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Question Session 06

Week 06 Questions:

Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science

[email protected]

this is being recorded

What anchors our shared understanding, as researchers, of
agents, actions, beliefs, desires, intentions and the like?

This question is pressing because we assume a shared understanding when we aksed The Problem of Action

What distinguishes your actions from things that merely happen to you? (‘The Problem of Action’)

Also pressing in the case of joint action. Do you ever get the feeling that you’re not sure whether a case is really joint action or not?

What distinguishes joint actions from parallel but merely individual actions?

We are supposed to be able to agree that one is a joint action and one is not. So what anchors this initial understanding?

What anchors our shared understanding, as researchers, of
agents, actions, beliefs, desires, intentions and the like?

What distinguishes your actions from things that merely happen to you? (‘The Problem of Action’)

What distinguishes joint actions from parallel but merely individual actions?

Which things manifest agency?

‘The paramecium’s swimming through the beating of its cilia, in a coordinated way, and perhaps its initial reversal of direction, count as agency.’

(Burge, 2009, p. 259)

Do these two have a shared understanding of agency?

Compatible claims about different things? Or incompatible claims about one thing?

Nearly everyone in philosophy thinks that, overall, the reasons favour one of these views. But we also know that philosophers have been disagreeing for a good 2000 years and that the trend is not towards disagreements being overcome through the use of reason.

Steward is clear about the sources of her view.

Steward’s model. Discoveries about psychological capacities to track agents and their actions provide some, perhaps limited, support for a conclusion about which things are agents. And what Steward calls ‘the evidence from everyday thinking’ likewise feeds into this conclusion.

Full plan is to run through the model for the case of red

We can ‘ask the normative question whether the concept truly applies to creatures of a given sort. The concept, once formed, has its own integrity’

Steward, 2009 p. 227

What anchors our shared understanding, as researchers, of
agents, actions, beliefs, desires, intentions and the like?

Do you see how Steward answers this question? Is it a good answer?

Full plan is to run through the model for the case of red

We can ‘ask the normative question whether the concept truly applies to creatures of a given sort. The concept, once formed, has its own integrity’

Steward, 2009 p. 227

Steward is thinking of the concept of agency. Comparison: the concep of colour

Early-developing (or innate) psychological capacities enable us to track agents red things.

There is ‘everyday thinking’ about red things.

But neither straightforwardly supports conclusions about which things are red.

‘In the local market, we find: red, brown, white, and russet potatoes; red and green cabbages; red, yellow, and green bell peppers; red, yellow, and white onions; red and white grapes; white and pink grapefruit; red, white, black, green, and yellow beans; and, of course, red, white, rose, and green wine (green as in green Hungarian). Among hair colors, we find black, brown, red, blond (in stead of yellow), gray, and white. None of these nomenclatures makes sense if we go strictly by the standard Munsell color chips. The reds in red hair, red potatoes, red cabbage, red bell peppers, red onions, red grapes, red beans, red wine, and red skin are very different from the blood red of the focal red Munsell chip. They are also very different from each other. They only make sense with the similarity, preference, and exhaustiveness constraints. And these constraints couldn't work if it weren't for the principle of possibilities’ (Clark, 1992, p. 372).

red hair, red potatoes, red cabbage, red bell peppers, red onions, red grapes, red beans, red wine, and red skin

(Clark, 1992, p. 372)

principle of possibilities

‘the principle of possibilities: We understand what an entity is with reference to [...] the set of possibilities we infer it came from’

As with colour, psychological terms like ‘acts’ and ‘thinks’ can be used to make many different contrasts ...

‘I know that my orchids are trying to stave off the cold so they can get growing again’

‘This dormancy happens because the grass is trying to preserve itself with limited resources’

‘spotify is trying to play’

‘as the flight controller fights to hold the craft in what it thinks is the correct attitude’

I am picking out examples using unfamiliar kinsd of agent because this makes it vivid that what is being suggested isn’t what Steward or Burge have in mind when they discuss agency.

But I do want to suggest that, in many cases, ordinary thought and talk about agents involves some of the same contrasts.

We can ‘ask the normative question whether the concept truly applies to creatures of a given sort. The concept, once formed, has its own integrity’

Steward, 2009 p. 227

Early-developing (or innate) psychological capacities enable us to track agents red things.

There is ‘everyday thinking’ about red things.

But neither straightforwardly supports conclusions about which things are red.

apply the idea about everyday thinking about ‘red’ to action ...

We can ‘ask the normative question whether the concept truly applies to creatures of a given sort. The concept, once formed, has its own integrity’

Steward, 2009 p. 227

(my|your|his|her|their) phone

is trying to (excluding ‘kill me’) [283,000]

eg ‘my phone is trying to navigate me to Alex even though he has been deleted’

wants to [278,000]

hates [147,000]

likes [86,800]

thinks (e.g. ‘My phone thinks I’m in another city’) [53,400]

is pretending [16,000]

Will skip that here.

Is this a good objection?

reply : but there are paradigm cases

Look, you can get monolingual German speakers to categorize colours and they will produce quite uniform boundaries.

Witzel & Gegenfurtner, 2013 figure 6

caption: ‘Figure 6. Color naming. The colors in the graphic refer to the color names used for a particular test color in a particular session by a particular observer. The x-axis refers to the variation in hue as in Figure 3. Each column refers to a particular stimulus color at isoluminance. The horizontal black lines separate layers that correspond to the data for each participant. Within each layer, the rows represent repeated measurements of color naming in different experimental sessions. Vertical black lines correspond to the category boundaries calculated through the modes of the single measurements. Supplementary Figure S6 provides the graphic for dark and light. Variation across was higher than within observers.’

