Philosophical Psychology:

A ‘subject-determining platitude’ about colour

According to Frank Jackson (1996, pp. 199–200), it is a ‘subject-determining platitude’ that ‘“red” denotes the property of an object putatively presented in visual experience when that object looks red’, and likewise for other colour terms.

How to Measure Phenomenology

It is perhaps tempting to assume that claims about phenomenology cannot be tested scientifically. But this is a mistake. We can use experiments to address the question, Do things which have the property denoted by ‘red’ thereby appear to be different from things which lack it?

Why Do Some Claim to Visually Experience Red?

Suppose, as argued, it is untrue that humans visually experience red or any other categorical colour properties. Why have so many philosophers have assumed the opposite, and done so without argument?

Appendix: Do you visually experience red because you call things ‘red’?

“surprising it would be indeed if I have a perceptual experience as of red because I call the perceived object ‘red’” (Stokes 2006, pp. 324--5).

Feelings of Agency

Feelings of agency may be a paradigm case of for metacognitive feelings. They seem to arise from a number of cues including the fluency of an action selection process (that is, the ease or difficulty involved in selecting one among several possible actions to perform motorically; this can be manipulated by, for example, providing helpful or misleading cues to action citep{wenke:2010_subliminal,sidarus:2013_priming,sidarus:2017_how}).

Metacognitive Feelings

What are metacognitive feelings? Could they be sensations in Reid’s sense? And why do humans have metacognitive feelings?

Categorical Perception & Emotion

The Objects of Categorical Perception

Speech Perception

Emotion vs Speech Categorical Perception

How to Get Beyond Intuition?

Can humans perceive causal interactions? Debate based on intuitions appears to be going no where. Is there a way to answer this question (or a refinement of it) without relying only on what philosophers say about their experiences?

The Launching Effect and Perceptual Processes

Object Indexes

Perception involves a system (at least one) of indexes which attach to objects These object indexes can be thought of, roughly, as mental analogues of the pins that an old fashioned logistician sticks into a map in keeping track of supply trucks. When things go well, the movements of trucks on the ground are mirrored by the movements of pins on the map. The key characteristic of the pins is this: ignoring re-use, if you have the same pin at two times, then the trucks it points to at those times are one and the same truck.

Object Indexes and the Launching Effect

A wild conjecture: Causal interactions are detected, or otherwise treated specially, by perceptual processes involved in segmenting and tracking objects.

The Launching Effect and Metacognition

If the launching effect is a consequence of the operation of a system of object indexes, why does it have phenomenal consequences? One possibility is that conflicts in assigning object indexes give rise to metacognitive feelings of surprise which subjects have learnt to interpret as impressions of causation.

Appendix: Adaptation and Launching

Appendix: The Pulfrich Double Pendulum Illusion

Are object perception and causal perception are one and the same process? Not if causal perception arises from the fact that solid objects cannot be perceived to move through each other and Leslie’s informal report about Wilson and Robinson’s (1986) version of the Pulfrich double pendulum illusion is correct.

Philosophical Methods

Philosophical methods include informal observation, guesswork (‘intuition’), imagination (including for ‘thought experiments’), reasoning and argument, & theoretical elegance.

Intentions and Goals

What is the relation between a purposive action and the outcome or outcomes to which it is directed? One way of answering this question appeals to intentions. On any standard view, an intention represents an outcome, causes an action, and does so in a way that would normally facilitate the outcome’s occurrence.

Motor Representation

Motor representations are involved in performing and preparing actions. Not all representations represent patterns of joint displacements and bodily configurations: some represent outcomes such as the grasping of an object, which may be done in different ways in different contexts.

Motor Representations Ground the Directedness of Actions to Goals

Some motor representations represent action outcomes, play a role in generating actions, and do this in a way that normally facilitates the occurrence of the outcomes represented. Like intentions, motor representations ground the directedness of actions to outcomes which are thereby goals of the actions.

Motor Representations Aren’t Intentions

Explains why motor representations aren’t intentions.

Decision Theory

How do rational agents decide which of several available actions to perform?

Game Theory

A game is ‘any interaction between agents that is governed by a set of rules specifying the possible moves for each participant and a set of outcomes for each possible combination of moves’ (Hargreaves and Varoufakis, 2004 p. 3)

Descision Theory Is Agnostic about Processes

You might be tempted to interpret decision theory as a description of how people reason. Is any such interpretation obligatory? Observation of how decision theory is applied supports the conclusion that decision theory is agnostic about processes.

Processes: Habitual vs Instrumental

What kinds of processes in individual animals guide actions? Research in animal learning enables us to distinguish habitual and instrumental processes (see Dickinson, 1985).

A Puzzle about Action

A rat has been given food contingent on its pressing a level. When it presses the lever, is its action habitual or instrumental? (This part also explains devaluation.)

A Dual-Process Theory of Action

Actions are neither habitual or instrumental. Actions are controlled by two or more distinct kinds of process, one instrumental and the other habitual.

Stress

When stressed, your preferences matter less: habits dominate (Schwabe & Wolf, 2010).

Is Decision Theory Really Agnostic about Processes?

The range of applications of decision theory indicates that it must be agnostic about processes. But Dickinson’s instrumental process is characterised by appeal to Decision Theory. How can the apparent tension between these facts be resolved?

Construals of Decision Theory

Decision Theory specifies a model of action. Models can be construed in several different ways. Decision Theory says nothing about how the model should be construed.

Training Effects

Whether you learn about the effects of an action can influence whether that action becomes dominated by instrumental or habitual processes (Klossek et al, 2011)).

