19,265 research outputs found
Bayesian Inference of Social Norms as Shared Constraints on Behavior
People act upon their desires, but often, also act in adherence to implicit
social norms. How do people infer these unstated social norms from others'
behavior, especially in novel social contexts? We propose that laypeople have
intuitive theories of social norms as behavioral constraints shared across
different agents in the same social context. We formalize inference of norms
using a Bayesian Theory of Mind approach, and show that this computational
approach provides excellent predictions of how people infer norms in two
scenarios. Our results suggest that people separate the influence of norms and
individual desires on others' actions, and have implications for modelling
generalizations of hidden causes of behavior.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, to appear in CogSci 2019, code available at
https://github.com/ztangent/norms-cogsci1
Ask, and shall you receive?: Understanding Desire Fulfillment in Natural Language Text
The ability to comprehend wishes or desires and their fulfillment is
important to Natural Language Understanding. This paper introduces the task of
identifying if a desire expressed by a subject in a given short piece of text
was fulfilled. We propose various unstructured and structured models that
capture fulfillment cues such as the subject's emotional state and actions. Our
experiments with two different datasets demonstrate the importance of
understanding the narrative and discourse structure to address this task
The Epistemology of Anger in Argumentation
While anger can derail argumentation, it can also help arguers and audiences to reason together in argumentation. Anger can provide information about premises, biases, goals, discussants, and depth of disagreement that people might otherwise fail to recognize or prematurely dismiss. Anger can also enhance the salience of certain premises and underscore the importance of related inferences. For these reasons, we claim that anger can serve as an epistemic resource in argumentation
The relation between language and theory of mind in development and evolution
Considering the close relation between language and theory of mind in development and their tight connection in social behavior, it is no big leap to claim that the two capacities have been related in evolution as well. But what is the exact relation between them? This paper attempts to clear a path toward an answer. I consider several possible relations between the two faculties, bring conceptual arguments and empirical evidence to bear on them, and end up arguing for a version of co-evolution. To model this co-evolution, we must distinguish between different stages or levels of language and theory of mind, which fueled each otherās evolution in a protracted escalation process
Folk Theory of Mind: Conceptual Foundations of Social Cognition
The human ability to represent, conceptualize, and reason about mind and behavior is one of the greatest achievements of human evolution and is made possible by a āfolk theory of mindā ā a sophisticated conceptual framework that relates different mental states to each other and connects them to behavior. This chapter examines the nature and elements of this framework and its central functions for social cognition. As a conceptual framework, the folk theory of mind operates prior to any particular conscious or unconscious cognition and provides the āframingā or interpretation of that cognition. Central to this framing is the concept of intentionality, which distinguishes intentional action (caused by the agentās intention and decision) from unintentional behavior (caused by internal or external events without the intervention of the agentās decision). A second important distinction separates publicly observable from publicly unobservable (i.e., mental) events. Together, the two distinctions define the kinds of events in social interaction that people attend to, wonder about, and try to explain. A special focus of this chapter is the powerful tool of behavior explanation, which relies on the folk theory of mind but is also intimately tied to social demands and to the perceiverās social goals. A full understanding of social cognition must consider the folk theory of mind as the conceptual underpinning of all (conscious and unconscious) perception and thinking about the social world
Know How and Acts of Faith
My topic in this paper is the nature of faith. Much of the discussion
concerning the nature of faith proceeds by focussing on the relationship
between faith and belief. In this paper, I explore a different approach. I
suggest that we approach the question of what faith involves by focussing on
the relationship between faith and action. When we have faith, we
generally manifest it in how we act; we perform acts of faith: we share our
secrets, rely on otherās judgment, refrain from going through our partnerās
emails, let our children prepare for an important exam without our
interference. Religious faith, too is manifested in acts of faith: attending
worship, singing the liturgy, fasting, embarking on a pilgrimage.
I argue that approaching faith by way of acts of faith, reveals that
faith is a complex mental state whose elements go beyond doxastic states
towards particular propositions. It also involves conative states and ā perhaps
more surprisingly ā know how. This has consequences for the epistemology
of faith: the role of testimony and experts, the importance of practices, and
what we should make of Pascalās advice for how to acquire faith
Intending is Believing: A Defense of Strong Cognitivism
We argue that intentions are beliefsābeliefs that are held in light of, and made rational by, practical reasoning. To intend to do something is neither more nor less than to believe, on the basis of oneās practical reasoning, that one will do it. The identification of the mental state of intention with the mental state of belief is what we call strong cognitivism about intentions. It is a strong form of cognitivism because we identify intentions with beliefs, rather than maintaining that beliefs are entailed by intentions or are components of them
Unconscious Rationalization, or: How (Not) to Think about Awfulness and Death
Many contemporary epistemologists take rational inference to be a conscious action performed by the thinker (Boghossian 2014; 2018; Valaris 2014; Malmgren 2018). It is tempting to think that rational evaluability requires responsibility, which in turn requires conscious action. In that case, unconscious cognition involves merely associative or otherwise arational processing. This paper argues instead for deep rationalism: unconscious inference often exhibits the same rational status and richly structured logical character as conscious inference. The central case study is rationalization, in which people shift their attitudes in logically structured, reason-responsive ways in response to evidence of their own incompetence or immorality. These attitude shifts are irrational in a way that reflects on the thinker. Thus rationally evaluable inference extends downward into the unconscious. Many take the sole aim of belief to be truth (Velleman 2000) or knowledge (Williamson 2000), but the prevalence of rationalization suggests that belief updating often aims instead at preserving our positive conceptions of ourselvesāthat is, belief updating is part of a psychological immune system (Gilbert 2006; Mandelbaum 2019). This paper argues that the psychological immune system comprises a suite of distinct cognitive mechanisms, some (ir)rational and some arational, which are united by a common function of avoiding the maladaptive predomination of negative affect and maintaining stable motivation. Other aspects of the psychological immune system include (i) a domain-general positive bias in evaluative attitudes and (ii) āterror management,ā i.e., the systematic strengthening of meaning-conferring beliefs to avoid death anxiety. The multiplicity of processes underlying the psychological immune system point toward an irrational but adaptive function of cognition to keep us motivated in a world rife with negativity and death
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