School of Liberal Arts

The aim of this article is to present an overview of the possibility of intertwining themes between contemporary research in social cognition, developmental psychology and the existential analytic proposed by Martin Heidegger. We analyze the notion of social intentionality (being-with) as formulated in Being and Time (1927), the discussion on social cognition, between the theory theory of mind and the simulation theory of mind and the development of intersubjectivity in neonatal infancy. We are guided by the hypothesis that there is a mutual enlightenment between the study of social cognition, developmental psychology and existential analytic, so that one area can benefit from the contributions of others - the analysis of social intentionality in hermeneutic phenomenology being an example of this approach.

A pretensão deste artigo é de apresentar um panorama geral sobre a possibilidade de entrecruzamento de temas entre a pesquisa em cognição social contemporânea, a psicologia do desenvolvimento e a analítica existencial proposta por Martin Heidegger. Nesse sentido, o trabalho é programático. Analisamos a noção de intencionalidade social (ser-com) como formulada em Ser e Tempo (1927), a discussão sobre cognição social, entre a teoria da mente e a teoria simulacional da mente e o desenvolvimento de intersubjetividade na infância neonatal. Pautamo-nos pela hipótese de que há um mútuo esclarecimento entre o estudo da cognição social, psicologia do desenvolvimento e a analítica existencial, de modo que uma área pode se beneficiar das contribuições de outras - sendo a análise da intencionalidade social na fenomenologia hermenêutica um exemplo desta abordagem.

Talk of a “genetic program” has become almost as common in cell and evolutionary biology as talk of “genetic information”. But what is a genetic program? I understand the claim that an organism’s genome contains a program to mean that its genes not only carry information about which proteins to make, but also about the conditions in which to make them. I argue that the program description, while accurate in some respects, is ultimately misleading and should be abandoned. After that, I sketch an alternative framework which is better suited to capturing the full informational nature of genes. This framework is centered on the notion of a signaling game, as originally developed by David Lewis, but expanded upon considerably by Brian Skyrms in more recent years. On the view I develop, genes turn out to be the producers and consumers of regulatory or developmental information, rather than entities encoding such information. This finding has consequences that link up with a broader debate in the philosophy of biology concerning inheritance systems. I take this to be one form of theoretical payoff that results from applying the signaling games framework to genes

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis have argued that individual-selection accounts of human cooperation flounder in the face of the free-rider identification problem. Kim Sterelny has responded to this line of argument for group selection, arguing that the free-rider identification problem in fact poses no theoretical difficulty for individual-selection accounts. In this article, I set out to clarify Bowles and Gintis’ argument. As I see matters, the real crux of their argument is this: solving the free-rider identification problem, even in modestly sized social groups, requires that group members are disposed to share social information with one another. The difficulty for individual-selection accounts, according to Bowles and Gintis, is that these accounts have no explanation for why individuals should be disposed to behave in this way. Having clarified their argument, I then turn to Sterelny’s criticism, and argue that Sterelny underestimates the challenge being raised by Bowles and Gintis. More specifically, I argue that it is unclear whether the expected benefits of having a disposition to share social information would have outweighed the expected costs for an individual belonging to a Pleistocene social group. Importantly, this is not to say that I am persuaded by Bowles and Gintis’ argument; on the contrary, what I claim is that more theoretical (and in particular) empirical work is necessary before the issues under discussion can be settled. I formulate some specific questions which I think future research in this area should aim to address.

The status of genes as bearers of semantic content remains very much in dispute among philosophers of biology. In a series of papers, Nicholas Shea has argued that his ‘infotel’ theory of semantics vindicates the claim that genes carry semantic content. On Shea’s account, each organism is associated with a ‘developmental system’ that takes genetic representations as inputs and produces whole-organism traits as outputs. Moreover, at least in his most recent work on the topic, Shea is explicit in claiming that these genetic representations are ‘read in ontogenetic time, in the course of individual development’. Here I argue that a close examination of the process of reading, in Shea’s sense, reveals that acts of reading do not actually occur over the course of developmental time at all. To make this vivid, I contrast the process of reading for Shea with another type of developmental process that is widely seen as a form of reading directed on inherited genes, and which certainly does occur over the course of developmental time, namely, gene expression. I suggest that this error in Shea’s thinking can be traced back to an equivocation on Shea’s part in the meaning of ‘reads’, and also to a reliance on an invalid principle regarding the transference of representational content from one token gene to another. The issues at play are bound up with questions about causation and in particular about causation over time. Thus, having first presented my arguments in a way that doesn’t depend on any particular theory of causation, I then make use of Kenneth Waters’ framework of difference-making causation to conceptually sharpen and shed further light on matters. I conclude by discussing a consequence of the fact that acts of reading do not occur in development.

According to one currently influential line of thinking, the evolution of ostensive communication was a prerequisite for the evolution of human language. In this article, I distinguish between a strong and a weak version of this view and offer a sustained argument against the former. More specifically, the strong version of this view would have it that ostensive communication was a prerequisite not just for the evolution of fully modern language but for any language-like system of communication. I argue that this version is too strong: I show how some distinctive and important features of language may well have been assembled prior to the evolution of ostensive communication. Put another way, I argue that a protolanguage before ostensive communication scenario is a real possibility. I conclude by briefly arguing that such an evolutionary scenario coheres better with archaeological evidence from the early Pleistocene as well as evidence from developmental psychology pertaining to the nature of our mind reading abilities.