We can ‘ask the normative question whether the concept truly applies to creatures of a given sort. The concept, once formed, has its own integrity’

Steward, 2009 p. 227

Objection: Compare ‘red’ things: Which concept?

Reply: paradigm cases

Objection-to-Reply: ???

Indeed, the extensions of colour terms vary quite radically between languages. Ongoing research concerns whether there is any kind of universal prinicple behind the pattern.

English

Roberson & Hanley 2010, Figure 1c

Berinmo

Roberson & Hanley 2010, Figure 1b

cross-cultural differences on action?

‘While diverse thoughts, opinions, and beliefs may not be a strong feature of ni-Vanuatu children’s conversational environments, social emotions (e.g., shame, resentment, jealousy, empathy, mutual happiness, and so forth) are more commonly and readily invoked in order to describe, predict, and explain behavior’

Dixson, Komugabe-Dixson, Dixson, & Low (2018, p. 2171)

further reading: Wassmann, Funke, & Träuble (2013)

We can ‘ask the normative question whether the concept truly applies to creatures of a given sort. The concept, once formed, has its own integrity’

Steward, 2009 p. 227

Objection: Compare ‘red’ things: Which concept?

Reply: paradigm cases

Objection-to-Reply:

cultural variation -> whose paradigms?

and ???

Can measure disciminability by different mechanisms.

[a] ‘cone–opponent dimensions of the second-stage mechanisms can be used as a perceptual reference’

[b] use discrimnation thresholds (JNDs) ‘the basic ability to detect small differences between colors. Sensitivity can be measured through discrimination thresholds’

[c] use ‘a speeded, suprathreshold discrimination task

Witzel & Gegenfurtner 2018, figure 5

[caption:] ‘Category effects on color perception. (a) Categorical sensitivity. The diagram shows how the sensitivity to color differences changes across hue. The x-axis corresponds to hue in DKL color space, and the y-axis to discrimination thresholds. Adapted from Witzel & Gegenfurtner (2013). Note that the green-blue boundary is unlike the others in that it coincides with a local minimum of discrimination thresholds. (b) Categorical facilitation. The bars along the x-axis of the main graphic correspond to color pairs that are composed of the colors illustrated by the inset. The y-axis of the main graphic represents response times in speeded discrimination. Note that discriminating the color pair BC, in which B and C belong to different categories (i.e., red and brown), is fastest even though the distances between colors control for sensitivity to color differences. Adapted from Witzel & Gegenfurtner (2016). Abbreviation: DKL, Derrington-Krausfopf- Lennie. ∗∗p < 0.01; ∗∗∗p < 0.001.’

(Witzel & Gegenfurtner, 2018, p. 488): ‘First, the known cone–opponent dimensions of the second-stage mechanisms can be used as a perceptual reference, and the sensitivity to color differences can serve as the category-probing measure. We refer to the sensitivity to color differences as the basic ability to detect small differences between colors. Sensitivity can be measured through discrimination thresholds under optimal conditions. In case categorical perception acts even at this basic level, sensitivity should be higher—and thresholds lower—at the category boundaries than within the categories. However, this is not the case (cf. Figure 5a): There is no category effect at this low sensory level of color processing (Bachy et al. 2012; Cropper et al. 2013; Danilova & Mollon 2014; Roberson et al. 2009; Witzel & Gegenfurtner 2013, 2018).’

(Witzel & Gegenfurtner, 2018, p. 488): ‘Second, we can use those empirical discrimination thresholds as the perceptual reference and test for category effects on other performance measures (response times and error rates) in a speeded, suprathreshold discrimination task. In this case, category effects on response times and error rates have been observed around an isoluminant hue circle (Witzel & Gegenfurtner 2015) and at the red–brown boundary (Witzel & Gegenfurtner 2016) (see Figure 5b). We call these effects categorical facilitation in the sense that they facilitate speeded discrimination of suprathreshold stimuli beyond what is predicted by sensitivity. Interestingly, the categorical facilitation effects occurred only in na ̈ıve, unexperienced observers with high response times, but they disappeared for trained observers who became experts in the task and responded fast and automatically (Witzel & Gegenfurtner 2015).’

We can ‘ask the normative question whether the concept truly applies to creatures of a given sort. The concept, once formed, has its own integrity’

Steward, 2009 p. 227

Objection: Compare ‘red’ things: Which concept?

Reply: paradigm cases

Objection-to-Reply:

cultural variation -> whose paradigms?

and multiple mechanisms
-> which paradigms?

The point of these objections is that there are various ways to generate paradigm cases, but it is just not clear which are significant.

Further, in practice Steward does not provide any way to isolate paradigm cases, nor does she seem to be interested in doing so.

What anchors our shared understanding, as researchers, of
agents, actions, beliefs, desires, intentions and the like?

If you are convinced there is a problem, then maybe we should think about how to solve it. (If not convinced, this could still be interesting but for different reasons.)

Brand, 1984

Keyboard Shortcuts?f

Question Session 06

Week 06 Questions:

Philosophical Issues in Behavioural Science

[email protected]

Keyboard Shortcuts`?f`