Abstract
One question of the bounds of cognition is that of which things have it. A scientifically relevant debate on this question must explain the persistent and selective use of psychological predicates to report findings throughout biology: for example, that neurons prefer, plants and fruit flies decide, and bacteria communicate linguistically. This paper argues that these claims should enjoy default literal interpretation, and that these reports of psychological properties in non-humans are as straightforward as they seem. An epistemic consequence is that these findings can contribute directly to understanding the nature of psychological capacities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
A popular, but distinct, question is whether cognitive processes are bound to—realized by—what’s inside the skull or else extend through the body or into the environment. This boundary dispute arises downstream from the issue discussed here.
The psychological predicates or verbs referred to throughout this paper comprise the vocabulary of common-sense or folk psychology (extensions in cognitive psychology are not critical here; in Sect. 2, I discuss psychological verb classes in linguistics.) Terms in this vocabulary are subject to revision, extension, precisification, or becoming irrelevant as the sciences proceed, but (as argued in the remainder of this paper) their grounding in our lay understanding of psychology is inclusive: their folk meanings easily adjust to discoveries about the capacities they pick out in the way that the folk physical term “gold” was adjusted to fit a deeper understanding of gold eventually provided by physics and chemistry. (I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify this point.)
Although I focus on biological cases, Anti-Exceptionalism is open in principle to ascriptions to non-biological (i.e. artificial) cases. For a non-anthroponormative, biology-based view of cognition, see Lyon (2006).
An indirect way of raising one or another these objections is to reserve the label “mental” for human cases of the psychological capacities and quarantine the rest in a separate and unequal “cognitive” category. Unless the dispute is merely verbal—for example, one might simply assert that all mental states are conscious states—the specific objection can be made explicit by asking what counts as mental and what merely cognitive.
Dennett’s intentional stance may be considered a sui generis version of the behavioristic or instrumental objection; in any case, he combines this with homuncular explanation (e.g., in Bennett et al. op.cit., pp. 88–89) such that what is ascribed at subpersonal levels, even if the same words are used, is not the same as what is ascribed to persons.
Thus, an anonymous reviewer commented on an earlier draft that in cases “when we attribute genuine mental states to adult humans ... reporting a preference is an act that has an extraordinary number of inferential consequences. In the case of neurons, it’s no more than a colorful redescription of the observed behavior.” This comment presupposes that behaviorism or instrumentalism is not true of people (about which Anti-Exceptionalism is officially neutral) and asserts a question-begging interpretation of what the neuron sentences say (about which it is not).
This is not to say that epistemic issues are not raised: for example, Alpi et al. (2007) question the explanatory utility of the concept of plant neurobiology; Trewavas agrees that this is a metaphor (though Alpi et al. call it an analogy) but defends its utility. (See also Calvo and Keijzer 2009 and Brenner et al. 2007).
This is not to affirm, with panpsychism, that they are literal everywhere. My perspective has a contemporary parallel in ojalehto et al. (2013), who defend teleological concepts in science; and my strategy has an historic precedent in Fellbaum and Miller’s (1990) reply to Rips and Conrad’s (1989) claim that certain patterns of mental verb use characterize folk beliefs about mental activities. They reply that verbal and nominal semantic relations are not the same and that psychological verbs follow the patterns for verbs in general. Rips and Conrad (1990) concede the general point.
Yet another task is to provide a theory of reference for verbs, psychological or otherwise. This is mainly a matter of showing how extant theories deal with verb (activity) reference, given that they are developed with noun (object) reference in mind. While a theory that easily deals with semantic variation (such as relevance-theoretic semantics) is more congenial, I need not be committed to any particular theory.
In what follows, I use “verb” for activity-referring terms and concepts, and “activity” in a broad sense to include processes, actions, events, activities, performances, states, and other occurrents, as well as any associated dispositions or capacities to engage in them. Reference to particular events in a familiar philosophical sense, such as Sebastian’s stroll at time t, presupposes the reference of verbs (in this case, strolling); the same holds for theories of event individuation (e.g., stabbing and killing, in the question of how Brutus’ stabbing Caesar is related to his killing Caesar). I include states as activities because they are being reconceptualized in cognitive science in dynamical terms (e.g., Roediger et al. 2007); their ontological status is also questionable on general grounds (Steward 2012).