This paper addresses the question of whether early Pleistocene hominins are plausibly viewed as having possessed a protolanguage, that is, a communication system exemplifying some but not all of the distinctive features of fully-modern human language. I argue that the answer is “yes” mounting evidence from the early Pleistocene “lithics niche”. More specifically, I first describe a cognitive platform which I think would have been sufficient, given appropriate socio-ecological conditions, for the creation and retention of a protolanguage. Then, using archeological evidence pertaining to hominin lithic behavior from the early Pleistocene, I attempt to make plausible the idea that each of these cognitive abilities were in fact in place by this point in hominin evolutionary history and also that the requisite socio-ecological conditions were satisfied.

The purpose of this paper is to critically engage with a recent attempt by Thom Scott- Phillips to offer a general account of communication. As a general account, it is intended to apply equally well to both non-human and human interactions which are prima facie communicative in character. However, so far, Scott-Phillips has provided little detail regarding how his account is supposed to apply to the latter set of cases. After presenting what I take to be the most plausible way of filling in those details, I argue that his account would appear to be too narrow: it (minimally) fails to capture a range of human interactions which strike us as instances of communication. To wit, these are cases in which some but not all of the information an act is designed to convey to a reactor actually reaches that reactor. An alternative account incorporating Scott-Phillips' main insights is then sketched, and it is suggested that this account, or something like it, would accommodate the full range of non-human and human interactions that are intuitively communicative.

Discussion item. Looks at the relationship between two hypotheses attempting to explain the evolution of Erectine anatomical and behavioral innovations (the "cooking hypothesis" and the "mechanical processing hypothesis"). Connects a regime of mechanical processing of plant foods using wooden implements and platforms to the discovery of primitive ignition technology.

This paper examines some recent work by Robert Berwick and Noam Chomsky as presented in their book "Why Only Us? Language and Evolution" (2015). As I understand them, Berwick and Chomsky's overarching purpose is to explain how human language could have arisen in so short an evolutionary period. After articulating their strategy, I argue that they fall far short of reaching this goal. A co-evolutionary scenario linking the mechanisms that realize the language system, both with one other and with cognitive mechanisms capable of exploiting linguistic expressions, is surely unavoidable. And yet this is precisely what B&C in effect rule out.

Modeling work by Brian Skyrms and others in recent years has transformed the theoretical role of David Lewis's 1969 model of signaling. The latter can now be understood as a minimal model of communication in all its forms. In this article, we explain how the Lewis model has been generalized, and consider how it and its variants contribute to ongoing debates in several areas. Specifically, we consider connections between the models and four topics: the role of common interest in communication, signaling within the organism, meaning, and the evolution of human communication and language. The orientation to communication and representation created by these models, what we call "the sender-receiver framework," treats coordination between behaviors of sign production and interpretation as the core phenomenon of communication. In some cases, that coordination will be the product of intentional foresight and agency, while in others it will be due to simpler selective processes operating over phylogenetic, ontogenetic, or cultural timescales. The unifying character of this framework also depends on its recognizing both clear and partial cases of sender-receiver systems, where this is understood in terms of how closely a real-world system matches the entities and relations treated by the models.

Humans' capacity for so-called symbolic cognition is often invoked by evolutionary theorists, and in particular archeologists, when attempting to explain human cognitive and behavioral uniqueness. But what is meant by "symbolic cognition" is often left underspecified. In this article, I identify and discuss three different ways in which the notion of symbolic cognition might be construed, each of them quite distinct. Getting clear on the nature of symbolic cognition is a necessary first step in determining what symbolic cognition might plausibly explain.

The idea that cognition makes use of one or more "languages of thought" remains central to much cognitive-scientific and philosophical theorizing. And yet, virtually no attention has been paid to the question of how a language of thought might evolve in the first place. In this article, I take some steps towards addressing this issue. With the aid of the so-called Sender-Receiver framework, I elucidate a family of distinctions and processes which enable us to see how languages of thought might evolve via a series of small, incremental changes. While much work doubtlessly remains to be done in this area, I hope to at least show that there need be nothing mysterious about the existence of languages of thought on evolutionary grounds.

Kinship plays a foundational role in organizing human social behavior on both local and more global scales. Hence, any adequate account of the evolution of human sociality must include an account of the evolution of human kinship. This article aims to make progress on the latter task by providing a few key pieces of an evolutionary model of kinship systems. The article is especially focused on the connection between primate social cognition and the origins of kinship systems. I argue that early conceptions of kinship in our line were very likely scaffolded by preexisting forms of primate social cognition. It was only later, as linguistic resources increased in our line, and as human social life grew more complex, that these conceptions came to resemble kin categories as we now know them. I conclude by situating “kin cognition” within a broader cognitive science framework for studying capacities that reflect both innate knowledge and human cultural learning.

An essay review of Richard Wrangham's "The Goodness Paradox". I summarize and then evaluate the book’s overall argument. I pay special attention to Wrangham's ideas about connections between human self-domestication and the evolution of language and cooperation.

To appear in Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy (ed. Killin, A., & Allen-Hermanson, S.): There is growing acceptance among language evolution researchers that an increase in our ancestors' theory of mind capacities was critical to the origins of language. However, little attention has been paid to the question of how those capacities were in fact upgraded. This article develops a novel hypothesis, grounded in contemporary cognitive neuroscience, on which our theory of mind capacities improved as a result of an increase in our System-2 thinking capacities, in turn based in an increase in our working memory capacities. I contrast this hypothesis with what would appear to be the default position among language evolution researchers, namely, that our theory of mind became more powerful as a result of genetic change to a domain-specific mindreading system which we share with other great apes. While the latter hypothesis is not implausible, it arguably enjoys less empirical support at present than does the alternative hypothesis I develop.