Mental Misrepresentation in Non-human Psychopathology

In this paper, we defend a representational approach to at least some kinds of non-human psychopathology. Mentally-ill non-human minds, in particular in delusions, obsessive-compulsive disorders and similar cognitive states, are traditionally understood in purely behavioral terms. In contrast, we argue that non-human mental psychopathology should be at least sometimes not only ascribed contentful mental representation but also understood as really having these states. To defend this view, we appeal to the interactivist account of mental representation, which is a kind of a constructive approach to meaning. We follow Mark Bickhard in assuming that only an organism – either human or non-human – capable of detecting its own misrepresentations is representational. However, under his autonomy-based account of biological function these minds are incapable of misrepresentations because these minds are, ex hypothesi, unable to detect error in such representations. To solve this problem, we argue that adding a historical dimension – as in Millikan’s view on mental representations – to Bickhard’s account of function makes mental misrepresentation of mentally-ill minds possible. Using Bickhard’s dynamic account of function, it is possible to explain why delusions and other mental disorders can be seen as locally functional. However, an etiological dimension can further explain why misrepresentations seem to be globally dysfunctional. Even if representational or biosemiotic hypotheses about non-human psychopathology are difficult to confirm empirically, we defend the view that they can enrich our understanding of the causes and development of such pathologies, and may constitute a new progressive research programme.     

Impact of professional learning on teachers’ representational strategies and students’ cognitive engagement with molecular genetics concepts

A variety of practices and specialised representational systems are required to understand, communicate and construct molecular genetics knowledge. This study describes teachers’ use of multimodal representations of molecular genetics concepts and how their strategies and choice of resources were interpreted, understood and used by students to demonstrate their conceptual understanding. Recordings of teachers’ and students’ discourse around representations, teacher interviews and student pre- and post-tests were used as data sources. Vignettes of students’ dialogue with teachers around the form and function of representations and teacher interview responses highlight higher order conceptual understanding. Coding for cognitive domains within lesson phases where different modes of representation were utilised showed classrooms operated at higher domains compared to lessons where modalities were absent. This study shows how pedagogy that focuses on representational form and function as well as students’ engagement in critical discussion around affordances and constraints of representations results in a higher cognitive engagement with molecular genetics knowledge.     

A lost cause? Fundamental problems for causal theories of parenthood

In this paper, I offer a critique of (actual and possible) causal theories of parenthood. I do not offer a competing account of who incurs parental obligations and why; rather, I aim to show that there are fundamental problems for any account of who acquires parental obligations and why by appeal to causal responsibility for a child’s existence. I outline and justify three criteria that any plausible causal account of parental obligation must meet, and demonstrate that attempting to fulfil all three criteria simultaneously will give rise to one or both of two potentially insurmountable dilemmas.     

Espaces de représentation et psychopathologie

A subjective world can be conceptualized as a “representational space” — that is, as a universe displayed from memory, in which the subject “is sailing”. Recent cognitive theory provides some conceptual tools for describing such a space in a relevant way for clinical purposes. The construction of a representational space is based on mental representations: (a) analogical representations, which display a content in working memory; (b) symbolic representations, which code and link up analogical representations to form a represented world. The dynamics of representations and affects is ruled by a principle of unification of representational space. The topology of a representational space depends on objective and subjective constraints which cause some “folds” and limit the display of such a space. The interaction between an event and a subjective memory can be analyzed within this framework, so that the concepts of trauma and defence processes can be defined. Clinical syndromes are defensive configurations that tend to close the representational space.     

The stem cell—Chromatin connection

Stem cells self-renew and give rise to all differentiated cell types of the adult body. They are classified as toti-, pluri- or multi-potent based on the number of different cell types they can give rise to. Recently it has become apparent that chromatin regulation plays a critical role in determining the fate of stem cells and their descendants. In this review we will discuss the role of chromatin regulators in maintenance of stem cells and their ability to give rise to differentiating cells in both the animal and plant kingdom. We will highlight similarities and differences in chromatin-mediated control of stem cell fate in plants and animals. We will consider possible reasons why chromatin regulators play a central role in pluripotency in both kingdoms given that multicellularity evolved independently in each.     

