Cognitive Science

What is the productivity of language?

- basically infinite number of sentences can be generated/understood from finite knowledge

What did the Wug Test show about f-rules in language?

- young children have extracted generalizable f-rules from the language around them, rather than simply memorizing words that they have heard

What was BF Skinner's simplistic view of sentences?

•A sentence is merely a sequence of words. •sentences are learned chains of responses: -A stimulus S0 elicits the first word. -The first word serves as the stimulus for the second word, second for the third, and so on

What does conceptual semantics posit? Accg to it how does and doesn't lang make contact w/the world?

*Conceptual semantics* - mentalistic approach: defines meaning in terms of a relationship between an utterance and conceptual structures in the mind of the language user. (ie. word "snow" doesn't refer directly to snow but to mind's idea of snow, which is what is referring to snow in the world) - Language makes contact with the world only through the complex mediation of the perceptual and motor systems, not some mysterious mind-world relation of intentionality

What are propositions and how do they relate to declarative sentences?

*Propositions*: - home base for linguistics - origin of questions (reformulate propositions to create questions: "the snow is white" -> "is the snow white?") - language independent - "people-independent" - fundamental bearers of truth and falsity Declarative sentences express propositions

What does truth-conditional semantics posit? Accg to it, how does one know a sentence's meaning?

*Truth-conditional semantics* - mainstream, dominant approach - objectivist approach: defines meaning in terms of a logical relationship between an utterance and the states of affairs in possible worlds - to know a sentence's meaning is to know the conditions under which the sentence would be true - truth conditions as possible worlds (eg. if it hadnt rained on sunday i would have cut the grass)

What are the most basic breakdowns of language comprehension and production?

*comprehension*: phonology -> syntax -> semantics *production*: semantics -> syntax -> phonology

How did William James define Psychology and Psychological phenomena, and what method did he consider central to its studies and why?

- "the Science of Mental Life, both of its phenomena and of their conditions." - "The phenomena are such things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings, decisions, and the like". - "Introspective Observation is what we have to rely on first and foremost and always...Because minds are a private theater of one, only way to access is through owner"

What is the difference b/t lexical and compositional semantics? What are the 3 semantic relationships?

- *lexical*: meaning of words; synonyms and antonyms - *compositional*: meaning of phrases, sentences, etc. - semantic relationships: 1. paraphrase (two differently structured sentences that are very close in meaning) 2. entailment (truth of one sentence implies the truth of another sentence) 3. reference and sense (eg. Michael Phelps is most decorated athlete)

What are the differences b/t Psychological and Philosophical Behaviorism?

- *psychological*: * An empirical research program * Goal is to explain behavior in terms of stimuli and the history of reinforcement and punishment * Tries to eliminate mental vocabulary altogether - *philosophical*: * mental terms express behavioral dispositions and/or neurophysiological states (behavioral translation) * Primarily concerned with the semantics of our common mentalistic vocabulary * The goal is to translate mental terms into terms that speak only of behaviors and propensities

What does monism say? What are the three main types?

- All is one, there are no fundamental divisions 1. Idealism (Berkeley) 2. Neutral monism (Spinoza's Dual-Aspect Theory) 3. Materialism (or, more specifically, physicalism)

What criticisms arose over introspection, and why were many psychologists becoming dissatisfied with the method?

- Different results using same methods for Imageless Thought Controversy - Kulpe: i think verbally, imageless - Wundt/Titchner: when i introspect, i see images - two *unable to reconcile b/t they had no notes/data to compare* - Many psychologists became *dissatisfied both with the focus of psychology being the "mind," and with the use of introspection as a scientific technique*.

What reasoning did Descartes use to come to his conclusion "I think, therefore I am"?

- Even if there is an all-powerful, evil genius bent on deceiving me, he cannot deceive me about my own existence because I must exist in order to be deceived. - Cogito ergo sum: self-evidently true

What is interactionalist dualism, and what problem does this present?

- Even though they are separate substances, minds and bodies interact causally with each other - If minds are not matter and bodies are, how can minds influence bodies?

What is physical causal closure?

- Every physical effect has a sufficient physical cause .-That is, the physical universe contains within itself the resources for a full causal explanation of any of its (caused) elements.