It bears emphasizing that this foray into linguistics is prompted by the objections to the literal view. Two anonymous reviewers remarked on an earlier draft that (in the words of one) I was “aiming to throw light on which nonhuman organisms have cognitive properties by a linguistic examination of the properties of words for these properties. ... Surely, one thinks, light on this question must come from the science of those organisms, primarily cognitive ethology. How could linguistics help?” My position just is that these sciences are telling us that neurons prefer, etc. The linguistics is for my opponents.
In fact, the idea that future use is so determined is exemplified by Bennett and Hacker’s (op.cit.) argument that these uses are nonsense. With Wilson (2006), I agree that the question itself implies a mistaken view of language. Wilson argues that natural languages are fluid and change their “patches” of correct application constantly without anyone taking any notice; we tolerate a lot of openness in how language is used. A relevant case in point is “neuron”, which in the original Greek referred to vegetal fibers and was generalized to include all natural fibers (Brenner et al. 2007). Wimsatt’s (op.cit.) work emphasizing the messiness of biology can be thought of as the ‘material mode’ complement to Wilson. As a result, we cannot reliably infer now which extensions of concepts (or terms expressing them) will be permissible in any possible situation. The claim defended in Sect. 3—that verb reference often remains constant across “patches”—is consistent with but independent of Wilson’s view (at least on some interpretations).
This puts me in opposition to Churchland (1981) even if he is right that we are thoroughly confused about the psychology of the folk: it follows from my view that many “folk”-psychological concepts will figure in a scientific psychology of the folk (and of other things) simply because there is nothing specifically “folk” about many of them. The fact that these terms are associated with a certain amount of human-specific baggage, at least some of which may be added or emphasized in philosophical contexts, is not an argument that this baggage is essential to them; the linguistic and cognitive data discussed in this paper constitute an argument for why it is not essential.
As a general pattern, the verb provides a literal organizing element within metaphor. For example, in the noun metaphor “Our piglet is getting dirty”, said by a husband to his wife regarding their child playing in mud (Bezuidenhout 2001), the child is metaphorically a piglet but is literally getting dirty. Similarly, Trewavas (2007) agrees with Alpi et al. (2007) that talk of plant “neurobiology” is a metaphor because plants don’t have neurons, but he defends the utility of the noun metaphor by arguing that the relevant plant structures have similar information-carrying functions as neurons and other brain structures in animals with brains (see also Brenner et al. 2007, p. 413). Verb metaphors are easily created by choosing verbs that, like pirouette, lexicalize object-specific information or select specific arguments, and then pairing them with arguments that pick out different objects than the ones they select for.
Although we use “is a kind of” to refer to set-membership and troponymy relations, they are not the same. Troponymy involves temporal co-extensiveness (pirouette; rotate); activities that are temporally related without troponymy are part-whole (snore; sleep) (Fellbaum 1990). Thus the same activity can be both a superordinate and a part of an activity, which is not true of object kinds: moving is a superordinate of jogging, and a part of jogging (e.g., pushing off with a foot) is also moving. Also, while in principle “troponym” is relative to a level in a semantic hierarchy (as are its customary synonyms “hyponym” or “subordinate”), it is typically used for verbs at level L0 (discussed below). Finally, the once-popular program of organizing verbs by decomposition into semantic atoms (e.g. kill into cause to become not alive) has been overtaken by the semantic organization described here, which takes them as primitive units. Miller and Fellbaum op.cit., pp. 214–215 discuss some reasons for the shift.
Note that the noun hierarchy is of count nouns (e.g., kangaroo), while the verb hierarchy is of mass-like terms (e.g., jumping or jump). Following Crowther (2011), Hornsby (2012) and Steward (2012), these processes or activities are individualized in context as events (e.g., a jump), analogous to bits of stuffs (e.g. a lump of gold).
While Kucera and Frances (op.cit.) remains widely cited, Brysbaert and New (2009) show that the textual sources of words and other corpus features affects word frequency measures. However they do not report different noun/verb frequency proportions or other differences. Fellbaum (1990) reports that the Collins English Dictionary lists 43,636 nouns (averaging 1.74 senses each) and 14,190 verbs (averaging 2.11 senses each).
