Ingar Brinck

An experimental paradigm that purports to test young children’s understanding of social norms is examined. The paradigm models norms on Searle’s notion of a constitutive rule. The experiments and the reasons provided for their design are discussed. It is argued that the experiments do not provide direct evidence about the development of social norms and that the concepts of a social norm and constitutive rule are distinct. The experimental data are re-interpreted, and suggestions for how to deal with the present criticism are presented that do not require abandoning the paradigm as such. Then the conception of normativity that underlies the experimental paradigm is rejected and an alternative view is put forward. It is argued that normativity emerges from interaction and engagement, and that learning to comply with social norms involves understanding the distinction between their content, enforcement, and acceptance. As opposed to rule-based accounts that picture the development of an understanding of social norms as one-directional and based in enforcement, the present view emphasizes that normativity is situated, reciprocal, and interactive

Intentional communication is perceptually based and about attentional objects. Three attention mechanisms are distinguished: scanning, attention attraction, and attention-focusing. Attention-focusing directs the subject towards attentional objects. Attention-focusing is goal-governed (controlled by stimulus) or goal-intended (under the control of the subject). Attentional objects are perceptually categorised functional entities that emerge in the interaction between subjects and environment. Joint attention allows for focusing on the same attentional object simultaneously (mutual object-focused attention), provided that the subjects have focused on each other beforehand (subject-subject attention). It results in intentional communication if the subjects attend to each other as subjects (i) capable of attending, and (ii) attending in a goal-intended way. Intentional communication is fundamentally imperative and adapted to action

We explain metacognition as a management of cognitive resources that does not necessitate algorithmic strategies or metarepresentation. When pragmatic, world-directed actions cannot reduce the distance to the goal, agents engage in epistemic action directed at cognition. Such actions often are physical and involve other people, and so are open to observation. Taking a dynamic systems approach to development, we suggest that implicit and perceptual metacognition emerges from dyadic reciprocal interaction. Early intersubjectivity allows infants to internalize and construct rudimentary strategies for monitoring and control of their own and others’ cognitions by emotion and attention. The functions of initiating, maintaining, and achieving turns make proto-conversation a productive platform for developing metacognition. It enables caregiver and infant to create shared routines for epistemic actions that permit training of metacognitive skills. The adult is of double epistemic use to the infant – as a teacher that comments on and corrects the infant’s efforts, and as the infant’s cognitive resource in its own right

It is argued that the theory of situated cognition together with dynamic systems theory can explain the core of artistic practice and aesthetic experience, and furthermore paves the way for an account of how artist and audience can meet via the artist's work. The production and consumption of art is an embodied practice, firmly based in perception and action, and supported by features of the local, agent-centered and global socio-cultural contexts. Artistic creativity and aesthetic experience equally result from the dynamic interplay between agent and context, allowing for artist and viewer to relate to the artist's work in similar ways.

We trace the difference between the ways in which apes and humans co–operate to differences in communicative abilities, claiming that the pressure for future–directed co–operation was a major force behind the evolution of language. Competitive co–operation concerns goals that are present in the environment and have stable values. It relies on either signalling or joint attention. Future–directed co–operation concerns new goals that lack fixed values. It requires symbolic communication and context–independent representations of means and goals. We analyse these ways of co–operating in game–theoretic terms and submit that the co–operative strategy of games that involve shared representations of future goals may provide new equilibrium solutions.

A recent version of the view that aesthetic experience is based in empathy as inner imitation explains aesthetic experience as the automatic simulation of actions, emotions, and bodily sensations depicted in an artwork by motor neurons in the brain. Criticizing the simulation theory for committing to an erroneous concept of empathy and failing to distinguish regular from aesthetic experiences of art, I advance an alternative, dynamic approach and claim that aesthetic experience is enacted and skillful, based in the recognition of others’ experiences as distinct from one’s own. In combining insights from mainly psychology, phenomenology, and cognitive science, the dynamic approach aims to explain the emergence of aesthetic experience in terms of the reciprocal interaction between viewer and artwork. I argue that aesthetic experience emerges by participatory sense-making and revolves around movement as a means for creating meaning. While entrainment merely plays a preparatory part in this, aesthetic engagement constitutes the phenomenological side of coupling to an artwork and provides the context for exploration, and eventually for moving, seeing, and feeling with art. I submit that aesthetic experience emerges from bodily and emotional engagement with works of art via the complementary processes of the perception–action and motion–emotion loops. The former involves the embodied visual exploration of an artwork in physical space, and progressively structures and organizes visual experience by way of perceptual feedback from body movements made in response to the artwork. The latter concerns the movement qualities and shapes of implicit and explicit bodily responses to an artwork that cue emotion and thereby modulate over-all affect and attitude. The two processes cause the viewer to bodily and emotionally move with and be moved by individual works of art, and consequently to recognize another psychological orientation than her own, which explains how art can cause feelings of insight or awe and disclose aspects of life that are unfamiliar or novel to the viewer.

