The present paper investigates the influence of opposing lexical forces on speech production using the duration of the stem vowel of regular and irregular verbs as attested in the Buckeye corpus of conversational North-American English. We compared two sets of predictors, reflecting two different approaches to speechproduction, one based on competition between word forms, the other based on principles of discrimination learning. Classical measures in word form competition theories such as word frequency, lexical density, and gang size (types of vocalic alternation) were predictive of stem vowel duration. However, more precise predic-tions were obtained using measures derived from a two-layer network model trained on the Buckeye corpus. Measures representing strong bottom-up support predicted longer vowel durations. Conversely, measures reflecting uncertainty predicted shorter vowel durations, including a measure of the verb’s semantic density. The learning-based model also suggests that it is not a verb’s frequency as such that gives rise to shorter vowel duration, but rather a verb’s collocational diversity. Results are discussed with reference to the Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis and the Paradigmatic Signal Enhancement Hypothesis.
In this work we present a new dataset of literary events-events that are depicted as taking place within the imagined space of a novel. While previous work has focused on event detection in the domain of contemporary news, literature poses a number of complications for existing systems, including complex narration, the depiction of a broad array of mental states, and a strong emphasis on figurative language. We outline the annotation decisions of this new dataset and compare several models for predicting events; the best performing model, a bidirectional LSTM with BERT token representations, achieves an F1 score of 73.9. We then apply this model to a corpus of novels split across two dimensionsprestige and popularity-and demonstrate that there are statistically significant differences in the distribution of events for prestige.
The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the philosophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multi-cellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a functionally integrated cognizing unit. Somewhere along the way, did such cognizing units simultaneously have cognizers as parts? Expanding upon the multiscale integration view of the Free Energy Principle, this paper develops an account of reciprocal integration, demonstrating how some coupled biological cognizing systems, when certain constraints are met, can result in a cognizing unit that is in ways greater than the sum of its cognizing parts. Symbiosis between V. Fischeri bacteria and the bobtail squid is used to provide an illustration this account. A novel manner of conceptualizing biological cognizers as gradient is then suggested. Lastly it is argued that the reason why the notion of ontologically nested cognizers may be unintuitive stems from the fact that our folk-psychology notion of what a cognizer is has been deeply influenced by our folk-biological manner of understanding biological individuals as units of reproduction.
Biogenic approaches investigate cognition from the standpoint of evolutionary function, asking what cognition does for a living system and then looking for common principles and exhibitions of cognitive strategies in a vast array of living systems—non-neural to neural. One worry which arises for the biogenic approach is that it is overly permissive in terms of what it construes as cognition. In this paper I critically engage with a recent instance of this way of criticising biogenic approaches in order to clarify their theoretical commitments and prospects. In his critique of the biogenic approach, Fred Adams (Stud Hist Philos Sci 68:20–30, 10.1016/j.shpsa.2017.11.007, 2018) uses the presence of intentional states with conceptual content as a criterion to demarcate cognition-driven behaviour from mere sensory response. In this paper I agree with Adams that intentionality is the mark of the cognitive, but simultaneously reject his overly restrictive conception of intentionality. I argue that understanding intentionality simpliciter as the mark of the mental is compatible with endorsing the biogenic approach. I argue that because cognitive science is not exclusively interested in behaviour driven by intentional states with the kind of content Adams demands, the biogenic approach’s status as an approach to cognition is not called into question. I then go on to propose a novel view of intentionality whereby it is seen to exist along a continuum which increases in the degree of representational complexity: how far into the future representational content can be directed and drive anticipatory behaviour. Understanding intentionality as existing along a continuum allows biogenic approaches and anthropogenic approaches to investigate the same overarching capacity of cognition as expressed in its different forms positioned along the continuum of intentionality. Even if all organisms engage in some behaviour that is driven by weak intentional dynamics, this does not suggest that every behaviour of all organisms is so driven. As such, the worry that the biogenic approach is overly permissive can be avoided.
A mark of the cognitive should allow us to specify theoretical principles for demarcating cognitive from non-cognitive causes of behaviour in organisms. Specific criteria are required to settle the question of when in the evolution of life cognition first emerged. An answer to this question should however avoid two pitfalls. It should avoid overintellectualising the minds of other organisms, ascribing to them cognitive capacities for which they have no need given the lives they lead within the niches they inhabit. But equally it should do justice to the remarkable flexibility and adaptiveness that can be observed in the behaviour of microorganisms that do not have a nervous system. We should resist seeking non-cognitive explanations of behaviour simply because an organism fails to exhibit human-like feats of thinking, reasoning and problem-solving. We will show how Karl Friston’s Free-Energy Principle (FEP) can serve as the basis for a mark of the cognitive that avoids the twin pitfalls of overintellectualising or underestimating the cognitive achievements of evolutionarily primitive organisms. The FEP purports to describe principles of organisation that any organism must instantiate if it is to remain well-adapted to its environment. Living systems from plants and microorganisms all the way up to humans act in ways that tend in the long run to minimise free energy. If the FEP provides a mark of the cognitive, as we will argue it does, it mandates that cognition should indeed be ascribed to plants, microorganisms and other organisms that lack a nervous system.
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