Using 79 permissible alternations, Levin classified 3,024 verbs (with a total of 4,186 senses) into 48 coarse-grained and 192 fine-grained classes (verbs of motion, communication, etc.) that also exhibit semantic relatedness, including in their possible arguments. VerbNet (http://verbs.colorado.edu/~mpalmer/projects/verbnet.html) expands on Levin’s taxonomy with more verbs, classes, and complementation structures (Fellbaum 1990; Kipper et al. 2008). It has been integrated into the general lexicon WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu), which contains 15 broad verb files grouped by semantic criteria (e.g. verbs of Bodily Functions and Care, Change, Communication, Cognition, Motion, Perception, etc.). In Sect. 3, I discuss research showing that identifying instances of paradigmatic psychological verbs (think, know) requires knowing syntax.
I thank Martha Palmer for alerting me to the need to emphasize that the class of verbs that linguists classify under the label “psychological” is much narrower than the class picked out in folk psychology.
From this perspective, Dennett’s (1981) ascription of wants, rather than craves or covets, to a lectern to provide an Intentional Stance explanation of its immobility is unsurprising. By the same token, scientists also don’t choose any old psychological verb to describe their findings; they choose those verbs that fit the phenomena.
Cruse and Croft’s example—“John and his driver’s license expired last Thursday”—is funnier but the point is the same. Ryle use this feature to illustrate category mistakes.
For example, it is an open possibility that neural populations, rather than individual neurons, are the proper locus for ascriptions of neural preferences (not unlike Ben-Jacob et al.’s (2012) hypothesis that cancer cell communication is a cooperative activity). This would be an empirical revision consistent with Anti-Exceptionalism.
It also seems that they need to not change reference in order to play their roles in sentence organization, object categorization, and metaphor, but I won’t defend this here.
I set aside here numerous debates about concepts, such as whether they are largely stored in long-term memory or constructed in context (e.g., Croft and Cruse 2004), whether they always contain perceptual or modality-specific information (e.g., Barsalou 2005) and whether they have context-independent common core or overlapping lexicalized constituents (e.g., Carston 2012). I am also neutral regarding various theories of concepts (e.g., prototypes, exemplars, and theories), though adopt prototype theory for ease of exposition. For the same reason, I will also adopt a standard, if not universally held, view by which the meaning of a word is the concept it expresses (hence that verbs express activity concepts) and that concepts have a lexicalized (context-independent) core encoded in memory (which may be semantically elaborated in context). The issue of feature overlap (with no single common feature shared by all members of a category) raises the issue of when one has passed from polysemy to homonymy (when a word form has distinct senses, as with “bank”); this is the sort of boundary issue that the ‘zeugma test’ and other similar tests are designed to help adjudicate.
For example, in one test, participants were asked to generate verbs to a sample verb. They found that is-a-manner-of (troponymy) relations between the sample and generated verbs accounted for 25.1 % of the resulting pairs (entailment accounted for another 14.4 % and synonymy for 13.5 %, with the remainder divided among three other relations).
Rifkin (1985) tested whether Rosch’s results could be extended to events, but he used event hierarchies that were not formed by troponymy relations between verbs. He found that subjects listed few features for superordinates (“medical activity”, “hygiene”) and more and similar numbers of features for basic (“surgery”, “shower”) and subordinate (“heart surgery”, “lockerroom shower”) event categories. Pulman (1983) asked participants to list features of activities denoted by verbs at two levels, hyperonym and hyponym, but they often responded by providing synonyms or attempting to give definitions. He found differences in judgments of representativeness among hyponyms in a category (e.g. for walk, stride was most representative, march in the middle, limp least representative among the 8 hyponyms provided; for speak, recite was most, whisper middle, stutter least). Morris and Murphy (1990), using Rifkin’s stimuli, found that subordinate events in the same category (subway travel, travel by school bus) were judged more similar than subordinate objects in the same category (rowboat, sports car) and interpreted this result as suggesting that superordinate event categories (transportation) were more informative. But it equally well suggests that judgments of similarity between events (in their sense) require less information. Murphy and Lassaline (1997) review these and similar studies.
Tranel et al.’s list included few psychological verbs (e.g., denying). Similarly, Fiez and Tranel (op.cit.) selected frequently used verbs (from Kucera and Francis op.cit.) that could easily be depicted in photographs (singly or in before/after pairs) and which reliably elicited 1–3 predominant responses from normal subjects. Few of these verbs were psychological (e.g., interviewing (speaking), looking, yelling, praying, and refusing) even though some psychological verbs (e.g., see, say, think, know) are among the most frequent in a corpus.