What is the fatal flaw of substance dualism?

- For anything to cause a physical object to move, or cause any change in one, there must be a flow of energy, or transfer of momentum, from the cause to the physical object. - But how could there be an energy flow from an immaterial mind to a material thing? - How could anything "flow" from something outside space to something in space?

What is epiphenomenalism?

- Mental phenomena "float above" the physical substrate, like a shadow. - There is physical-to-mental but no mental-to-physical causation.

What does autonomous semantics posit? How does it define the relationship b/t semantic and syntactic structures?

- Phrase and sentence meanings are composed from the meanings of the words plus independent principles for constructing meanings, only some of which correlate with syntactic structure. - some syntactic structures express elements of meaning (not just arrangements of elements) that are not conveyed by individual words.

What is Inference to the Best Explanation or Abduction? What is an example of this in science?

- Postulate unobservable (theoretical) entities (f-rules in this case) to systematize and explain the pattern of interlocking regularities in the data. - correct inference of atomic theory by 19th century physics on basis of regularities found in 1000s of chemical rxns

How did Wundt define psychology, distinguish b/t physicists and psychologists, and what was his main goal in studying it?

- Psychology is the study of "conscious processes" -Physicists study the external world without being part of the situation while psychologists study the psychological processes by which we experience the external world (from the inside; eg. Green is defined by its characteristic wavelength vs. the greenness of the percept) - *Structuralism*: Wundt's goal was to determine the elements and structure of conscious experience (analogous to chemistry's search for the "building blocks" of compounds: "thoughts ~ molecules, both have more basic elements w/in them)

What is mind-body supervenience?

- Things (objects, events, organisms, persons, etc.) that are exactly alike in all physical properties cannot differ with respect to mental properties. - That is, physical indiscernibility entails psychological indiscernibility.

What is linguistic performance and its role in linguistics?

- What a person actually does, the occasional imperfections have nothing to do with one's competence. - linguists maintain that their focus should be on competence and psycholinguists should focus on performance -- psychologists and cog scientists don't entirely agree

What examples do Buddhist doctrine put forth to support the idea of the anatman (no-self)?

- When a lute is played upon, there is no previous store of sound; and when the music ceases it does not go anywhere in space. - There is a path to walk on, there is walking being done, but there is no traveler. There are deeds being done, but there is no doer. There is blowing of the air, but there is no wind that does the blowing. The thought of self is an error...

Describe the "Rider and the Elephant" preliminary

- a rider (rational mind) sits atop an elephant (emotional mind) traversing a path (environmental factors) - "The rider acts as a spokesman for the elephant, even though it doesn't necessarily know what the elephant is really thinking."

What is the critical/sensitive period of language acquisition, and what is particularly problematic to learn after this period?

- ability to acquire a first language in an effortless and ultimately successful way begins to decline from age six and is severely compromised by the onset of puberty -- *syntax and morphology are particularly problematic*.

What is intentionality, and what context does it put beliefs into?

- aboutness: intentional state is about something, represents something, is directed @ something, or means something -- has content - Beliefs are paradigmatic intentional states.

How are creole languages formed, what evidence is there of there relative independence from the pidgin, and how do they serve as evidence of UG?

- children growing up in pidgin-speaking comm.y and use pidgin as raw-material for more grammatically rich system (improvement on parent's lang.) - grammatical devices not traceable to any of the parent languages of the pidgin - parents can't learn or create it bc they're outside the critical period, but the children create the grammar based on their expectations of "what a language has to look like" (ie. UG)

Describe language in an anthropological and evolutionary context [REVISE]

- chimps have diff.t mouth shape/vocal mechanisms, cannot produce speech - humans co-evolved w/their lang. -- natural selection: those who were better at producing language were more likely to cooperate with others to survive and reproduce

Why is semantics regard as a combinatorial system, and what are its units?

- clear from the many approaches to semantics in the literature that semantics is a combinatorial system independent of, and far richer than, syntactic structure. - units are not nouns and verbs but rather entities like individuals, events, predicates, variables, and quantifiers.

