240 research outputs found
The cultural evolution of mind-modelling
I argue that uniquely human forms of âTheory of Mindâ are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental statesâand so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of the cultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of the cultural evolution of mental state talk
Fitting Pragmatics into the Human Mind: A philosophical investigation of the Pragmatics Module Hypothesis
This thesis focuses on the hypothesis that pragmatic understanding is underpinned by a mental module closely related to the ability to interpret othersâ behaviors by inferring underlying mental states, also called âmindreadingâ. First, it aims at evaluating the plausibility of this hypothesis in light of the available data in the empirical literature by drawing on the argumentative toolbox of the philosophy of mind and language. Second, it aims at developing this hypothesis by addressing its main theoretical and empirical challenges.
In Chapter One, I outline a historical overview of the different declinations of the modularity hypothesis in cognitive science, with a focus on early works in cognitive pragmatics and Theory of Mind research.
In Chapter Two, I provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of the Pragmatics Module Hypothesis by focusing on the central tenets of Relevance Theory.
In Chapter Three, I explore the idea of pragmatics as a âsub-moduleâ of Theory of Mind from an empirical perspective by surveying the current state of the art in experimental and clinical pragmatics, thus âclearing upâ the recent controversy on the modularity of pragmatics from some misconceptions and empirical predictions which do not follow from the Pragmatics Module Hypothesis.
In Chapter Four, I provide a novel cognitive framework for the modular view of pragmatics by evaluating the significance of research on ostensive communication in infancy with respect to the hypothesis of an early-developing modular heuristic for interpreting communicative behaviors.
Chapters Five and Six both focus on the several âdevelopmental dilemmasâ that must be confronted by intentional-inferential accounts of infant communication like the one endorsed in the present thesis, which will be disentangled, analyzed, and addressed by evaluating several possible solutions. In these two chapters, I show how the cognitive framework offered in Chapter Four can be employed and further extended to deal with such developmental dilemmas from a renewed modular perspective
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The Role of Perspective-Taking in Childrenâs Quantity Implicatures
Young children excel at pragmatic inferences known as ad hoc quantity implicatures: they can infer, for example, that a speaker who said âthe card with applesâ meant the card with nothing but apples. However, it is not known whether children take into account the speakerâs perspective in deriving such inferences, as adults are able to do, and as the received theories of pragmatics claim. In two experiments, we tested children (5-7 years, N = 33 and N = 25) and adults using a picture-matching director task, in which participants played a game giving cards to the speaker, with some cards being in common ground and some in privileged ground. We found that adults can both derive implicatures when all information is in common ground and not derive them when relevant information is in privileged ground. Children also derive ad hoc implicatures when relevant information is in common ground but, crucially, fail to not derive them when it is in privileged ground. Childrenâs difficulty to integrate perspective-taking with pragmatic inferencing challenges the received theories about the necessity of perspective-taking in pragmatics
Sharedness and privateness in human early social life
This research is concerned with the innate predispositions underlying human intentional communication. Human communication is currently defined as a circular and overt attempt to modify a partner's mental states. This requires each party involved to posse ss the ability to represent and understand the other's mental states, a capability which is commonly referred to as mindreading, or theory of mind (ToM). The relevant experimental literature agrees that no such capability is to be found in the human speci es at least during the first year of life, and possibly later. This paper aims at advancing a solution to this theoretical problem. We propose to consider sharedness as the basis for intentional communication in the infant and to view it as a primitive, i nnate component of her cognitive architecture. Communication can then build upon the mental grounds that the infant takes as shared with her caregivers. We view this capability as a theory of mind in a weak sense.