As another example, children are said to possess the concept of belief on the basis of ascribing false beliefs to puppets at an age (about 4) when they don’t reliably know that puppets can’t have beliefs—either they’re not sure puppets can’t, or they think puppets could have beliefs by magic (Harris et al. 1991). The restriction barring puppets from literal ascription of believes is not lexicalized in the verb, as is (in contrast) the restriction barring a planet from literal pirouetting.
The informational content in concepts expressed by verbs at different levels of a verb hierarchy remains to be adequately operationalized and measured. However, the idea of an informational difference has been put in terms of a contrast between heavy and light verbs (Brown 2008). Verbs with rich, contextually specific semantics, often incorporating object properties, are heavy. (Heavy nouns may be nouns denoting animate beings (Gentner and Boroditsky 2001, p. 245); proper names may be heaviest of all and therefore atypical of reference in general.) Prototypical light verbs, such as go, do, and get, lexicalize very little, and are often combined with nouns to form contentful wholes (such as go skiing). Feature lists would be a way to operationalize the heavy/light distinction. Fiez and Tranel (op.cit.) designed a test for knowledge of action features in which subjects chose between two pictures of actions to answer 8 comparative attribute questions, such as which action would take longer to complete, make the loudest noise, be most physically tiring, etc.. A corresponding test for semantic knowledge substituted words for pictures. However these tests do not operationalize information differences between superordinate and basic terms.
Rosch et al. (op.cit.) found that categorization of concrete objects is preferred at the basic level. For example, subjects were quicker to identify an object from visual stimuli when primed by basic rather than superordinate or subordinate nouns. Thus, concepts expressed by basic-level nouns contain the optimal amount and kind of information for classification and prediction, and are preferred in many cognitive tasks. In contrast, superordinate verbs appear to be preferred.
Across languages, children find verbs harder to learn than nouns, even though prelinguistic infants are able to distinguish both objects and events, and learn novel actions quicker than either novel nouns or verbs but still learn novel nouns before novel verbs (Gleitman et al. 2005; Childers and Tomasello 2002; Tardif et al. 1999; Gentner and Boroditsky 2001). Verb meaning also varies more than noun meaning, both across contexts and between languages. This semantic flexibility has been suggested to explain the well-known greater polysemy of verbs, as measured by the number of subentries for distinct but related senses in a lexical dictionary (Gentner 1981, p. 169); within-language variability conventionalized as polysemy also affects performance on semantic decision tasks (Brown 2008). Importantly, polysemy is not homonymy (distinct unrelated senses), and can be explained by sameness of reference even if meaning is not (identical to) reference (Rakova 2003). Verb meaning is also more mutable in that we tend to select a verb meaning to fit a relatively fixed noun meaning to obtain overall sense (Gentner 1981). For example, when interpreting the sentence “The crowd was moved by his face”, we are more likely to interpret moved in the emotional sense to fit face rather than interpret face to refer to an object that can change the location of a crowd.
Similarly, Korean has a common verb (kkita) lexicalizing or encoding tightness of fit, cross-cutting the English verbs for putting in and putting on (Bowerman and Choi 2003); Cantonese lexicalizes epistemic status or evidentiality into a verb translatable as falsely-believe, while English uses a separate modifier (Cheung et al. 2009); Tzeltal contains specific eat-verbs for eating different kinds of things: we (eat tortilla or bread), k’ux (eat crunchy things), lo (eat soft things) and ti (eat meat or bite) (Brown 2008). This variability is also psychologically real. Cheung et al. (op. cit., p. 153) found that Cantonese-speaking children exhibited false-belief understanding when the evidential status was lexicalized in the verb, but not if it was conveyed by a separate particle.
References
Alpi, A., Amrhein, M., Bertl, A., Blatt, M., Blumwald, E., Cervone, F., et al. (2007). Plant neurobiology: No brain, no gain? Trends in Plant Sciences, 12(7), 135–136.
Andrews, K. (2009). Politics or Metaphysics? On attributing psychological properties to animals. Biology and Philosophy, 24(1), 51–63.
Andrews, K. (2014). Animal cognition. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 edition). E. Zalta, ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/cognition-animal/.
Barsalou, L. W. (2005). Situated conceptualization. In H. Cohen & C. Lefebvre (Eds.), Handbook of categorization in cognitive science (pp. 619–650). St. Louis: Elsevier.
Bekoff, M., Allen, C., & Burkhardt, G. (2002). The cognitive animal: Empirical and theoretical perspectives on animal cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ben-Jacob, E., Coffey, D., & Levine, H. (2012). Bacterial survival strategies suggest rethinking cancer cooperativity. Trends in Microbiology, 20(9), 403–410.
