Jay L. Garfield

Social Cognition, Language Acquisition and The Development of the Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the cognitive achievement that enables us to report our propositional attitudes, to attribute such attitudes to others, and to use such postulated or observed mental states in the prediction and explanation of behavior. Most normally developing children acquire ToM between the ages of 3 and 5 years, but serious delays beyond this chronological and mental age have been observed in children with autism, as well as in those with severe sensory impairments. We examine data from studies of ToM in normally developing children and those with deafness, blindness, autism and Williams syndrome, as well as data from lower primates, in a search for answers to key theoretical questions concerning the origins, nature and rep- resentation of knowledge about the mind. In answer to these, we offer a framework according to which ToM is jointly dependent upon language and social experience, and is produced by a conjunction of language acquisition with childrens growing social understanding, acquired through conversation and interaction with others. We argue that adequate language and adequate social skills are jointly causally sufficient, and individually causally necessary, for producing ToM. Thus our account supports a social developmental theory of the genesis of human cognition, inspired by the work of Sellars and Vygotsky.

The fundamental wisdom of the middle way : Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā

BLA new translation from the Tibetan, with a verse-by-verse philosophical commentary in English Mulamadhyamakakarika is the foundational text for all Mahayana Buddhism and is one of the most influential works in the history of Indian philosophy.

Nagarjuna and the Limits of Thought

Nagarjuna seems willing to embrace contradictions while at the same time making use of classic reductio arguments. He asserts that he rejects all philosophical views including his own-that he asserts nothing-and appears to mean it. It is argued here that he, like many philosophers in the West and, indeed, like many of his Buddhist colleagues, discovers and explores true contradictions arising at the limits of thought. For those who share a dialetheists comfort with the possibility of true contradictions commanding rational assent, for Nagarjuna to endorse such contradictions would not undermine but instead confirm the impression that he is indeed a highly rational thinker. It is argued that the contradictions he discovers are structurally analogous to many discovered by Western philosophers and mathematicians.

Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness: Why Did Nagarjuna Start with Causation?

Nagarjuna, who lived in South India in approximately the first century C.E., is undoubtedly the most important, influential, and widely studied Mahayana Buddhist philosopher. He is the founder of the Madhyamika, or Middle Path, schools of Mahayana Buddhism. His considerable corpus includes texts addressed to lay audiences, letters of advice to kings, and the set of penetrating metaphysical and epistemological treatises that represent the foundation of the highly skeptical and dialectical analytic philosophical school known as Madhyamika. Most important of these is his largest and best-known text, the Muilamadhyamikakarika-in English, Fundamental Stanzas on the Middle Way. This text in turn inspires a huge commentarial literature in Sanskrit, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. Divergences in interpretation of the Mulamadhyamikakarika often determine the splits between major philosophical schools. So, for instance, the distinction between two of the three major Mahayana philosophical schools, Svatantrika-Madhyamika and Prasargika-Madhyamika, reflect, inter alia, distinct readings of this text, itself taken as fundamental by scholars within each of these schools. The treatise itself is composed in very terse, often cryptic verses, with much of the explicit argument suppressed, generating significant interpretative challenges. But the uniformity of the philosophical methodology and the clarity of the central philosophical vision expressed in the text together provide a considerable fulcrum for exegesis. The central topic of the text is emptiness-the Buddhist technical term for the lack of independent existence, inherent existence, or essence in things. Nagarjuna relentlessly analyzes phenomena or processes that appear to exist independently and argues that they cannot so exist, and yet, though lacking the inherent existence imputed to them either by naive common sense or by sophisticated, realistic philosophical theory, these phenomena are not nonexistent-they are, he argues, conventionally real. This dual thesis of the conventional reality of phenomena together with their lack of inherent existence depends upon the complex doctrine of the two truths or two realities-a conventional or nominal truth and

Problems with the argument from fine tuning

The argument from fine tuning is supposed to establish the existence of God from the fact that the evolution of carbon-based life requires the laws of physics and the boundary conditions of the universe to be more or less as they are. We demonstrate that this argument fails. In particular, we focus on problems associated with the role probabilities play in the argument. We show that, even granting the fine tuning of the universe, it does not follow that the universe is improbable, thus no explanation of the fine tuning, theistic or otherwise, is required.

