VOLUME 9 (1996), ISSUE 4

Manuscripts:

JUSTIN LEIBER
Helen Keller as cognitive scientist

• Abstract: Nature's experiments in isolation—the wild boy of Aveyron, Genie, their name is hardly legion-are by their nature illusive. Helen Keller, blind and deaf from her 18th month and isolated from language until well into her sixth year, presents a unique case in that every stage in her development was carefully recorded and she herself, graduate of Radcliffe College and author of 14 books, gave several careful and insightful accounts of her linguistic development and her cognitive and sensory situation. Perhaps because she is masked, and enshrined, in William Gibson's mythic and false Miracle Worker, cognitive scientists have yet to come to terms with this richly enlightening, albeit anecdotal, resource.

CHRIS ELIASMITH
The third contender: A critical examination of the dynamicist theory of cognition

• Abstract: In a recent series of publications, dynamicist researchers have proposed a new conception of cognitive functioning. This conception is intended to replace the currently dominant theories of connectionism and symbolicism. The dynamicist approach to cognitive modeling employs concepts developed in the mathematical field of dynamical systems theory. They claim that cognitive models should be embedded, low-dimensional, complex, described by coupled differential equations, and non-representational. In this paper I begin with a short description of the dynamicist project and its role as a cognitive theory. Subsequently, I determine the theoretical commitments of dynamicists, critically examine those commitments and discuss current examples of dynamicists models. In conclusion, I determine dynamicism's relation to symbolicism and connectionism and find that the dynamicist goal to establish a new paradigm has yet to be realized.

MARK RISJORD
Meaning, belief, and language acquisition

• Abstract: A very plausible and common view of meaning supposes that linguistic meaning is to be understood in terms of speakers' intentions. This program proposes to analyze the meaning of a sentence in terms of what speakers mean by or in uttering it; and this speaker meaning in turn is to be analyzed in terms of the speaker's intentions. This essay argues that intention-based semantics cannot provide an adequate analysis of linguistic meaning: not because of contrived counter-examples, nor because it conflicts with scruples about intentionality which we do or should have. It fails because research in psychology shows that children do not attribute beliefs to others in the way demanded by the theory. Empirical evidence is provided for the claim that two-and three-year-old children do not satisfy the conditions for speaker meaning, and thus cannot be said to mean anything by their utterances. It seems to me that children both mean something by their utterances and that their utterances have linguistic meaning. Hence the intention-based analysis does not provide necessary conditions for meaning.

AUSTEN CLARK
Three varieties of visual field

• Abstract: The goal of this paper is to challenge the rather insouciant attitude that many investigators seem to adopt when they go about describing the items and events in their "visual fields." There are at least three distinct categories of interpretation of what these reports might mean, and only under one of those categories do those reports have anything resembling an observational character. The others demand substantive revisions in one's beliefs about what one sees. The ur-concept of a "visual field" is that of the "sum of things seen," but one can interpret the latter in very different ways. The first is the "field of view," or the sum of physical things seen. The second is an array of visual impressions, whose spatial relations are distinct from those of physical phenomena in front of the eyes. The third is an intentional object: the world as it is represented visually. These three categories are described, and various locutions of vision science—such as "optic array," "retinocentric space," "visual geometry," "virtual object" and others—are analyzed and variously located within them. Finally, a recent argument purporting to necessitate the existence of a version two visual field is examined and shown wanting.

DON DEDRICK
Color language universality and evolution: On the explanation for basic color terms

• Abstract: Since the publication of Brent Berlin & Paul Kay's Basic color terms in 1969 there has been continuing debate as to whether or not there are linguistic universals in the restricted domain of color naming. In this paper I am primarily concerned with the attempt to explain the existence of basic color terms in languages. That project utilizes psychological and ultimately physiological generalizations in the explanation of linguistic regularities. The main problem with this strategy is that it cannot account for a particular subset of basic color words: words that the Berlin-Kay tradition calls "composite." The existence of such words does not compromise the claim that there are basic color words. It does suggest that such words—and basic terms in general—require a more complex type of explanatory strategy than much contemporary work on color naming supposes. It is my main contention that the central problems with the Berlin-Kay tradition arise from the difficulty of linking conceptually and empirically separate domains: linguistic, psychological, physiological. What is needed is not an attempt to reduce color naming to biology or to culture but, rather, an adequate conceptual account of how people may come to have and use basic color terms—an account which stands between the biological and the cultural.

DAVID A. JOPLING
"Take away the life-lie...": Positive illusions and creative self-deception

• Abstract: In a well-known paper "Illusion and well-being," Taylor & Brown maintain that positive illusions about the self play a significant role in the maintenance of mental health, as well as in the ability to maintain caring inter-personal relations and a sense of well-being. These illusions include unrealistically positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of personal control, and unrealistic optimism about one's future. Accurate self-knowledge, they maintain, is not an indispensable ingredient of mental health and well-being. Two lines of criticism are directed against the creative self-deception hypothesis, one methodological and one substantive. First, it is argued that Taylor & Brown's method of eliciting experimental subjects' self-reports and comparative self-ratings under artificial experimental conditions lacks ecological validity and phenomenological realism. Second, it is argued that positive illusions diminish the range of reactive other-regarding attitudes and emotions that people can adopt. A literary case history (Ibsen's The wild duck) which satisfies the criteria of ecological adequacy is used to illustrate the latter point.

Book Reviews:

ROBERT S. STUFFLEBEAM
Review of STANLEY FINGER's Origins of neuroscience

ADINA ROSKIES
Review of JOAQUIN M. FUSTER's Memory in the cerebral cortex: An empirical approach to neural networks in the human and non-human primate

FRED A. KEIJZER
Review of STAN FRANKLIN's Artificial minds

SHAUN GALLAGHER
Review of JONATHAN COLE's Pride and a daily marathon

CAROL SLATER
Review of CHRISTOPHER PEACOCKE's Objectivity, simulation, and the unity of consciousness: Current issues in the philosophy of mind

HENRY CRIBBS
Review of STEVEN M. SMITH, THOMAS B. WARD, & RONALD A. FINKE's The creative cognition approach

JOHN T. BRUER
Review of ALEXANDER GEORGE's Mathematics and mind