Bennett, M. R., & Hacker, P. M. S. (2003). Philosophical foundations of neuroscience. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Bennett, M., Dennett, D., Hacker, P., & Searle, J. (2007). Neuroscience & philosophy: Brain, mind, & language. New York: Columbia University Press.
Bermudez, J. L. (2003). Thinking without words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bertenthal, B. I. (1993). Perception of biomechanical motions by infants: Intrinsic image and knowledge-based constraints. In C. Granrud (Ed.), Carnegie symposium on cognition: Visual perception and cognition in infancy (pp. 175–214). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Bezuidenhout, A. (2001). Metaphor and what is said: A defense of a direct-expression view of metaphor. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXV, 156–186.
Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2003). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first-language acquisition. In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 387–427). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brenner, E. D., Stahlberg, R., Mancuso, S., Vivanco, J., Baluška, F., & Von Volkenburgh, E. (2006). Plant neurobiology: An integrated view of plant signaling. Trends in Plant Sciences, 11, 413–419.
Brenner, E. D., Stahlberg, R., Mancuso, S., Baluška, F., & Von Volkenburgh, E. (2007). Reply to Alpi et al.: Plant neurobiology: The gain is more than the name. Trends in Plant Sciences, 12(7), 285–286.
Brown, S. W. (2008). Polysemy in the mental lexicon. Colorado Research in Linguistics, 21, 1–12.
Brown, S. W., & Palmer, M. (2010). What computers need to know about verbs. In P. Sheu, H. Yu, C. V. Ramamoorthy, A. K. Joshi, & L. A. Zadeh (Eds.), Semantic computing (pp. 13–31). New York: Wiley-IEEE Press.
Brysbaert, M., & New, B. (2009). Moving beyond Kucera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior Research Methods, 41(4), 977–990.
Calvo, P., & Keijzer, F. (2009). Cognition in plants. In F. Baluška (Ed.), Plant- environment interactions: Signaling and communication in plants (pp. 247–266). Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Camp, E. (2006). Metaphor in mind: The cognition of metaphor. Philosophy Compass, 1(2), 154–170.
Carston, R. (2012). Metaphor and the literal/nonliteral distinction. In K. Allan & K. Jaczszolt (Eds.), Cambridge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 469–492). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cheung, H., Chen, H.-C., & Yeung, W. (2009). Relations between mental verb and false-belief understanding in cantonese-speaking children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 104, 141–155.
Childers, J. B., & Tomasello, M. (2002). Two-year-olds learn novel nouns, verbs, and conventional actions from massed or distributed exposures. Developmental Psychology, 38(6), 967–978.
Churchland, P. (1981). Eliminative materialism and the propositional attitudes. The Journal of Philosophy, 78(2), 67–90.
Croft, W. A. (2012). Verbs: Aspect and causal structure. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Croft, W. A., & Cruse, D. A. (2004). Cognitive linguistics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Crowther, T. (2011). The matter of events. The Review of Metaphysics, 65, 3–39.
DasGupta, S., Ferreira, C., & Miesenböck, G. (2014). FoxP influences the speed and accuracy of a perceptual decision in Drosophila. Science, 344, 901–904.
Davidson, D. (1975). Thought and talk. In S. Guttenplan (Ed.), Mind and language. New York: Oxford University Press.
Davies, M. (2008). The corpus of contemporary American English: 450 million words, 1990-present. http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.
Dennett, D. (1981). True believers: The intentional strategy and why it works. In A. F. Heath (Ed.), Scientific explanation: Papers based on Herbert Spencer lectures given in the University of Oxford (pp. 150–167). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fellbaum, C. (1990). English verbs as a semantic net. International Journal of Lexicography, 3(4), 278–301.
Fellbaum, C., & Chaffin, R. (1990). Some principles of organization of verbs in the mental lexicon (pp. 420–427). Program of the 12th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Fellbaum, C., & Miller, G. A. (1990). Folk psychology or semantic entailment? A reply to Rips and Conrad (1989). Psychological Review, 97(4), 565–570.
Fiez, J., & Tranel, D. (1997). Standardized stimuli and procedures for investigating the retrieval of lexical and conceptual knowledge for actions. Memory & Cognition, 25(4), 543–569.