How should the development of creativity be approached? Many accounts of children’s creativity focus on the relation between creativity and pretend play, placing make-believe and the mental exploration of possible scenarios about the world at the fore. Often divergent thinking and story-telling are used to measure creativity with fluency, originality, and flexibility as indicators. I will argue that the strong focus on conceptual processes and higher-order thought leaves procedural forms of creativity in the dark and hinders a proper investigation of the development of creativity. Creativity involves both strategic and procedural elements and the mental and physical manipulation of ideas are equally important. Sahlin’s notion of rule-based creativity might serve as the starting-point for an approach to the development of creativity that is neutral as to the underlying nature of creativity and that permits investigating creativity independently of language. On this approach, creativity is characterized by the violation and subsequent replacement of a rule or norm that underlies a given activity with a novel strategy or procedure. When, where, and how children will manifest creativity is conditional on the kind of rule or norm that is violated

The first part of the article examines some recent studies on the early development of social norms that examine young children’s understanding of codified rule games. It is argued that the constitutive rules than define the games cannot be identified with social norms and therefore the studies provide limited evidence about socio-normative development. The second part reviews data on children’s play in natural settings that show that children do not understand norms as codified or rules of obligation, and that the norms that guide social interaction are dynamic, situated, and heterogeneous. It is argued that normativity is intersubjective and negotiable and starts to develop in the first year, emerging as a practical skill that depends on participatory engagement. Three sources of compliance are discussed: emotional engagement, nonverbal agreement, and conversation

Several conditions for being an intrinsically intentional agent are put forward. On a first level of intentionality the agent has representations. Two kinds are described: cued and detached. An agent with both kinds is able to represent both what is prompted by the context and what is absent from it. An intermediate level of intentionality is achieved by having an inner world, that is, a coherent system of detached representations that model the world. The inner world is used, e.g., for conditional and counterfactual thinking. Contextual or indexical representations are necessary in order that the inner world relates to the actual external world and thus can be used as a basis for action. To have full-blown intentionality, the agent should also have a detached self-awareness, that is, be able to entertain self-representations that are independent of the context

The subject of this book is the first person in thought and language. The main question concerns what we mean when we say 'J'. Related to it are questions about what kinds of self-consciousness and self-knowledge are needed in order for us to have the capacity to talk about ourselves. The emphasis is on theories of meaning and reference for 'J', but a fair amount of space is devoted to 'I' -thoughts and the role of the concept of the self in cognition. The purpose is to give a picture of how we think and talk about ourselves in a wide range of circumstances. The topic has been discussed in numerous articles during the last decades, but rarely in the form of a monograph. I felt the need for a book of this kind while working on my dissertation. The manuscript is the result of many years of reflection on the self and indexicals. Some of the theories that I advance have developed as a result of my teaching an undergraduate course in the philosophy of language the last couple of years.

By describing the aim of triangulation as locating the objects of thoughts and utterances, Davidson has given in the double role of accounting for both the individuation of content and the sense in which content necessarily is public. The focus of this article is on how triangulation may contribute to the individuation of content. I maintain that triangulation, interpreted in terms of joint attention, may serve to break into the intentional circle of meaning and belief, yet without forcing us to renounce the claims concerning the interdependence of meaning and belief and the irreducibility of meaning.