How did Chomsky successfully argue against behaviorist FSG

- finite boxes don't represent infinite possible sentence combinations - words in a sentence may depend on a word much earlier in the sentence (accg to FSG, intervening words b/t them would disrupt this dependence, short-term memory of the initial word)

What reality does productivity by recursion explain, and what is recursion?

- how there's a finite # of words and rules but infinite possible sentences - *recursion*: something contains or is defined by a (smaller) version of itself (eg. noun phrase w/in a noun phrase)

What does "the physical facts fix all the facts" mean in regard to physicalism?

- if one was to design a world in which the laws of nature and initial conditions are specified as 2 different physical facts about the world and physicalism holds in this world, then their job as a Creator would be finished and they just sit back and watch - the remaining facts would emerge from the physics

How do the study of thought and language shine a light on one another?

- if you can formulate a thought and then output it to the world, that proves that you are also correctly mentally representing that thought - if we can study language, we can indirectly study thought, although perhaps not comprehensively (not all thought can be articulated) - any theory of the semantics of thought would more than encompass the semantics of language

What are constraints in linguistics, and what may they consist of? Give an example

- kind of rule that places extra conditions on structures created by formation rules and derivational rules. - may consist of conditions that structures must necessarily satisfy, or of conditions that help make a structure more "favorable" or "stable." - ex. transitive verbs, such as dislike, must be followed by an NP (in underlying structure)

Summarize Tolman's study in which he found latent learning in rats

- mice made to run a maze - 3 groups: 1. immediate reward 2. delayed reward 3. no reward - when group 2 was given reward, they showed fastest maze times -- suggested before reward they were learning the layout of the maze

How did General Finite-State Grammar build on FSG?

- parts of speech replace arbitrary words in behavioral language

Where do pidgin languages generally occur, how are they formed, and what are their drawbacks?

- place of contact of people coming from different speaking areas - mix together aspects of parent languages to get some rudimentary meaning across, typically borrowing vocab from parent lang.s *often in phonologically degraded forms* - *lack stable word order, their grammatical organization* has a rudimentary "Me Tarzan, you Jane" flavor, *lacking inflection and subordination*.

What evidence is there supporting UG?

- sensitive periods for lang. acq. - limited ability of apes to acq. human lang - localization of lang fxns and aphasias - parallels b/t spoken & signed lang. - genetically-inherited lang. deficits - creole languages and NSL

Summarize William James' "Fundamental Fact"

- similar to Descartes' cogito ergo sum - 'it thinks' similar to 'it rains' or 'it blows' ('it' as a nonpersonal, grammatical placeholder) as in "thought goes on"

What did Introspection entail?

- systematic self-observation and self-report - reaction times - word-association

What did Tolman describe as being the best way to explain latent learning, and how was this in contrast to behaviorism?

- the rats created cognitive maps, or mental representations, of the maze - r/t than explaining behavior through S-R psychology and behavior alone, explained it through S-O-R (stimulus-organism-response), using behavior to infer about mental states

What was Watson's goal for psychology? What two types of responses did he define?

- theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. •Two kinds of responses: -Explicit response: overt and directly observable, e.g., pressing a lever -Implicit response: occurs inside the organism, e.g., glandular secretions, neural activity, visceral movements

How does Cartesian philosophy distinguish privacy b/t body and mind?

- thinking cannot occur outside the mind/consciousness, which itself is private, only accessible to owner

What is linguistic competence, and how does grammar fit into it?

- to be able to produce and understand an unlimited number of utterances, including novel and unfamiliar ones, and recognize that certain ("ungrammatical") utterances do not belong in the language - Grammar: the mental system behind our linguistic competence.

What is motivated reasoning and interpretive biases?

- tricks people use to reach the conclusion they want to reach. - "interpretive biases" that tend to operate subconsciously in the service of emotion regulation - people are quick to embrace ideas that make them feel good and resist ideas that threaten them or their worldview.

What is Psychological Behaviorism and its goal?

-An empirical research program -Goal is to explain behavior in terms of stimuli and the history of reinforcement and punishment; tries to eliminate mental vocabulary altogether

What are some basic facts of language acquisition?

-Any normal child becomes fluent in their local language(s) without formal instruction -No non-human animal comes close -Feral and neglected children never achieve fluency

What was Euclid's axiomatic method?