Millikanâs teleosemantics and communicative agency
Millikanâs teleosemantic approach constitutes a powerful framework for explaining the continued reproduction and proliferation of intentional conventional linguistic signs, and thereby the stability of human verbal intentional communication. While this approach needs to be complemented by particular proximate psychological mechanisms, Millikan rejects the mentalistic psychological mechanisms, which are part of the Gricean tradition in pragmatics. The goal of this paper is to assess the balance between Millikanâs teleosemantic framework and the particular proximate psychological mechanisms that she favors
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Childrenâs development of Quantity, Relevance and Manner implicature understanding and the role of the speakerâs epistemic state
In learning language, children have to acquire not only words and constructions, but also the ability to make inferences about a speakerâs intended meaning. For instance, if in answer to the question, âwhat did you put in the bag?â, the speaker says, âI put in a bookâ, then the hearer infers that the speaker put in only a book, by assuming that the speaker is informative. On a Gricean approach to pragmatics, this implicated meaning â a quantity implicature â involves reasoning about the speakerâs epistemic state. This thesis examines childrenâs development of implicature understanding. It seeks to address the question of what the relationship is in development between quantity, relevance and manner implicatures; whether word learning by exclusion is a pragmatic forerunner to implicature, or based on a lexical heuristic; and whether reasoning about the speakerâs epistemic state is part of childrenâs pragmatic competence.
This thesis contributes to research in experimental and developmental pragmatics by broadening the focus of investigation to include different types of implicatures, the relationship between them, and the contribution of other aspects of childrenâs development, including structural language knowledge. It makes the novel comparison of word learning by exclusion with a clearly pragmatic skill â implicatures â and opens an investigation of manner implicatures in development. It also presents new findings suggesting that childrenâs early competence with quantity implicatures in simple communicative situations belies their ongoing development in more complex ones, particularly where the speakerâs epistemic state is at stake.
I present a series of experiments based on a sentence-to-picture-matching task, with children aged 3 to 7 years. In the first study, I identify a developmental trajectory whereby word learning by exclusion inferences emerge first, followed by ad hoc quantity and relevance, and finally scalar quantity inferences, which reflects their increasing complexity in a Gricean model. Then, I explore cognitive and environmental factors that might be associated with childrenâs pragmatic skills, and show that structural language knowledge â and, associated with it, socioeconomic status â is a main predictor of their implicature understanding. In the second study, I lay out some predictions for the development of manner implicatures, find similar patterns of understanding in children and adults, and highlight the particular challenges of studying manner implicatures experimentally. Finally, I focus on childrenâs ability to take into account the speakerâs epistemic state in pragmatic inferencing. While adults do not derive a quantity implicature appropriately when the speaker is ignorant, children tend to persist in deriving implicatures regardless of speaker ignorance, suggesting a continuing challenge of integrating contextual with linguistic information in utterance interpretation.ESRC studentshi
Gricean Communication and Cognitive Development
On standard readings of Grice, Gricean communication requires (a) possession of a concept of belief, (b) the ability to make complex inferences about othersâ goal-directed behaviour, and (c) the ability to entertain fourth order meta-representations. To the extent that these abilities are pre-requisites of Gricean communication they are inconsistent with the view that Gricean communication could play a role in their development. In this paper, I argue that a class of âminimally Gricean actsâ satisfy the intentional structure described by Grice, but require none of abilities (a)-(c). As a result, Gricean communicative abilities may indeed contribute to the development of (a)-(c) â in particular, by enabling language development. This conclusion has important implications for our theorising about cognitive development
The cultural evolution of mind-modelling
I argue that uniquely human forms of âTheory of Mindâ (or âToMâ) are a product of cultural evolution. Specifically, propositional attitude psychology is a linguistically constructed folk model of the human mind, invented by our ancestors for a range of tasks and refined over successive generations of users. The construction of these folk models gave humans new tools for thinking and reasoning about mental statesâand so imbued us with abilities not shared by non-linguistic species. I also argue that uniquely human forms of ToM are not required for language development, such that an account of the cultural origins of ToM does not jeopardise the explanation of language development. Finally, I sketch a historical model of the cultural evolution of mental state talk
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