Some Evidence

Many animals including scrub jays (Clayton, Dally and Emery 2007), ravens (Bugnyar, Reber and Buckner 2016), goats (Kaminski, Call and Tomasello 2006), dogs (Kaminski et al. 2009), ringtailed lemurs (Sandel, MacLean and Hare 2011), monkeys (Burkart and Heschl 2007; Hattori, Kuroshima and Fujita 2009) and chimpanzees (Melis, Call and Tomasello 2006; Karg et al. 2015) reliably vary their actions in ways that are appropriate given facts about another’s mental states.

Question 1: Tracking to Representing

How do observations about tracking support conclusions about representing?

Question 2: Dissociations

Why are there dissociations in nonhuman apes’, human infants’ and human adults’ performance on belief-tracking tasks?

Question 3: Automaticity

In adults, mindreading is sometimes entirely a consequence of relatively automatic processes and sometimes not. Why is belief-tracking in adults sometimes but not always automatic? (And how could belief-tracking ever be automatic if it significantly depends on working memory and consumes attention?)

A Dual Process Theory of Mindreading

According to the Dual Process Theory of Mindreading, two (or more) processes for tracking mental states are distinct in this sense: the conditions which influence whether they occur, and which outputs they generate, do not completely overlap.

Minimal Theory of Mind

The construction of a minimal theory of mind provides on account of how automatic and nonautoamtic mindreading could make complementary trade-offs between speed and accuracy.

Signature Limits

A signature limit of a model is a prediction which can be derived from the model, which cannot be derived from any other models under consideration, and which is untrue. Signature limits make it possible to test hypotheses about which model characterises a particular mindreading process.

The Double Life of Motor Representation

Motor representations live a kind of double life. Although paradigmatically involved in performing actions, they also occur when merely observing others act and sometimes influence thoughts about the goals of observed actions. Further, these influences are content-respecting: what you think about an action sometimes depends in part on how that action is represented motorically in you.

Pure Goal Tracking

An account of pure goal tracking is an account of how you could in principle infer facts about the goals to which actions are directed from facts about joint displacements, bodily configurations and their effects (e.g. sounds).

The Teleological Stance

The Teleological Stance (Gergeley and Csibra , 1995) provides a computational theory of pure goal ascription. Pure goal ascription is the process of identifying goals to which anothers’ actions are directed independently of any knowledge, or beliefs about, the intentions or other mental states of an agent.

The Motor Theory of Goal Tracking

How do humans track the goals of others’ actions? According to the Motor Theory of Goal Tracking, it is sometimes* by means of motor processes. More carefully, the Motor Theory of Goal Tracking consists of these claims: (1) in action observation, possible outcomes of observed actions are represented motorically; (2) these representations trigger motor processes much as if the observer were performing actions directed to the outcomes; (3) such processes generates predictions; (4) a triggering representation is weakened if the predictions it generates fail. The result is that, often enough, the only only outcomes to which the observed action is a means are represented strongly. (*‘sometimes’ because the Motor Theory is part of a dual-process account of goal-tracking.)

Marr’s Threefold Distinction

Marr helpfully distinguishes computational description (What is the thing for and how does it achieve this?) from representations and algorithms (How are the inputs and outputs represented, and how is the transformation accomplished?) and from the hardware implementation (How are the representations and algorithms physically realised?)

A Role for Motor Processes in Mindreading?

An Interface Problem: Preferences

‘we should search in vain among the literature for a consensus about the psychological processes by which primary motivational states, such as hunger and thirst, regulate simple goal-directed [i.e. instrumental] acts’ (Dickinson & Balleine, 1994 p. 1)

Another Interface Problem: Action

For a single action, which outcomes it is directed to may be multiply determined by an intention and, seemingly independently, by a motor representation. Unless such intentions and motor representations are to pull an agent in incompatible directions, which would typically impair action execution, there are requirements concerning how the outcomes they represent must be related to each other. This is the interface problem: explain how any such requirements could be non-accidentally met.

Five Complications

Any attempt to solve the interface problem must surmount at least five complications.

Mylopoulos and Pacherie’s Proposal

Mylopoulos and Pacherie propose that the Interface Problem can be solved by appeal to executable action concepts. This is perhaps also a promising idea for tacking the New Interface Problem too.

A Puzzle about Thought, Experience and the Motoric

Motor representations occur when merely observing others act and sometimes influence thoughts about the goals of observed actions. Further, these influences are content-respecting: what you think about an action sometimes depends in part on how that action is represented motorically in you. The existence of such content-respecting influences is puzzling. After all, motor representations do not feature alongside beliefs or intentions in reasoning about action; indeed, thoughts are inferentially isolated from motor representations. So how could motor representations have content-respecting influences on thoughts?

The Twin Interface Problems

How could intentions have content-respecting influences on motor representations given their inferential isolation? And how could motor representations have content-respecting influences on thoughts given their inferential isolation?

Appendix: Representational Format

A Question about Experiences of (Speech) Actions

What do we experience when we encounter others’ actions? One hypothesis (the Indirect Hypothesis) says that such experiences are all experiences of bodily configurations, of joint displacements and of effects characteristic of particular actions. Another hypothesis (the Direct Hypothesis) says that in observing an action we sometimes experience not only bodily configurations and joint displacements and their sensory effects but also the action as directed to a particular outcome.

Action Experience

What do you experience when someone acts? According to the Action Index Conjecture, motor representations of outcomes structure experiences, imaginings and (prospective) memories in ways which provide opportunities for attention to actions directed to those outcomes. Forming intentions concerning an outcome can influence attention to the action, which can influence the persistence of a motor representation of the outcome.

Sharing Smiles

Sharing smiles and otherwise collectively expressing emotions makes available to us facets of mental states that are not available on the basis of perception.

Motivational States

Your preferences can be incompatible with your aversions (and with primary motivational states). This shows that there is not a single system of preferences in rats or humans.