Gentner, D. (1981). Some interesting differences between nouns and verbs. Cognition and Brain Theory, 4(2), 161–178.
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In S. Kuczaj (Ed.), Language development: language, cognition, and culture (pp. 301–334). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gentner, D. (2006). Why verbs are hard to learn. In K. Hirsh-Pasek & R. Golinkoff (Eds.), Action meets word: How children learn verbs (pp. 544–564). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gentner, D., & Boroditsky, L. (2001). Individuation, relativity and early word learning. In M. Bowerman & S. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gentner, D., & Boroditsky, L. (2009). Early acquisition of nouns and verbs: Evidence from Nav. In V. C. Mueller Gathercole (Ed.), Routes to language: Essays in honor of Melissa Bowerman (pp. 5–35). New York: Psychology Press.
Gentner, D., & France, I. M. (1988). The verb mutability effect: Studies of the combinatorial semantics of nouns and verbs. In S. L. Small, G. W. Cottrell & M. K. Tanenhaus (Eds.), Lexical ambiguity resolution: Perspective from psycholinguistics, neuropsychology and artificial intelligence (pp. 343–382). San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.
Gleitman, L. R., Cassidy, K., Papafragou, A., Nappa, R., & Trueswell, J. T. (2005). Hard words. Journal of Language Learning and Development, 1, 23–64.
Harris, P., Brown, E., Marriott, C., Whittall, S., & Harmer, S. (1991). Monsters, ghosts, and witches: Testing the limits of the fantasy-reality distinction in young children. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9, 105–123.
Haspelmath, M. (2012). How to compare major word-classes across the world’s languages. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, Theories of Everything, 17(16), 109–130.
Hirsch, E. (1982). The concept of identity. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hirsch, E. (1993). Dividing reality. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hornsby, J. (2012). Actions and activity. Philosophical Issues, 22(1), 233–245.
Horton, M., & Markman, E. (1980). Developmental differences in the acquisition of basic and superordinate categories. Child Development, 51(3), 708–719.
Hubel, D. H., & Wiesel, T. N. (1962). Receptive fields, binocular interaction and functional architecture in the cat’s visual cortex. Journal of Physiology, 160, 106–154.
Izhikevich, E. M. (2007). Dynamical systems in neuroscience: The geometry of excitability and bursting. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Johnson, C. (1997). Metaphor vs. conflation in the acquisition of polysemy: The case of see. In Cultural, psychological, and typological issues in cognitive linguistics (pp. 155–69).
Keeley, B. L. (2004). Anthropomorphism, primatomorphism, mammalomorphism. Philosophy & Biology, 19, 521–540.
Keller, E. F. (1983). Feeling for the organism: The life and work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W.H. Freeman & Co.
Kemmerer, D. (2014). Word classes in the brain: Implications of linguistic typology for cognitive neuroscience. Cortex, 58, 27–51.
Kipper, K., Korhonen, A., Ryant, N., & Palmer, M. (2008). A large-scale classification of English verbs. Language Resources and Evaluation Journal, 42(1), 21–40.
Kucera, H., & Francis, W. (1967). Computational analysis of present-day American English. Providence, RI: Brown University Press.
Levin, B. (1993). English verb classes and alternations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levin, B. (2009). Where verb classes come from. Presentation notes for Verb Typologies Revisited, Ghent, Belgium, Feb 5–7, 2009.
Levin, B. (2012). Manner and result: Implications for Argument realization across languages. Presentation notes for Dusseldorf, July 5, 2012.
Lyon, P. (2006). The biogenic approach to cognition. Cognitive Processing, 7, 11–29.
Markman, E. (1985). Why superordinate category terms can be mass nouns. Cognition, 19(1), 31–53.
Miller, G. A., & Fellbaum, C. (1991). Semantic networks of English. Cognition, 41, 197–229.
Miller, G. A., & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1976). Language and perception. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Morris, M. W., & Murphy, G. L. (1990). Converging operations on a basic level in event taxonomies. Memory & Cognition, 18, 407–418.
Murphy, G. L., & Lassaline, M. E. (1997). Hierarchical structure in concepts and the basic level of categorization. In K. Lamberts & D. Shanks (Eds.), Knowledge, concepts and categories (pp. 93–132). Hove: Psychology Press.
O’Keefe, J., & Dostrovsky, J. (1971). The hippocampus as a spatial map. Preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely-moving rat. Brain Research, 34, 171–175.
ojalehto, B., Waxman, S. R., & Medin, D. L. (2013). Teleological reasoning about nature: Intentional design or relational perspectives? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(4), 166–171.
