, scientific laboratories, and artist colonies can be more creative than individuals on their own, when the groups foster communication of semantic pointers among individuals. Apple’s production of novel and successful products such as the Apple II, Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad illustrates the mental and social mechanisms responsible for creative design.

Law

The legal profession is a complex of mental and social mechanisms. Social cognitivism yields new ways of thinking about reasonable doubt, wrongful convictions, and criminal responsibility. Semantic pointer theories of cognition and emotion explain individual decisions, including defective ones that lead to wrongful convictions. Explanatory coherence shows how people can make judgments of guilt in accord with legal principles, and reasonable doubt based on the value of the presumption of innocence is a legitimate motivated inference. However, illegitimate motivated inferences resulting from emotional coherence with inappropriate values can produce biased and inaccurate verdicts. Moreover, the social interactions that operate in trials and other legal proceedings can naturally be explained using the semantic pointer theory of communication that mingles verbal and nonverbal modes while accommodating the interactions of cognitions and emotions.

Politics

Ideologies are coherent systems of concepts, values, and other representations that operate in a group of people to justify the current situation or to motivate change. These sets of values spread among individuals as the result of interactions that typically involve both verbal and nonverbal communication. Ideologies spread through talking and writing but also through nonverbal expressions such as visual and auditory images, gestures, facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice. Ideologies such as the Islamic State worldview can be analyzed by identifying the main cognitive-emotional representations. The mental processes of individual leaders and voters use concepts, images, beliefs, rules, goals, and analogies. All of these representations have important emotional aspects, as when concepts are bound with emotions to produce values and when beliefs are bound into specific emotions such as fear, all producing semantic pointers.

Sociology

Social mechanisms of communicative interaction influence and are influenced by mental mechanisms of representation, inference, and emotion. Discrimination is an important problem that results from social causes such as institutions but also from psychological causes such as prejudice. Prejudice operates in individual minds through representations and processes that include concepts, images, beliefs, rules, and emotions. Emotions are a key part of the force of prejudicial concepts, not just because of their general negativity but also because of specific emotions such as fear, anger, hatred, resentment, contempt, and disgust. Important sociological ideas such as identity, social norms, and institutions can be deepened by understanding how concepts and rules operate in human minds. The semantic pointer theory of communication provides the social mechanism that complements the cognitive mechanism of conscious and unconscious rule operation.