VOLUME 14 (2001), ISSUE 4

Manuscripts:

RUSSIL DURRANT & BRIAN D. HAIG
How to pursue the adaptationist program in psychology

• Abstract: In recent times evolutionary psychologists have offered adaptation explanations for a wide range of human psychological characteristics. Critics, however, have argued that such endeavors are problematic because the appropriate evidence required to demonstrate adaptation is unlikely to be forthcoming, therefore severely limiting the role of the adaptationist program in psychology. More specifically, doubts have been raised over both the methodology employed by evolutionary psychologists for studying adaptations and about the possibility of ever developing acceptably rigorous evolutionary explanations of human psychological phenomena. We argue that by employing a wide range of methods for inferring adaptation and by adopting an inference to the best explanation strategy for evaluating adaptation explanations, these two doubts can be adequately addressed. We illustrate how this approach can be fruitfully employed in evaluating claims about the evolutionary origins of language, and conclude with a brief discussion of the future of evolutionary psychology.

JAMES W. GARSON
(Dis)solving the binding problem

• Abstract: The binding problem is to explain how information processed by different sensory systems is brought together to unify perception. The problem has two sides. First we want to explain phenomenal binding: the fact that we experience a single world rather than separate perceptual fields for each sensory modality. Second we must solve a functional problem: to explain how a neural net like the brain links instances to types. I argue that phenomenal binding and functional binding require very different treatments. The puzzle of phenomenal binding rests on a confusion and so can be dissolved. So only functional binding deserves explanation. The general solution to that problem is that information to be bound is arrayed along different dimensions. So sensory coding into separate topographic maps facilitates functional binding and there is no need based on the unity of perception for special mechanisms that bring "back together" information in different maps.

GEORGE TERZIS
How crosstalk creates vision-related eureka moments

• Abstract: The discussion begins with a familiar and defensible characterization of the eureka moment, according to which it is the unexpected product of separate and often seemingly incompatible perspectives. The principal aim of the discussion is to explain how, so characterized, vision-related eureka moments can occur. To fulfill this aim, the discussion employs a notion of crosstalk, in which cognitive interference slightly increases as a result of the creative thinker's considerable, albeit only partly successful, preeureka cognitive effort. Such crosstalk, it is suggested, is likely to occur when top-down visual imaging repeatedly stimulates pyramidal cells closely apposed to others that, although simultaneously active, are part of bottom-up visual perception that is initially cognitively unrelated to such imaging. It is further suggested that local circuitry, in the form of inhibitory interneurons, can synchronize cells associated with these initially separate processes, thus causing subsequent perceptual patterns to be slightly modified by preeureka problem-solving imagery. This modification, it is claimed, may help explain the unexpected shift in visual perception that accompanies the creative thinker's eureka moment, a shift that can improve the thinker's subsequent understanding of the relevance of information to a problem's solution.

MARK LeBAR
Simulation, theory, and emotion

• Abstract: It seems that in interpreting others we sometimes simulate, sometimes apply theory. Josef Perner has suggested that a fruitful line of inquiry in folk psychology would seek "criteria for problems where we have to use simulation from those where we do without or where it is even impossible to use." In this paper I follow Perner with a suggestion that our understanding of our interpretive processes may benefit from considering their physiological bases. In particular, I claim that it may be useful to consider the role emotion plays in the respective interpretive processes. I give reasons for believing that affective processes are more heavily involved in simulation (especially in situations of practical judgment and practical reasoning) than in theory application. But affective processes have distinctive neurological and metabolic properties. These distinctive features of emotion may not only enrich our understanding of the simulation process, but also afford us a step towards responding to Perner's challenge.

MARK T. BROWN
Multiple personality and personal identity

• Abstract: If personal identity consists in non-branching psychological continuity, then the sharp breaks in psychological connectedness characteristic of Multiple Personality Disorder implicitly commit psychological continuity theories to a metaphysically extravagant reification of alters. Animalist theories of personal identity avoid the reification of alternate personalities by interpreting multiple personality as a failure to integrate alternative autobiographical memory schemata. In the normal case, autobiographical memory cross classifies a human life, and in so doing provides access to a variety of interpretative frameworks with their associated clusters of general event memory and episodic memory. Multiples exhibit erratic behavior because they cannot access reliably the intersecting autobiographical memory schemata that permit graceful transitions between social roles, behavioral repertoire and emotional dispositions. Selves, in both normal and certain pathological cases, are best understood as semi-fictional narratives created by human animals to serve their social, emotional and physical needs.