How calcium may cause exocytosis in sea urchin eggs

The process of secretory granule-plasma membrane fusion can be studied in sea urchin eggs. Micromolar calcium concentrations are all that is required to bring about exocytosisin vitro. I discuss recent experiments with sea urchin eggs that concentrate on the biophysical aspects of granule-membrane fusion. The backbone of biological membranes is the lipid bilayer. Sea urchin egg membrane lipids have negatively charged head groups that give rise to an electrical potential at the bilayer-water interface. We have found that this surface potential can affect the calcium required for exocytosis. Effects on the surface potential may also explain why drugs like trifluoperazine and tetracaine inhibit exocytosis: they absorb to the bilayer and reduce the surface potential. The membrane lipids may also be crucial to the formation of the exocytotic pore through which the secretory granule contents are released. We have measured calcium-induced production of the lipid, diacylglycerol. This lipid can induce a phase transition that will promote fusion of apposed lipid bilayers. The process of exocytosis involves the secretory granule core as well as the lipids of the membrane. The osmotic properties of the granule contents lead to swelling of the granule during exocytosis. Swelling promotes the dispersal of the contents as they are extruded through the exocytotic pore. The movements of water and ions during exocytosis may also stabilize the transient fusion intermediate and consolidate the exocytotic pore as fusion occurs.     

Autopoiesis, Life, Mind and Cognition: Bases for a Proper Naturalistic Continuity

The strong version of the life-mind continuity thesis claims that mind can be understood as an enriched version of the same functional and organizational properties of life. Contrary to this view, in this paper I argue that mental phenomena offer distinctive properties, such as intentionality or representational content, that have no counterpart in the phenomenon of life, and that must be explained by appealing to a different level of functional and organizational principles. As a strategy, and following Maturana’s autopoietic theory of cognition, I introduce a conceptual distinction between mind and cognition. I argue that cognition corresponds to the natural behaviour that every living being exhibits in the realization of its existence, and that, viewed in that way, cognition is a dynamic process of structural coupling that, unlike mental phenomena, involves no representational contents. On the basis of this distinction, I try to show that while life suffices for cognition, it does not suffice for mind. That is, that the strong continuity is not between life and mind but between life and cognition.     

Deep Supervised,but Not Unsupervised,Models May Explain IT Cortical Representation

Inferior temporal (IT) cortex in human and nonhuman primates serves visual object recognition. Computational object-vision models, although continually improving, do not yet reach human performance. It is unclear to what extent the internal representations of computational models can explain the IT representation. Here we investigate a wide range of computational model representations (37 in total), testing their categorization performance and their ability to account for the IT representational geometry. The models include well-known neuroscientific object-recognition models (e.g. HMAX, VisNet) along with several models from computer vision (e.g. SIFT, GIST, self-similarity features, and a deep convolutional neural network). We compared the representational dissimilarity matrices (RDMs) of the model representations with the RDMs obtained from human IT (measured with fMRI) and monkey IT (measured with cell recording) for the same set of stimuli (not used in training the models). Better performing models were more similar to IT in that they showed greater clustering of representational patterns by category. In addition, better performing models also more strongly resembled IT in terms of their within-category representational dissimilarities. Representational geometries were significantly correlated between IT and many of the models. However, the categorical clustering observed in IT was largely unexplained by the unsupervised models. The deep convolutional network, which was trained by supervision with over a million category-labeled images, reached the highest categorization performance and also best explained IT, although it did not fully explain the IT data. Combining the features of this model with appropriate weights and adding linear combinations that maximize the margin between animate and inanimate objects and between faces and other objects yielded a representation that fully explained our IT data. Overall, our results suggest that explaining IT requires computational features trained through supervised learning to emphasize the behaviorally important categorical divisions prominently reflected in IT.     

