***Apologies for multiple postings***

Reminder of the Cognitive Area Seminar this week:

The Elephant Outside the Room, or the Hard Problem of Representations: Toward an Eco-Semiotic Account of the Ontogeny of Affordances in Social Learning. Samuel Veissière McGill University (see below for abstract)

Friday, November 13th, 15h30-17h00 Stewart Biology Building, S 3/4

Please forward this message to your students and other interested parties. Thanks,

Esther

Full Info on Dr. Veissière's talk: The Elephant Outside the Room, or the Hard Problem of Representations:

Toward an Eco-Semiotic Account of the Ontogeny of Affordances in Social Learning.

The combined efforts of developmental psychology, the philosophy of mind, and anthropology (particularly linguistic and cognitive anthropology) have greatly advanced our understanding of the invariant features of human cognition that give rise to language, culture, and the manipulation of symbols in phylogeny and ontogeny. But our accounts of the ontological and epistemological status of representations (what they are, and how they are learned) in the so-called symbol-grounding problem rely on just-so stories.

We know that joint intentionality in social learning enables neurotypical humans to navigate complex semiotic worlds by inferring conventionally and situationally appropriate responses to implicitly rule-governed contexts. But we don't know how those implicit cultural grammars are learned, and we don't know what they are. We know that there are, in Sperber's terms, widely shared and durable epidemics of unrepresented beliefs. Thus, we know that human children across cultures acquire implicit group biases that often differ from their caregivers' and educators' reflective beliefs, but are consistent with the dominant ideologies found in their culture at large (e.g., both non-minority and minority children in North America express preference for non-minority phenotypes). While different theories of social cognition have sought to shed light on these mechanisms, they have remained silent on the onto-epistemic status of representations. Thus, in their critique of theory-theory and simulation accounts of mindreading, enactivists claim that representations are grounded in largely automatic, embodied and affective responses learned through imitation and enacted in context. The recent predictive coding account, in turn, offers that human brains generate models of the world by inferring and extrapolating from past experience. But these models shed no light on what it is that brains, bodies, and modes of affect are responding to or predicting. What, after all, are representations, when most of 'them' cannot be pointed to, verbalized, or consciously accessed by humans?

In this talk, I propose an ontologically pluralist account of the ontogeny of representations that draws on multi-system theories of social cognition, ecological and phenomenological approaches to perception, Peircian semiotics, and language socialization paradigms in the ethnographic study of language acquisition. Theorizing public representations as affordances stabilized in ontogeny, I propose to differentiate between iconic (first order), indexical (second-order), and symbolic (third order) affordances that require inferences from different forms of perspective-taking, and argue that symbolic representations are successfully learned when they acquire near-iconic affordance status through recursivity.

I conclude with notes and queries for a mixed-method approach to the study of representations in social learning.

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