Evidentials in Tibetan: Acquisition, Semantics, and Cognitive Development.

We describe the nature of the evidential system in Tibetan and consider the challenges that any evidential system presents to language acquisition. We present data from Tibetan-speaking children that shed light on their understanding of the syntactic and semantic properties of evidentials, and their competence in the point-of-view shift required for the use of evidentials in questions. We then examine connections between the mastery of indirect evidentials and childrens inferential competence.

Nagarjuna's Theory of Causality: Implications Sacred and Profane

And he devotes two important chapters of the MalamadhyamakakjrikJ to the analysis of causality per se and of dependent arising more generally. The analysis developed in these chapters permeates the rest of the treatise. I have largely said my piece about how these chapters are to be read and about their role in Nagdrjunas larger philosophical enterprise (Garfield 1990, 1994, 1995). I will review that account only briefly here as a preliminary to some applications. I think not only that Nagarjuna is right about the fundamental importance of causality, and of dependence more generally, to our understanding of reality and of human life but also that his own account of these matters is generally correct. Given these two premises, it follows that our conduct of natural science as well as the pursuit of our moral life should be informed by Nagarjunas account of these matters. Here, I will develop some of these implications. I caution, however, that my development, at least in the case of ethics, is heterodox-although, as I will argue, absolutely orthodox Madhyamaka-within at least one major living tradition in which Madhyamaka is preserved and practiced: the dGe lugs pa school of Tibetan Buddhism. As a consequence, we will have reason to question both certain substantive claims made within that tradition about the necessary conditions of the cultivation of bodhicitta and the doxographic strategy of the tradition. My claims about the philosophy of science may be less controversial, but will nonetheless offend some. And that (on both counts) is as it should be. For the philosophy of science has been steadily maturing into a more Buddhist framework over the past few decades (even if most Western philosophers of science would not recognize that characterization). But there are residues of pre-Buddhist modernism in practice, and even those who opt for a more enlightened approach to these matters do not always see the big picture.

Taking Conventional Truth Seriously: Authority Regarding Deceptive Reality

Mādhyamika philosophers in India and Tibet distinguish between two truths: the conventional and the ultimate. It is difficult, however, to say in what sense conventional truth is indeed a truth, as opposed to falsehood. Indeed, many passages in prominent texts suggest that it is entirely false. It is explained here in the sense in which, for Candrakīrti and Tsong khapa, conventional truth is truth.

Mentalese not spoken here: Computation, cognition and causation

Abstract Classical computational modellers of mind urge that the mind is something like a von Neumann computer operating over a system of symbols constituting a language of thought. Such an architecture, they argue, presents us with the best explanation of the compositionality, systematicity and productivity of thought. The language of thought hypothesis is supported by additional independent arguments made popular by Jerry Fodor. Paul Smolensky has developed a connectionist architecture he claims adequately explains compositionality, systematicity and productivity without positing any language of thought, and without positing any operations over a set of symbols. This architecture encodes the information represented in linguistic trees without explicitly representing those trees or their constituents, and indeed without employing any representational vehicles with constituent structure. In a recent article, Fodor (1997; Connectionism and systematicity, Cognition, 62, 109–119) argues that Smolenskys prop...

Coherence as an Explanation for Theory of Mind Task Failure in Autism

O’Loughlin and Thagard (2000) present a specific computational implementation of the idea that the problems encountered by a child with autism in classic False Belief tasks derive from a failure to maintain coherence among multiple propositions. They argue that this failure can be explained as a structural feature of a connectionist network attempting to maintain coherence. The current paper criticizes this implementation because it falsely predicts that the same children will have a parallel problem with the False Photographs task. The fact that the content of representations makes a difference while the structure remains constant casts doubt upon their claim.