Skin colour and race as analytic concepts

White working-class people have been portrayed in the media and political discourse as unable to keep pace with the demands associated with living in multicultural Britain. In this article, I shall challenge such representations of white working-class people's attitudes towards racialized ‘others’. To do this I explore the views of the members of a white working-class family to the changing racial composition of their once ethnically homogenous council estate (municipal housing). My ethnographic attention is directed to the connections, affective ties and emotional investments that the members of this family have with the estate and its community, and the ways in which BrAsians become configured in these narratives of belonging. I will show how analytical attention to the connections and attachments that white working-class people form with those whom they identify as ethnic and racial ‘others’ provides an account of white working-class identities that undermines popular representations of ‘them’.     

The Altyerre Story—‘Suffering Badly by Translation’

In culture‐contact situations, it is commonplace for words to be borrowed from other unrelated vernaculars, for their pronunciations to be changed, and their meanings modified to fit new contexts. The Arandic word altyerre is a rather extreme example of this, and at the end of the nineteenth century, the ‘translation’ of the related word Alcheringa as ‘dream‐times’ sparked a debate that, in some forms, continues to this day. In this article, I discuss some of the reasons why this particular word struck such a controversial chord. I give an updated semantic perspective on the word altyerre , drawing on evidence from Arandic languages and from other languages in Central Australia. Then I examine some of the consequences of both religious and secular interpretations of altyerre and show how the popularisation of this word and its translations has impacted on its meanings in current usage.     

Stem cells as probabilistic self-producing entities

Stem cells have the capacity both to self-renew and to give rise to differentiated progeny, and are vital to the organization of multicellular organisms. Stem cells raise a number of fundamental questions regarding lineage restriction and cellular differentiation, and they hold enormous promise for cell-based therapies. Here I propose a theoretical framework for stem cell biology based on the concepts of autopoiesis (self-production) and complementarity. I argue that stem cells are pivotal in the self-production of the organism and that we need complementary approaches to understand their probabilistic behavior. I discuss how this framework generates testable hypotheses regarding stem-cell functions.     

Consciousness and the structure of neuronal representations.

The hypothesis is defended that brains expressing phenomenal awareness are capable of generating metarepresentations of their cognitive processes, these metarepresentations resulting from an iteration of self-similar cortical operations. Search for the neuronal substrate of awareness therefore converges with the search for the nature of neuronal representations. It is proposed that evolved brains use two complementary representational strategies. One consists of the generation of neurons responding selectively to a particular constellation of features and is based on selective recombination of inputs in hierarchically structured feedforward architectures. The other relies on the dynamic association of feature-specific cells into functionally coherent cell assemblies that, as a whole, represent the constellation of features defining a particular perceptual object. Arguments are presented that favour the notion that the metarepresentations supporting awareness are established in accordance with the second strategy. Experimental data are reviewed that are compatible with the hypothesis that evolved brains use assembly codes for the representation of contents and that these assemblies become organized through transient synchronization of the discharges of associated neurons. It is argued that central states favouring the formation of assembly-based representations are similar to those favouring awareness.     

Representation in the genome and in other inheritance systems

There is ongoing controversy as to whether the genome is a representing system (Sterelny K., Smith K.C. and Dickson M. 1996. Biol. Philos. 11: 377–403; Griffiths P.E. 2001. Philos. Sci. 68: 394–412). Although it is widely recognised that DNA carries information, both correlating with and coding for various outcomes, neither of these implies that the genome has semantic properties like correctness or satisfaction conditions (Godfrey-Smith P. 2002. In: Wolenski J. and Kajania-Placek K. (eds), In the Scope of Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Sciences, Vol. II. Kluwer, Dordrecht, pp. 387–400). Here a modified version of teleosemantics is applied to the genome to show that it does indeed have semantic properties – there is representation in the genome. The account differs in three respects from previous attempts to apply teleosemantics to genes. It emphasises the role of the consumer of representations (in addition to their mode of production). It rejects the standard assumption that genetic representation can be used to explain the course of an organism’s development. And it identifies the explanatory role played by representational properties of the genome. A striking consequence of this account is that other inheritance systems could also be representational. Thus, a version of the parity thesis is accepted (Griffiths P.E. 2001. Philos. Sci. 68: 394–412). However, the criteria for being an inheritance system are demanding, so semantic properties are not ubiquitous.     

