Lecture II. The Origin of Concepts: Logical connectives and abstract relations
Prof Carey Susan (Harvard University)

part of: Petrus Hispanus Lectures 2014
May 29, 2014, 11:00am - 1:00pm
LanCog Group, Philosophy Centre, University of Lisbon

Anfiteatro III FLUL, Anfiteatro FPUL
Alameda da Universidade
Lisbon 1600-214
Portugal

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Sponsor(s):

  • FCT, Faculdade de Psicologia da Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

Organisers:

Branquinho João
University of Lisbon

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Lecture II.  The Origin of Concepts:  Logical connectives and abstract relations
29 May 2014, 15:00
Faculty of Psychology, University of Lisbon
Abstract: In lecture I I argue for innate domain specific systems of representations, systems of core cognition, illustrating with two such systems with numerical content.  Systems of core cognition are perception like in many ways:  the format of representation is most likely iconic, and entity identification is supported by innate perceptual analyzers.  The existence of systems of core cognition, so specified, does not preclude the existence of innate representations with different properties.  
Here I consider what form innate support for logic might take.  Logical connectives (or, not…) and symbols for abstract relations (e.g., same) are not likely to be iconic in format nor perception like in any way.  At issue is whether non-linguistic animals, and/or prelinguistic human infants, have a logic-like, language-like, Language of Thought, capable of propositional representations formulated over discrete arbitrary symbols.  I will present the progress we have made on addressing this question around two case studies:  reasoning according to the disjunctive syllogism (A or B, not A, therefore B) and representations of the abstract relations same and different.

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