-Begin with self-evident truths ("axioms") -Prove theorems based on these axioms and previously proven theorems.

What two main types of solutions did philosophers follow for the mind-body problem of dualism?

-Give up the idea that a [causal] connection exists between the mental and the physical. -Give up Dualism in favor of Monism.

Summarize Descartes's epistemological argument that led him to dualism

-I am such that my existence cannot be doubted. -My body is not such that its existence cannot be doubted. -Therefore, I am not identical with my body. -Therefore, the thinking thing that I am is not identical with my body.

What is Philosophical Behaviorism and its goal?

-Primarily concerned with the semantics of our common mentalistic vocabulary -The goal is to translate mental terms into terms that speak only of behaviors and propensities

What was Descartes's explanation for the Mind-Body problem?

-The idea of mind-body union is a "primitive notion" that cannot be explained in terms of more basic notions -The locus of interaction is the pineal gland (where not how)

What two methods are used to test phrase structure

1. *Substitution test* - Some groups of words can be replaced with a pronoun 2. *Movement test* - Some groups of words move together

Name and define the 6 components of grammar

1. Phonetics: the articulation and perception of speech sounds 2. Phonology: the patterning of speech sounds 3. Morphology: the structure of words 4. Syntax: the structure of phrases and sentences 5. Semantics: the (literal) meaning of words, phrases, sentences, passages, and texts 6. Pragmatics: how to use language in context

What is a category mistake?

A semantic error in which things of one kind are presented as if they belonged to another or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property.

What is the ontological physicalism thesis?

All that exists in this world are bits of matter in space-time and aggregate structures composed exclusively of bits of matter. There is nothing else in the space-time world.

Briefly summarize physicalism

Everything that exists in the space-time world is a physical thing, and every property of a physical thing is either a physical property or a property that is related in some intimate way to its physical nature.

What is behavioral translation?

Mental terms express behavioral dispositions and/or neurophysiological states.

What are formation rules?

Specify how lexical items are combined into larger units (phrases), and how these larger units in turn are combined into still larger units

The authority of the past was being shaken by skeptical arguments that were undermining the received wisdom

What was occurring during the epistemological crisis of the 16th century?

Provide an illustration of a mutually recursive rule

X -> ...Y... Y -> ...X... X expands into something w/Y, Y expands into something with X

Briefly summarize Wittgenstein's private language argument

i can mark a certain sensation some way, but it will only serve as an ostensive definition so i can remember the connection in the future; but in marking it i have no criterion of correctedness against which to check it, so in the future any use of the mark is going to seem right, and that means that we can't talk about 'right' in this context

What are phrase structure rules?

paradigmatic examples of formation rules

According to John Watson, what topics should psychologists never study and which should they, and why?

scientists should only study events they can directly observe (ie. environmental stimuli and behavior), must never use the terms consciousness, mental states, mind, introspectively verifiable, content, imagery, etc/

How did Chomsky alternatively explain sentence structure formation?

sentences have a hierarchical design in which words are grouped together into successively larger structural units called phrases

What is an ostensive definition?

show what a term means by pointing to the thing it refers to

In principle, how can Finite-State Grammar be learned, and what two limitations are there of this idea?

• In principle, such grammar can be learned by associating pairs of words (or categories). • FSGs have extremely limited memory - only the last word that was produced - but dependencies between words in a sentence can extend over many words (can't account for recursion) • would take children >30yrs to learn lang due to ~1 bil associative links among specific word combos if they were learning @ 1 assoc./sec.

What is the difference b/t the mentalist and abstract perspective of language study?

• mentalist - language is a product of a mind, it is a window to the mind - language is a cognitive structure; words, sentences, etc. express conceptual representations in the mind • abstract - language has nothing to do with minds - refers to objects, states, etc. in possible worlds (eg. logic language of philosophy, math)

What are the 3 major types of rules in linguistics, and the 2 interpretations of these rules?

• rules: 1. formation rules 2. derivation rules (aka transformations) 3. constraints • *interpretations* 1. an abstract way of describing a class of structures -- no claims about processing 2. algorithmically -- generate grammar (eg. sentences)

Solipsism: what does it say, how did Descartes open the door to it, how is it related to idealism, and how do most philosophers regard it?

