Cognitive Science 2

Eric Saidel (George Washington University)
According to Povinelli and Eddy (1996) chimpanzees do not know very much about seeing. Specifically, they do not know what others can and cannot see. According Hare et al (2000, 2001) chimpanzees know what other chimpanzees can see. How can we resolve this puzzle? This paper argues that the answer lies in a modification of Flavell's (1974, 1977) levels of visual perspective taking in order to take into account that recognizing that another does not see an object requires different cognitive mechanisms than recognizing that another does see an object.

Aida Roige (University of Maryland, College Park)
How can we determine whether non-human animals are phenomenally conscious? This paper reviews the best naturalistic attempts to make attributions of consciousness to animals, and why they fail. To address the problems they face, I elaborate some guidelines for good consciousness attributions. I conclude that some of those guidelines pull in different directions, because of an underlying problem inherent in the field: what I call the Kinda Hard problem.

Elliott Sober (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Lawrence Shapiro (University of Wisconsin-Madison), William Roche (Texas Christian University)

If belief N has proposition p as its content precisely when N and p are positively correlated, then it is obvious that misrepresentation is possible. Here we look at some interesting details that arise when this theory of content is applied to the disjunction problem. We identify circumstances in which natural selection will lead organisms to form a belief with propositional content X rather than a belief with propositional content XorY. We also describe how meaning hypotheses can be formulated as models that contain adjustable parameters, thus allowing the Akaike Information Criterion to apply to them.

Kenneth Aizawa (Rutgers University)
Polger and Shapiro believe that an individual being a member of a kind is a species of realization. This has important ramifications for some of their other views and for their critiques of the work of others. First, by their own lights, Polger and Shapiro should not count individual membership in a kind as a realization relation. Second, their handling of individuals realizing a kind fails to explicate what is involved in kinds realizing a kind. Third, their critique of Dimensioned realization fails to engage that view.

Filippo Vindrola (Ruhr-University Bochum)
This paper proposes a philosophy of science reconstruction of reasoning research. In reasoning research, an impressive body of experimental evidence seems to suggest that sometimes we deviate from norms of rationality. But what does it take to discriminate between "good" and "bad" reasoning? I argue that the toolbox of contemporary philosophy of science and argumentation theory might provide an answer to this foundational question. I reconstruct the argumentative structure of reasoning research, and discuss the role that auxiliary assumptions play in the interpretation of psychological data. Finally, I identify a set of necessary conditions for inferring reasoning errors from behavioral data.