[1] To know who one is, and also know whether one's experiences really belong to oneself, do not normally present any problem. It nevertheless happens that people do not recognise themselves as they walk by a mirror or do not understand that they fit some particular description. But there are situations in which it really seems impossible to be wrong about oneself. Of that, Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote: " It is possible that, say in an accident, I should feel pain in my arm, see a broken arm at my side, and think it is mine, when really it is my neighbour's. And I could, looking into a mirror, mistake a bump on his forehead for one on mine. On the other hand there is no question of recognising a person when I say I have toothache.... it is as impossible that in making the statement "I have toothache" I should have mistaken another person for myself, as it is to moan with pain by mistake, having mistaken someone else for me. " In the passage in which this remark is found, Wittgenstein distinguishes between two kinds of use of "I". The first use, as object, as in "I have broken my arm" or "The wind is blowing in my hair", he holds, involves the recognition of a particular person, and there is the possibility of error as concerns the identity of the person. In the other use, as subject, as in "I think it will rain" or "I am trying to lift my arm", no person is recognised. No mistake can be made about who the subject is

Recently, it has been suggested that at least somekinds of mental representation are strongly context-dependent. Not only what is represented, but also how, depends on the context and the subject's interaction with it. Theories about situated cognition stress the importance of the subject's bodily presence and physical activity in the environment for representing and thinking. What does this mean for creativity? Context-dependence can, it seems, both impede and support creativity. Is creativity a higher-level cognitive function, or does it mainly rely on good old-fashioned know-how?

Taking a psychological and philosophical outlook, we approach making as an embodied and embedded skill via the skilled artisan’s experience of having a corporeal, nonlinguistic dialogue with the material while working with it. We investigate the dynamic relation between maker and material through the lens of pottery as illustrated by wheel throwing, claiming that the experience of dialogue signals an emotional involvement with clay. The examination of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of habit, the skilled intentionality framework, and material engagement theory shows that while these theories explain complementary aspects of skillful engagement with the material world, they do not consider the dialogic dimension. By way of explanation, we submit that the artisan’s emotional engagement with the material world is based in openness and recognition and involves dialogue with the material. Drawing on the intimate relationship between movement and emotion, it promotes an open-ended manner of working and permits experiencing with the material, acting into its inherent possibilities. In conclusion, we suggest that dialogue, whether verbal or nonverbal, constitutes a primary means for making sense of the world at large, animate and inanimate.

The present account explains (i) which elements of nonverbal reference are intersubjective, (ii) what major effects intersubjectivity has on the general development of intentional communication and at what stages, and (iii) how intersubjectivity contributes to triggering the general capacity for nonverbal reference in the second year of life. First, intersubjectivity is analysed in terms of a sharing of experiences that is either mutual or individual, and either dyadic or triadic. Then it is shown that nonverbal reference presupposes intersubjectivity in communicative intent indicating and referential behaviour, and indirectly in modifications of previous behaviour in response to communication failure. It is argued that different forms of intersubjectivity entail different types of communicative skills. A comprehensive analysis of data on gaze-related intersubjective behaviour in young infants shows that interaffectivity and interattentionality enable referential skills early in development and together allow for complex behaviour. Early referential skills, it is proposed, arise by other mechanisms than in nonverbal reference. Reliable and consistent use of nonverbal reference occurs when interaffectivity and interattentionality coalesce with interintentionality, which affords general cognitive skills that together permit a decontextualisation of communicative behaviour.

In an experimental study of humans reactions to social motor intention in a humanoid robot, we showed that SMI cause the emergence of social interaction between human and robot. We investigated whether people would respond differently to a humanoid robot depending on the kinematic profile of its movement. A robot placed a block on a table in front of a human subject in three different ways. We designed the robot’s arm and upper body movements to manifest the human kinematic profile of either a non-social motor intention or a social motor intention. In the control condition the robot performed an irregular movements. Once the robot had finished its task, the task of the human was to place another block on top of the first one. We distinguishedbetween social and non-social responses to the robot’s behavior based in gaze behavior and kinematic profile of the human’s arm movement during the task. Our results show that the behavior of the human can be modulated by the kinematics of a robot’s motor action. In several cases the participants reciprocated movements displaying social motor intention with movements with a similar kind of kinematics, attempting to make eye contact during the task. This shows that HRI can emerge implicitly by sensorimotor processing and suggests that implementing a mechanism for social-motor intention in social robots designed to interact spontaneously would be useful.