RUPERT READ
On approaching schizophrenia through Wittgenstein

• Abstract: Louis Sass disputes that schizophrenia can be understood successfully according to the hitherto dominant models—for much of what schizophrenics say and do is neither regressive (as psychoanalysis claims) nor just faulty reasoning (as 'cognitivists' claim). Sass argues instead that schizophrenics frequently exhibit hyper-rationality, much as philosophers do. He holds that schizophrenic language can after all be interpreted—if we hear it as Wittgenstein hears solipsistic language. I counter first that broadly Winchian considerations undermine both the hermeneutic conception of interpreting other humans in general and Sass's hope of interpreting schizophrenics in particular. I then go on to argue that even if these Winchian conisderations are not accepted, Sass in any case doesn't take sufficiently seriously Wittgenstein's use of nonsense as a term of criticism. Solipsism is not something we can understand so as to be able to understand analogically the schizophrenic's 'world'—for there is no such thing as understanding it. Solipsism is nonsense, is nothing—there is no 'world' there, in solipsists (as I show by reference to Cora Diamond's reading of Wittgenstein). Nor in any actually analogous cases of schizophrenia. Their 'alienness' is the alienness of nothingness; roughly, of the fantasy of 'logically alien thought'.

Discussion:

GRANT GILLETT
Signification and the unconscious

• Abstract: In European philosophical psychology, the work of Jacques Lacan has exerted a great deal of influence but it has received little attention from analytic philosophers. He is famous for the view that the unconscious is a repository of influences arising from language and the meanings it captures but the presentation of his ideas is sometimes perplexing and impenetrable and its conceptual links with analytic philosophers like Frege and Wittgenstein are not easily discerned. In fact, there are a number of such links and they are worth pursuing for those interested in language, mind, and the unconscious. If we explore Lacan's claim about the link between signification and the tuchè (the encounter with the real) we find that the mental content of the subject is essentially tied to the external world both causally and linguistically. The means of tying the two together arise in the context of human interactions and therefore are charged with personal and emotive content as well as the semantic content with which we are normally concerned in philosophy of language. When we pursue the implications of his view it becomes plausible both that the unconscious is structured like a language and that language borrows much of its meaning and significance to a subject from the interpersonal medium through which it has been inscribed on that subject. His approach is therefore illuminating both for linguistics (especially psycholinguistics) and for the psychology of the unconscious.

RUPERT READ
What does 'signify' signify?

• Abstract: Gillett argues that there are unexpected confluences between the tradition of Frege and Wittgenstein and that of Freud and Lacan. I counter that that the substance of the exegeses of Frege and Wittgenstein in Gillett's paper are flawed, and that these mistakes in turn tellingly point to unclarities in the Lacanian picture of language, unclarities left unresolved by Gillett. Lacan on language is simply a kind of enlarged/distorted mirror-image of the Anglo-American psychosemanticists: where they emphasise information and representation, he emphasises evocation and connotation. Neither contrasting emphasis is remotely adequate to linguistic action-in-the-world. Is 'the unconscious', as Lacan claims, a 'network of signifiers'? Arguably, yes; but most ordinary/actual language does not involve such 'signification'. Words primarily 'signify' concepts or things only in exceptional circumstances; normally, words are transparent, and nothing at all is meant by them except in an actual situation of use of a sentence. Second, is 'the unconscious' structured like a language? Again, yes—if we understand by 'language' what Lacan asks us to. 'The unconscious' arguably is structured like a language—as Lacan (inadequately) understands language.

GRANT GILLETT
Response to Read on signfication and the unconscious

• Abstract: I am gratified and informed by Read's commentary on "Signification and the Unconscious" which suggests many fruitful directions for further work. However I find myself, despite his trenchant criticisms, none dissuaded from some of the major themes I wished to sketch out. I tried to indicate that Lacan and Frege had in common a recognition of the joint importance of sense (or something like cognitive significance) and reference or the actual (some would say—but Wittgenstein would not—causal) relation between the subject and the object. For Lacan the subjective elements of sense and its role in the mind of an individual are of far greater interest than the objective content of sense that concerned Frege. I will pursue some of the more detailed points about the relationship between these two aspects below. In relation to the link between Lacan and Wittgenstein I argued that Wittgenstein, contra any platonistic reading of sense, was concerned to ground the ideas of meaning and understanding in our actual practices wherein we used words and segments of language to do things with each other. In this context there is an intersubjectivity of content which is enmeshed with the rest of our proceedings. As such Wittgenstein's position does not give any purchase to the idea that language and its content can be considered as a self-contained structure that carries meaning independent of the natural and cultural histories of human beings (in so far as they can be separated). So, to some detailed points of debate.