•"I am the only mind which exists." •Descartes's method of radical doubt and his "Cogito ergo sum" opened the door. •Many types of idealism lead quite directly to solipsism. •Most philosophers regard solipsism as a philosophical dead end.

Why can't language be entirely private?

•"Language games" are rule-governed practices that people engage in -- language itself is rule-governed •[Verificationsim:] A rule must have a criterion of correctness to verify that the rule is being followed in each specific case •*An isolated mind is fallible: mistakes can occur during reasoning, e.g., memory lapses.* •Without some resource external to the mind, there can be no criterion of correctness.

What is the Problem of Other Minds, and what other questions does it raise?

•"What justifies the almost universal belief that others have minds very like my own?" •It also is an effective, if roundabout, way of asking, "What is the nature of mind?" and "Can machines (or robots) have minds?"

What two components must a theory of semantic structure include?

•*Expressiveness*: must be able to express all the semantic distinctions made by a natural language. •*Universality*: Languages are (largely) inter-translatable -- hence the stock of semantic structures available to be used in particular languages must be universal. (inter-lingual)

Summarize the 2 main competing theories of language acquisition

•*universal grammar*: - something in the genes code for syntax - Rule-based grammar - autonomous, modular syntax •*general learning*: - genes code for proteins, not concepts like syntax; genetic endowment specifies general learning mechanisms, not language-specific rules - lang is inextricably intertwined with the rest of cognition, it's not special, like learning to ride a bike, etc.

What/when are the major milestones of language acquisition? (12 wks - 4 yrs)

•12 wks: cooing, smiling •6 mos: babbling, e.g, ba-ba-ba-ba •10 mos: no longer able to discriminate non-native phonemic contrasts •12 mos: first words, understands simple commands •18 mos: can pronounce up to 50 words •24 mos: two-word phrases, productivity •30 mos: explosive increase in vocabulary, steady increase of mean length of utterance (MLU) •3 yrs: ~1000 words, grammatical complexity •4 yrs: well-established language

What was Descartes' geometrical method, and what Euclidian method was this analogical to?

•Construct a system of certain knowledge using the two fundamental, foolproof operations of reason: -Intuition ("I see clearly and distinctly that...") -Deduction •Analogous to axiomatic method

What were some of Chomsky's distinctions and contributions to cognitive science and linguistics?

•Described human language as a sophisticated, hierarchical system that involves storage and manipulation of sophisticated, hierarchical phrase structures •Defined an algorithmic basis for this manipulation •Mathematical theorems - Chomsky's hierarchy of formal grammars •Opened up a whole new field of inquiry

What is parallelism?

•Each realm runs in isolation, like a clock made by God and set in motion to run in sync . •The two realms run in parallel, deterministically.

What is the "The Gate Is Closely Guarded" preliminary?

•Few things are as anxiety-provoking as the realization that death is inevitable and to some extent unpredictable, so the physicalist hypothesis about the MBP is bound to encounter very strong resistance; rational arguments just don't cut that deep.

What does the red spot on Jupiter illustrate about processes, and how does this relate back to Descartes's "cogito ergo sum"?

•Giant red spot serves as vivid example that a process can persist for a very long time even though there is no "substance" underneath it. • ie. thinking can persist without a thinker

What is occasionalism?

•God causes both the physical and the mental, like a puppeteer with a puppet in each hand. •Mental and physical appear to interact, but they don't actually

What is the Mind-Body Problem, and the two problems within it?

•How are our mental states, events, and processes related to the physical states, events and processes? •The problem of *mental causation*: if the mental is not physical, then how can we make sense of its causal interaction with the physical? •The problem of *consciousness*: if the mental is physical, how can we make sense of the phenomena of consciousness?

How does Cartesian Metaphysics explain the existence of God?

•I think, therefore I am. •I am and I have the idea of God in my mind, therefore God is! -Ontological proof: God is the only possible explanation of the idea of a Most Perfect Being, that is clearly and distinctly present in my mind. •God is no deceiver (God put the idea of God's existence in my mind, and since God doesn't deceive, God exists).

What is inflection and some examples of it in English?

