Radu J. Bogdan

Pretending as Imaginative Rehearsal for Cultural Conformity

Pretend play and pretense develop in distinct phases of childhood as ontogenetically adaptive responses to pressures specific to those phases, and may have evolved in different periods of human ancestry. These are pressures to assimilate cultural artifacts, norms, roles, and behavioral scripts. The playful and creative elements in both forms of pretending are dictated by the variable, open-ended, and evolving nature and function of the cultural tasks they handle. The resulting creativity of the adult intellect is likely to be a distant and indirect by-product of temporary and specific ontogenetic responses to temporary and specific ontogenetic challenges, particularly cultural ones.

DEVELOPING MENTAL ABILITIES BY REPRESENTING INTENTIONALITY

Communication by shared meaning, themastery of word semantics,metarepresentation and metamentation aremental abilities, uniquely human, that share a sense ofintentionality or reference. The latteris developed by a naive psychology or interpretation – acompetence dedicated to representingintentional relations between conspecifics and the world. Theidea that interpretation builds new mentalabilities around a sense of reference is based on three linesof analysis – conceptual, psychological andevolutionary. The conceptual analysis reveals that a senseof reference is at the heart of the abilitiesin question. Psychological data track tight developmentalcorrelations between interpretation and theabilities it designs. Finally, an evolutionary hypothesislooks at why interpretation designed thosenew abilities around a sense of reference.

The Objects of Perception

Our perceptions, beliefs, thoughts and memories have objects. They are about or of things and properties around us. I perceive her, have beliefs about her, think of her and have memories of her. How are we to construe this aboutness (or ofness) of our cognitive states?1 There are four major choices on the philosophical market. There is an interaction approach which says that the object of cognition is fixed by and understood in terms of what cognizers physically and sensorily interact with — or, alternatively, in terms of what the information delivered by such interaction is about. There is the satisfactional approach which says that the object of a cognitive state is whatever satisfies the representation constitutive of that state. There is also a hybrid approach which requires both physical/sensory interaction and representational satisfaction in the fixation of the object of cognition. And there is, finally, the direct acquaintance approach which says that only an immediate cognitive contact with things and properties can establish them as objects of cognition.2 The latter, as far as I can tell, goes the way perception goes, so only the remaining three approaches look like serious contenders.

Roderick M. Chisholm

Self-Profile.- Chisholm on Intentionality, Thought, and Reference.- States of Affairs.- The Objects of Perception.- Chisholm on Certainty.- Chisholms Theory of Action.- Replies.- Three.- Bibliography of Roderick Chisholm.- Index of Names.- Index of Subjects.

Intuitive Psychology as Mind Designer: Scaffolding Cognitive Novelties in Early Childhood

Intuitive psychology, also known as theory of mind or mindreading, has been a dynamic and expansive academic industry for almost forty years. Perhaps the most important insight of the multidisciplinary work undertaken in this area is how central and indispensable intuitive psychology is to social interactions, communication, cultural and language learning and transmission, and education. Less explored and less well understood is the crucial contribution of intuitive psychology to mental development and the very construction of the human mind. It is a contribution that takes the form of new (mostly) cognitive abilities that emerge at different stages of ontogeny and reshape the developing mind. I call this the mind-design work of intuitive psychology. In several past works I have explored this mind-design role of intuitive psychology in a few areas of cognitive development construed in evolutionary terms – reflexive thinking or thinking about one’s own thoughts, learning word meaning and reference, predicative thinking, self-consciousness, and imagination (Bogdan, 2000, 2001, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2013). In sampling and expanding on key themes of this prior work, this chapter discerns several mind-design patterns through which intuitive psychology, in discharging its basic functions, scaffolds new cognitive abilities as ontogenetic adaptations to pressures arising at distinct stages of childhood. The basic idea is this. The business of intuitive psychology is to register, represent, and interpret mental states of oneself and of others (cognitive component) and, as a result, guide appropriate reactions by way of thought, speech, and action, as part of one’s goal-pursuing strategies (practical component). It is on the latter practical side, when in new domains children face new pressures on their actively initiated and pursued goal strategies, that the expertise of intuitive psychology is recruited to provide adaptive solutions that gradually end up scaffolding new cognitive abilities. The scaffolding follows several patterns that I call templates, matrices, assemblies, escalators and infrastructures. The earliest such scaffoldings, discussed below, occur in domains that generate some of the strongest pressures on young minds, such as meaning-based communication, learning word reference and mastering predicative communication and thinking. The first part of the chapter provides a theoretical background for this basic idea. It introduces a certain conception of intuitive psychology and explains its mind-

Memory as Window on the Mind

This paper argues for two propositions. The first is that memory is not only indispensable to a mind but also implicated in shaping its operations. As a result, a study of memory systems that dominate a kind of mind opens a unique explanatory window on what that kind of mind can and cannot do. From this perspective, the second proposition is that autobiographical memory, which is unique to humans and emerges late in childhood, operates in ways and with resources that reveal an entirely new kind of mind that only older children develop and adults inherit – a mind unknown in the rest of the animal world.

Inside loops: developmental premises of self-ascriptions

Self-ascriptions of thoughts and attitudes depend on a sense of the intentionality of one’s own mental states, which develops later than, and independently of, the sense of the intentionality of the thoughts and attitudes of others. This sense of the self-intentionality of one’s own mental states grows initially out of executive developments that enable one to simulate one’s own actions and perceptions, as genuine off-line thoughts, and to regulate such simulations.

More theory and evolution, please!

Heyess (1998) skepticism about theory of mind (ToM) in nonhuman primates exploits the idea of a strong and unified theory of mind in humans based on an unanalyzed category of mental state. It also exploits narrow debates about crucial observations and experiments while neglecting wider evolutionary trends. I argue against both exploitations.

The epistemological illusion

I argue against the mentalist view that commonsense psychology (CSP) is about the intrinsic properties of the mind, and in particular against the notion that the evidence privately or publicly available to the CS psychologists confirms the mentalist view. I suggest that the internal phenomenology of mental attitudes merely provides access to a body of procedural knowledge, and that the propositional forms of the attitudes normally summarize extensive units of procedural knowledge.

Hume and the Problem of Local Induction

This paper is an epistemological attempt to outline the problem of local induction relative to the classical framework set forth by Hume. The reconstruction of the latter will be rather unexegetically simplified in the light of the former. Hume’s approach to factual knowledge and induction was to a very large extent motivated and influenced by his opposition to, and criticism of, rationalism. I will try to project the problem of local induction against this background. I will claim that, his nuances and sometimes surprising qualifications notwithstanding (particularly in the Appendix to (1739)), Hume’s approach to knowledge was atheoretical; and that it is this feature, perhaps more than anything else, which shaped his understanding of induction and left a profound mark on subsequent developments in the philosophy of induction. In contrast with it, I will argue that any epistemologically sound treatment of induction should be theoretical, or relative to a theoretical context of knowledge, and that methodologically this favors a relevance approach to local induction.