Pulman, S. G. (1983). Word meaning and belief. London: Croom Helm.
Rakova, M. (2003). The extent of the literal: Metaphor, polysemy and theories of concepts. Houndmills: Palgrave-MacMillan.
Rifkin, A. (1985). Evidence for a basic level in event taxonomies. Memory & Cognition, 13(6), 538–556.
Rips, L. J., & Conrad, F. G. (1989). Folk psychology of mental activities. Psychological Review, 96, 187–207.
Rips, L. J., & Conrad, F. G. (1990). Parts of activities: Reply to Fellbaum and Miller (1990). Psychological Review, 97(4), 571–575.
Roediger, III., Henry, L., Dudai, Y., & Fitzpatrick, S. M. (2007). Science of memory: Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rolls, E. T., Browning, A. S., Inoue, K., & Hernadi, I. (2005). Novel visual stimuli activate a population of neurons in primate orbitofrontal cortex. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 84, 111–123.
Rosch, E. (1973). Natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 328–350.
Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive Representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 104(3), 192–233.
Rosch, E., & Mervis, C. (1975). Family resemblances: Studies in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology, 7, 573–605.
Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson, D. M., & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8, 382–439.
Schwitzgebel, E. (2012). A dispositional approach to the attitudes: Thinking Outside the belief box. (MS).
Slaney, K., & Maraun, M. (2005). Analogy and metaphor running amok: An examination of the use of explanatory devices in neuroscience. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 25(2), 153–172.
Snedeker, J., & Gleitman, L. (2004). Why it is hard to label our concepts. In D. Hall & S. R. Waxman (Eds.), Weaving a lexicon. ambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sober, E. (2005). Comparative psychology meets evolutionary biology: Morgan’s canon and cladistic parsimony. In L. Datson & G. Mitman (Eds.), Thinking with animals: New perspectives on anthropomorphism (pp. 85–99). New York: Columbia University Press.
Stamenkovic, D. (2011). Verbs and prototype theory: State of the art and possibilities. In L. Subotic (Ed.), English studies today: Views and voices (pp. 175–185). Novi Sad: University of Novi Sad.
Steward, H. (2012). Actions as processes. Philosophical Perspectives, 26(1), 373–388.
Stich, S. (1979). Do Animals have beliefs? Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 57(1), 15–28.
Talmy, L. (1975). Semantics and syntax of motion. In J. P. Kimball (Ed.), Syntax and Semantics 4 (pp. 181–238). New York: Academic Press.
Tardif, T., Gelman, R., & Xu, F. (1999). Putting the noun bias in context: A comparison of English and Mandarin. Child Development, 70(3), 620–635.
Tranel, D., Manzel, K., Asp, E., & Kemmerer, D. (2008). Naming dynamic and static actions: Neuropsychological evidence. Journal of Neurophysiology: Paris, 102, 80–94.
Trewavas, A. (2007). Response to Alpi et al.: Plant neurobiology—All metaphors have value. Trends in Plant Science, 12(6), 231–233.
VerbNet (http://verbs.colorado.edu/~mpalmer/projects/verbnet.html).
Wagner, L., & Carey, S. (2003). Individuation of objects and events: A developmental study. Cognition, 90, 163–191.
Wilson, M. (2006). Wandering significance: An essay on conceptual behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wimsatt, W. (2006). Reductionism and its heuristics: Making methodological reductionism honest. Synthese, 151, 445–475.
Wynn, K. (1996). Infants’ individuation and enumeration of actions. Psychological Science, 7(3), 164–169.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank participants in the June 2013 “What is Cognition?” workshop at Ruhr Universitat - Bochum, in partciular Colin Allen, Albert Newen, and co-organizers Cameron Buckner and Ellen Fridland, for helpful responses to my initial attempts at working out some of these issues; and to the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science, in particular John Norton, Jim Bogen, Mazviita Chirimuuta, and my fellow fellows, for further questions and encouragement. I also thank my colleague Evan Fales for providing examples of verbs that refer to very specific activities in rock-climbing and woodworking. I also am deeply grateful to three (I think) anonymous reviewers for detailed critical comments on a previous draft, which led to enormous improvements and clarifications throughout.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Figdor, C. On the proper domain of psychological predicates. Synthese 194, 4289–4310 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0603-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0603-2