Modelling the flow of cytometric data obtained from unperturbed human tumour cell lines: Parameter fitting and comparison

In this paper we firstly present three alternative formulations of a mathematical model for human tumour cell lines unperturbed by cancer therapy. The model counts the number density of cells in each phase of the cell cycle over time where cells are differentiated by their DNA content. Data are available from the Auckland Cancer Society Research Centre, Auckland, New Zealand, in the form of DNA histograms or profiles from 11 different human tumour cell lines (i.e. in vitro) unperturbed by cancer therapy. We then apply one (computationally fast) formulation of the model and discover that although in general different combinations of parameter values give rise to very different DNA profiles it is possible that different combinations of parameter values give rise to virtually identical profiles. Experimental estimates of the rate of transition from the G ₁-phase (growth) to the S-phase (DNA synthesis) enable us to uniquely determine other model parameters of interest that give the least square error between the model and data. We finally apply our model to each of the 11 different cell lines and compare cell cycle phase transit times. Although the DNA histograms of each of the cell lines have similar shapes these cell lines have different combinations of transit times to each other, which could explain why they often react very differently when exposed to anti-cancer therapies during laboratory experiments. An understanding of the in vitro situation may give an insight into why some human cancer patients do not respond to cancer therapy. An erratum to this article is available at .     

Post-war settlements and the production of new illegalities: the case of Dayton and people trafficking and prostitution in Bosnia and Herzegovina

This article charts the rise of people smuggling, trafficking and prostitution in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, and also goes on to point to their transformation in the post-post-war era into ‘cottage’ industries. I argue that the conditions of possibility for their existence are rooted in contradictions inherent in the Dayton Peace Agreement that brought to an end the war of Yugoslav succession. In particular, borrowing Auge’s concept of non-places, I argue that village life has been characterised increasingly by the multiplication of human mobility, the emergence of new forms of inter-ethnic clientship and social relations of estrangement, each of which may enable the industries to thrive. Above all, they are likely to render ineffective the Bosnian state’s attempts at incorporating the public, particularly in rural areas, into the surveillance and detection of people smuggling, trafficking and prostitution.     

The adaptive importance of cognitive efficiency: an alternative theory of why we have beliefs and desires

Finding out why we have beliefs and desires is important for a thorough understanding of the nature of our minds (and those of other animals). It is therefore unsurprising that several accounts have been presented that are meant to answer this question. At least in the philosophical literature, the most widely accepted of these are due to Kim Sterelny and Peter Godfrey-Smith, who argue that beliefs and desires evolved due to their enabling us to be behaviourally flexible in a way that reflexes do not—which, they claim, is beneficial in epistemically complex environments. However, as I try to make clear in this paper, upon closer consideration, this kind of account turns out to be theoretically implausible. In the main, this is because it fails to give due credit to the powers of reflex-driven organisms, which can in fact be just as flexible in their behaviour as ones that are belief/desire-driven. In order to improve on this account, I therefore propose that beliefs and desires evolved, not due to their enabling us to do something completely different from what reflexive organisms can do, but rather due to their enabling us to do the same things better. Specifically, I argue that beliefs and desires evolved for making the generation of behaviour more efficient, since they can simplify the necessary cognitive labour considerably. I end by considering various implications of this account.     

Explanation in Two Dimensions: Diagrams and Biological Explanation

Molecular biologists and biochemists often use diagrams to present hypotheses. Analysis of diagrams shows that their content can be expressed with linguistic representations. Why do biologists use visual representations instead? One reason is simple comprehensibility: some diagrams present information which is readily understood from the diagram format, but which would not be comprehensible if the same information was expressed linguistically. But often diagrams are used even when concise, comprehensible linguistic alternatives are available. I explain this phenomenon by showing why diagrammatic representation is especially well suited for a particular kind of explanation common in molecular biology and biochemistry: namely, functional analysis, in which a capacity of the system is explained in terms of capacities of its component parts.     

