Stephen A. Butterfill

Tool Use and Causal Cognition

1. Tool Use and Causal Cognition: An Introduction 2. A Philosopher Looks at Tool Use and Causal Understanding 3. The Development of Tool Use Early in Life 4. Through a Floppy Tool Darkly: Toward a Conceptual Overthrow of Animal Alchemy 5. Causal Knowledge in Corvids, Primates and Children: More Than Meets the Eye? 6. The Evolutionary Origins of Causal Cognition: Learning and Using Causal Structures 7. Tool Use, Planning, and Future Thinking in Children and Animals 8. Representing Causality 9. Why Do Language and Tool Use Both Count as Manifestations of Intelligence? 10. Effects of brain damage on human tool use 11. Human tool-use: a causal role in plasticity of bodily and spatial representations 12. Tool-use and the representation of peripersonal space in humans

Cue competition effects and young children's causal and counterfactual inferences

The authors examined cue competition effects in young children using the blicket detector paradigm, in which objects are placed either singly or in pairs on a novel machine and children must judge which objects have the causal power to make the machine work. Cue competition effects were found in a 5- to 6-year-old group but not in a 4-year-old group. Equivalent levels of forward and backward blocking were found in the former group. Childrens counterfactual judgments were subsequently examined by asking whether or not the machine would have gone off in the absence of 1 of 2 objects that had been placed on it as a pair. Cue competition effects were demonstrated only in 5- to 6-year-olds using this mode of assessing causal reasoning.

Is goal ascription possible in minimal mindreading

In this response to the commentary by Michael and Christensen, we first explain how minimal mindreading is compatible with the development of increasingly sophisticated mindreading behaviors that involve both executive functions and general knowledge and then sketch 1 approach to a minimal account of goal ascription.

Drawn together: When motor representations ground joint actions

What enables individuals to act together? Recent discoveries suggest that a variety of mechanisms are involved. But something fundamental is yet to be investigated. In joint action, agents represent a collective goal, or so it is often assumed. But how, if at all, are collective goals represented in joint action and how do such representations impact performance? To investigate this question we adapted a bimanual paradigm, the circle-line drawing paradigm, to contrast two agents acting in parallel with two agents performing a joint action. Participants were required to draw lines or circles while observing circles or lines being drawn. The findings indicate that interpersonal motor coupling may occur in joint but not parallel action. This suggests that participants in joint actions can represent collective goals motorically.

Planning for Collective Agency

Which planning mechanisms enable agents to coordinate their actions, and what if anything do these tell us about the nature of collective agency? On the leading, best developed account, Michael Bratman’s, collective agency is explained in terms of interconnected planning. For our plans to be interconnected is for them to concern not just facts about our environment and goals but also facts about each others’ plans. This chapter contrasts interconnected with parallel planning. In parallel planning, we each individually plan all of our actions and so are in a position to conceive of our own and each other’s actions as parts of a single plan or exercises of a single ability. (The very idea of parallel planning may initially seem incoherent; the chapter examines this issue.) Could parallel rather than interconnected planning underpin collective agency? Some considerations in favour of a positive answer are provided by appeal to recent evidence on the role of motor representation in coordinating exercises of collective agency.

On a puzzle about relations between thought, experience and the motoric

Motor representations live a kind of double life. Although paradigmatically involved in performing actions, they also occur when merely observing others act and sometimes influence thoughts about the goals of observed actions. Further, these influences are content-respecting: what you think about an action sometimes depends in part on how that action is represented motorically in you. The existence of such content-respecting influences is puzzling. After all, motor representations do not feature alongside beliefs or intentions in reasoning about action; indeed, thoughts are inferentially isolated from motor representations. So how could motor representations have content-respecting influences on thoughts? Our aim is to solve this puzzle. In so doing, we shall provide the basis for an account of how experience links the motoric with thought. Such an account matters for understanding how humans think about action: in some cases, we have reasons for thoughts about actions that we would not have if we were unable to represent those actions motorically.