112 research outputs found
An Unintentional Defense of the Indeterminacy of Meaning?
No full textMarkus Werning attempts to refute Quine’s thesis that meaning is indeterminate. To this purpose he employs Hodges’ theorem about extensions of cofinal meaning functions. But the theorem does neither suffice to solve Quine’s problem nor the problem Werning mistakenly identifies with Quine’s. Nevertheless it makes sense to employ the methods used in Werning’s paper with regard to Quine’s thesis, only that they tell in favour of the thesis instead of against it.publishe
Minds, persons, and space: An fMRI investigation into the relational complexity of higher-order intentionality
No full textMental state reasoning or theory-of-mind has been the subject of a rich body of imaging research. Although such investigations routinely tap a common set of regions, the precise function of each area remains a contentious matter. With the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we sought to determine which areas are involved when processing mental state or intentional metarepresentations by focusing on the relational aspect of such representations. Using non-intentional relational representations such as spatial relations between persons and between objects as a contrast, the results ascertained the involvement of the precuneus, the temporal poles, and the medial prefrontal cortex in the processing of intentional representations. In contrast, the anterior superior temporal sulcus and the left temporo-parietal junction were implicated when processing representations that refer to the presence of persons in relational contexts in general. The right temporo-parietal junction, however, was specifically activated for persons entering spatial relations. The level of representational complexity, a previously unexplored factor, was also found to modulate the neural response in some brain regions, such as the medial prefrontal cortex and the right temporo-parietal junction. These findings highlight the need to take into account the critical roles played by an extensive network of neural regions during mental state reasoning
Remembering without (representational) memory: A neuro-computational study on regaining categoricity and compositionality from minimal traces
No full textThis paper provides a proof of principle for the philosophical theory of Trace Minimalism (Werning, 2020), a novel account of episodic memory. It claims that remembering goes without the storage of representational content in memory. Remembering rather consists in the construction of a representation about a scenario, previously experienced, through the interaction of minimal traces with acquired statistical regularities. A minimal trace merely constitutes a causal link to the experience but possesses no trans-temporally transmitted representational (viz. categorical and compositional) content. Our proof of principle uses a neuro-computational model that is based on an autoencoder modeling the visual pathway and a transformer modeling the semantic information network. It assumes the hippocampus as the host of minimal traces. Our model demonstrates that minimal traces, which lack sufficient information for the reliable categorization and composition of content on their own, can be enhanced through interaction with semantic information. This process allows for the accurate construction of past scenarios, respecting regularities in the world, and supporting the reliability of episodic memory. Our findings suggest that episodic memory relies on sparse, fragmentary information rather than stored content, providing a robust proof of principle that remembering is possible without representational memory traces
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From Minimal Traces to Scenarios of the Past: A Neuro-Computational Model on Regaining Categoricity and Compositionality in Remembering
No full textThis paper presents a proof of principle for Trace Minimalism (Werning, 2020), a novel philosophical framework for episodic memory. Trace Minimalism claims that remembering does not involve the storage of representational content but rather the reconstruction of past scenarios through the interaction of minimal traces with semantic information. Minimal traces establish a causal link to prior experiences but lack categorical and compositional content. We provide a neuro-computational model using a vector-quantized autoencoder and a transformer-based semantic completion mechanism. Our findings support the hypothesis that remembering is possible without representational memory traces and that minimal traces, in interaction with semantic information, reliably construct past scenarios. The results offer a compelling alternative to classical representational theories of memory while maintaining causal continuity with past experiences
Matching mind to world and vice versa: Functional dissociations between belief and desire mental state processing
No full text© 2009 Psychology Press
Revisiting the Valence Account
No full textThe existence of phenomenally conscious mental states is often taken to be obvious from first-person experience. Sytsma and Machery (2010) argued that if that is the case, then lay people should classify mental states in the same way that philosophers typically do, treating states like seeing red and feeling pain similarly. We then presented evidence that they do not. This finding is interesting in its own right, however, outside of any implications for the philosophical debates concerning phenomenal consciousness. As such, we attempted to explain our finding, presenting evidence that lay mental state ascriptions depend on valence judgments (that the mental states have a hedonic value for the subject). In this paper, I present new evidence that suggests against this valence account. I then provide evidence for a new explanation based on previous findings that lay people tend to view both colors and pains as mind-independent qualities of objects outside the mind/brain
How to compose meanings — seminar script
No full textThe principle of compositionality is commonly known as a principle saying that the meaning of an expression is determined by the meanings of its parts. Frege, in the only posthumously published manuscript Logic in Mathematics, writes what later, to many, serves as the template for a formal definition of the principle of compositionality: [...] thoughts have parts out of which they are built up. And these parts, these building blocks, correspond to groups of sounds, out of which the sentence expressing the thought is built up, so that the construction of the sentence out of parts of a sentence corresponds to the construction of a thought out of parts of a thought. And as we take a thought to be the sense of a sentence, so we may call a part of a thought the sense of that part of the sentence which corresponds to it. (Frege, 1914/1979, p. 225) The quotation is, of course, worded in Frege’s jargon, which for a Quinean is outright unacceptable. A closer look, however, reveals a message that can be put in more general terms and might be convincing even to someone who refuses to adopt thoughts and senses into his universe of discourse. To uncover this message, I shall distinguish three aspects of Frege’s statement. First, he claims that there is a part-whole relation between sentences and less complex items of language (‘groups of sounds ’ as he puts it). What kind of part-whole relation is appropriate? Cases of ambiguous expressions call for a distinction between mereological and syntactic parts (or constituents). The mereological relation is defined as follows: Definition 1 (Mereological constitution) A (spoken or written) utterance s is called a mereological part (or constituent) of an utterance t if and only if for any physical token of t in some region of space in some interval of time, s is physically tokened in the same region and the same interval. Mereological constitution, thus, is a relation of spatio-temporal co-occurrence. The utterance ‘brown’, e.g., is a mereological part of the utterance ‘brown dog’ because the latter utterance cannot be uttered without uttering the former. If we, however, contented ourselves with mereological constitution, we would be likely to run into a problem with the second aspect of Frege’s statement: Sentences express thoughts, where for Frege thoughts are nothing but the meaning
The "complex first" paradox: Why do semantically thick concepts so early lexicalize as nouns?
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