Philip Robbins

The Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition

Since its inception some fifty years ago, cognitive science has seen a number of sea changes. Perhaps the best known is the development of connectionist models of cognition as an alternative to classical, symbol-based approaches. A more recent - and increasingly influential - trend is that of dynamical-systems-based, ecologically oriented models of the mind. Researchers suggest that a full understanding of the mind will require systematic study of the dynamics of interaction between mind, body, and world. Some argue that this new orientation calls for a revolutionary new metaphysics of mind, according to which mental states and processes, and even persons, literally extend into the environment. This is a state-of-the-art guide to this new movement in cognitive science. Each chapter tackles either a specific area of empirical research or specific sector of the conceptual foundation underlying this research.

How to blunt the sword of compositionality

Concepts—the elementary building-blocks of thought—have long been a focusof research in psychology, and it shows. A naturalistically minded philosopherwho goes shopping for a theory of concepts finds herself faced with a fairlydizzying array of options, including definition theories, prototype theories,exemplar theories, theory theories, and an assortment of hybrids. It is with somesense of relief, perhaps, that she learns of a device—what I shall call, follow-ing Fodor 1998a, the “sword of compositionality”—with which to cut downthe space of possibilities. In particular, the sword is supposed to greatly sim-plify the selection task by eliminating in one fell swoop the largest and mostinfluential class of theories currently on the market. The aim of this paper isto test the credibility of this rather bold supposition.To get a sense of what’s at stake here requires a quick survey of the theoret-ical terrain. Most contemporary thinking about concepts is informed by thelexical semantics tradition, which approaches the study of concepts via the nat-ural language expressions that encode them. Of special importance to this studyare lexical concepts, that is, concepts encoded by monomorphemic words like‘cat’ or ‘bachelor’. Non-lexical concepts—concepts encoded either by polymor-phemic words ~‘housebroken’, ‘unmarried’! or by phrases ~‘cat fur’, ‘bachelorparty’!—are understood to be built up somehow from lexical ones, and henceare explanatorily posterior to them.Theories of concepts in the lexical semantics tradition can be sorted usinga binary decision tree with three branches. First there is the question of atom-ism. Atomists say that lexical concepts are by and large semantically primi-tive or unstructured, in that they have the content they do independently oftheir relations to particular other concepts ~Fodor 1998a!. Anatomists deny this,opting instead for the idea that concepts generally exhibit semantic structureof some sort. Second there is the question of classicalism. Classical anatomisttheories dictate that the kind of structure possessed by concepts is definitional

To Structure, or not to Structure?

Some accounts of mental content represent the objects of beliefas structured, using entities that formally resemble the sentencesused to express and report attitudes in natural language; others adopta relatively unstructured approach, typically using sets or functions. Currently popular variants of the latter include classical andneoclassical propositionalism, which represent belief contents as setsof possible worlds and sets of centered possible worlds, respectively;and property self-ascriptionism, which employs sets of possibleindividuals. I argue against their contemporary proponents that allthree views are ineluctably plagued by generation gaps: they eitherovergenerate beliefs, undergenerate them, or both.

Modularity and mental architecture

Debates about the modularity of cognitive architecture have been ongoing for at least the past three decades, since the publication of Fodors landmark book The Modularity of Mind. According to Fodor, modularity is essentially tied to informational encapsulation, and as such is only found in the relatively low-level cognitive systems responsible for perception and language. According to Fodors critics in the evolutionary psychology camp, modularity simply reflects the fine-grained functional specialization dictated by natural selection, and it characterizes virtually all aspects of cognitive architecture, including high-level systems for judgment, decision making, and reasoning. Though both of these perspectives on modularity have garnered support, the current state of evidence and argument suggests that a broader skepticism about modularity may be warranted. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:641-649. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1255 CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

An unconstrained mind: Explaining belief in the afterlife

Bering contends that belief in the afterlife is explained by the simulation constraint hypothesis: the claim that we cannot imagine what it is like to be dead. This explanation suffers from some difficulties. First, it implies the existence of a corresponding belief in the “beforelife.” Second, a simpler explanation will suffice. Rather than appeal to constraints on our thoughts about death, we suggest that belief in the afterlife can be better explained by the lack of such constraints.

Explaining ideology: two factors are better than one.

Hibbing et al. contend that individual differences in political ideology can be substantially accounted for in terms of differences in a single psychological factor, namely, strength of negativity bias. We argue that, given the multidimensional structure of ideology, a better explanation of ideological variation will take into account both individual differences in negativity bias and differences in empathic concern.

Crime, Punishment, and Causation: The Effect of Etiological Information on the Perception of Moral Agency.

Moral judgments about a situation are profoundly shaped by the perception of individuals in that situation as either moral agents or moral patients (Gray & Wegner, 2009; Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012), Specifically, the more we see someone as a moral agent, the less we see them as a moral patient, and vice versa. As a result, casting the perpetrator of a transgression as a victim tends to have the effect of making them seem less blameworthy (Gray & Wegner, 2011). Based on this theoretical framework, we predicted that criminal offenders with a mental disorder that predisposes them to antisocial behavior would be judged more negatively when the disorder is described as having a genetic origin than when it is described as environmentally caused, as in the case of childhood abuse or accident. Further, we predicted that some environmental explanations would mitigate attributions of blame more than others, namely, that offenders whose disorder was caused by childhood abuse (intentional harm) would be seen as less blameworthy than offenders whose disorder is caused by an unfortunate accident (unintentional harm). Results from two vignette-based studies designed to test these predictions, conducted with participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 244 and N = 387, respectively), confirmed the first prediction but not the second. Implications of this research for three areas—the psychology of moral judgment, philosophical debates about moral responsibility and determinism, and the practice of the law—are discussed in the sequel.

Philosophizing the social brain

Abstract Introduction to themed issue on philosophical approaches to social neuroscience.

Guilt by dissociation: Why mindreading may not be prior to metacognition after all

Carruthers argues that there is no developmental or clinical evidence that metacognition is dissociable from mindreading, and hence there is no reason to think that metacognition is prior to mindreading. A closer look at the evidence, however, reveals that these conclusions are premature at best.