•Inflection = the modification of a word's form to indicate grammatical information of various sorts •Examples of inflection in English: -Singular vs plural: the book vs the books -Past vs nonpast: We work. vs We worked.

What were the benefits and detriments of psychological behaviorism?

•It provided needed counterweight to the prior, speculative mode of theorizing. •However, its refusal to consider mental mechanisms at all was too narrow. •Within their self-circumscribed domain, the behaviorists made many important discoveries in animal learning, etc.; they established a robust experimental rigor

According to UG, how do languages differ from one another, and what explains how children learn lang so quickly? What do they define as the role of external input?

•Languages differ only in the settings of a relatively small number of parameters. •The child learns language quickly because it knows most of it already -- needs external input only to discover the parameter settings of the local language and to learn words.

What is a lexicon and what are they composed of?

•Lexicon: A list of morphemes and the rules for combining morphemes (The smallest units of language that carry meaning)

What is the method of exaggerated skepticism, and how is this illustrated by the indestructible object principle?

•Method of exaggerated skepticism: I will doubt everything until I reach a bedrock of certain truth. -The senses are fallible. -Assume an "evil genius" is bent on deceiving me. -Only way to find indestructible object in the room is to smash everything until you find something that cant be smashed

What are the 3 main types of non-interactive dualism?

•Occasionalism •Parallelism •Epiphenomenalism

What is property dualism? Provide an example from physics to illustrate

•Property dualism: mental properties are diverse from and irreducible to physical properties. •Example from physics: The electron has gravitational mass and electrical charge.

What are the main types of physicalism?

•Reductive physicalism -Behaviorism •Nonreductive physicalism •Functionalism

What is representative perception and the egocentric predicament?

•Representative perception: the theory that our ideas correspond to and faithfully represent objects in the external world. •Egocentric predicament: if all we can directly know is our own ideas, then how could we ever know whether our ideas correspond to anything, or even approximate anything, "out there"?

What are derivational rules, and how can they be thought of? Give an example of one. What do they always leave behind?

•Rules that take a fully formed structure and change some aspect of it; can be thought of more generally as a relation between two structures, one "more underlying" and one "more superficial." •Example: "Fatima really disliked that movie." -> "That movie, Fatima really disliked [it]." •Movement rules always leave behind a "trace" - a sort of unpronounced pronoun, whose antecedent is the moved constituent

What are some arguments against UG?

•Statistical learning algorithms are very powerful. Much more powerful than most people realize -- some have already demonstrated lang.-learning •Language universals might be due to non-language universals and/or historical factors. •double dissociations are never absolute. •brain is a massively interactive system. •Genes code for proteins, not word order. •Communicative demands enforce grammar.

What are the 3 three main, hotly contested questions of the "Language War"?

•Symbolic: Are formal grammar rules expressed in the brain? •Autonomy: Is grammar independent of other brain structures? •Genetic: Is there some special genetic encoding specifically for grammar?

What was the Cartesian project, and how did Wittgenstein challenge this idea?

•The Cartesian project was to build a system of certain knowledge using nothing but the resources of the individual mind. •Wittgenstein argued that the resources of any individual mind are not up to the challenge. •Human memory is fallible and language, which is inherently social, is needed

What is the Universal Grammar hypothesis of language acquisition?

•The child comes to the language-learning situation prepared -- they already know certain aspects of language in advance. •The standard term for the unlearned component is Universal Grammar or UG.

What is the paradox of language acquisition?

•The whole community of linguists, working together for decades with all sorts of cross-linguistic and psycho-linguistic data unavailable to children, has still been unable to come up with a complete characterization of the grammar of a single natural language. •Yet every child does it by the age of 10.

What are some of the dark, mortal implications of physicalism?

•There is no immaterial soul that survives the disintegration of the brain. •Death is the end of an individual's existence. •The only thing that survives is the person's legacy, and it too will not survive for long.

What is the distinction b/t top-down and bottom-up interpretations of a rule? Give an example of each in order to answer this

•Top-down: A noun phrase (NP) has as parts a determiner (Det), and adjectival phrase (AP), and a noun (N), in that order. •Bottom-up: A Det followed by an AP followed by an N may be taken to constitute an NP.