Wild justice and fair play: cooperation,forgiveness, and morality in animals

In this paper I argue that we can learn much about ‘wild justice’ and the evolutionary origins of social morality – behaving fairly – by studying social play behavior in group-living animals, and that interdisciplinary cooperation will help immensely. In our efforts to learn more about the evolution of morality we need to broaden our comparative research to include animals other than non-human primates. If one is a good Darwinian, it is premature to claim that only humans can be empathic and moral beings. By asking the question ‘What is it like to be another animal?’ we can discover rules of engagement that guide animals in their social encounters. When I study dogs, for example, I try to be a ‘dogocentrist’ and practice ‘dogomorphism.’ My major arguments center on the following ‘big’ questions: Can animals be moral beings or do they merely act as if they are? What are the evolutionary roots of cooperation, fairness, trust, forgiveness, and morality? What do animals do when they engage in social play? How do animals negotiate agreements to cooperate, to forgive, to behave fairly, to develop trust? Can animals forgive? Why cooperate and play fairly? Why did play evolve as it has? Does ‘being fair’ mean being more fit – do individual variations in play influence an individual's reproductive fitness, are more virtuous individuals more fit than less virtuous individuals? What is the taxonomic distribution of cognitive skills and emotional capacities necessary for individuals to be able to behave fairly, to empathize, to behave morally? Can we use information about moral behavior in animals to help us understand ourselves? I conclude that there is strong selection for cooperative fair play in which individuals establish and maintain a social contract to play because there are mutual benefits when individuals adopt this strategy and group stability may be also be fostered. Numerous mechanisms have evolved to facilitate the initiation and maintenance of social play to keep others engaged, so that agreeing to play fairly and the resulting benefits of doing so can be readily achieved. I also claim that the ability to make accurate predictions about what an individual is likely to do in a given social situation is a useful litmus test for explaining what might be happening in an individual's brain during social encounters, and that intentional or representational explanations are often important for making these predictions.     

Dynamics of sex ratio and female unmatedness under haplodiploidy

Haplodiploid sex determination allows unmated females to produce sons. Consequently, a scarcity of males may lead to a significant proportion of females remaining unmated, which may in turn give rise to a surfeit of males in the following generation. Stable oscillation of the sex ratio has been predicted by classic models, and it remains a puzzle as to why this is not observed in natural populations. Here, I investigate the dynamics of sex allocation over ecological and evolutionary timescales to assess the potential for sustained oscillation. I find that, whilst stable oscillation of the sex ratio is possible, the scope for such dynamical behavior is reduced if sex allocation strategies are evolutionary labile, especially if mated females may facultatively adjust their sex allocation according to the present availability of mating partners. My model, taken together with empirical estimates of female unmatedness in haplodiploid taxa, suggests that sustained oscillation of the sex ratio is implausible in natural populations. However, this phenomenon may be relevant to artificially introduced biological control agents.     

A word in the hand: action, gesture and mental representation in humans and non-human primates

The movements we make with our hands both reflect our mental processes and help to shape them. Our actions and gestures can affect our mental representations of actions and objects. In this paper, we explore the relationship between action, gesture and thought in both humans and non-human primates and discuss its role in the evolution of language. Human gesture (specifically representational gesture) may provide a unique link between action and mental representation. It is kinaesthetically close to action and is, at the same time, symbolic. Non-human primates use gesture frequently to communicate, and do so flexibly. However, their gestures mainly resemble incomplete actions and lack the representational elements that characterize much of human gesture. Differences in the mirror neuron system provide a potential explanation for non-human primates' lack of representational gestures; the monkey mirror system does not respond to representational gestures, while the human system does. In humans, gesture grounds mental representation in action, but there is no evidence for this link in other primates. We argue that gesture played an important role in the transition to symbolic thought and language in human evolution, following a cognitive leap that allowed gesture to incorporate representational elements.