Cognitive Systems Research

The discovery of mirror neurons has given rise to a number of interpretations of their functions together with speculations on their potential role in the evolution of specifically human capacities. Thus, mirror neurons have been thought to ground many ...

Young children's pretend play is considered in the context of the development of collective intentionality. It is argued that (i) early pretending is an essentially social and culturally acquired form of action, and (ii) early social pretend play can be ...

This research is concerned with the innate predispositions underlying human intentional communication. Human communication is currently defined as a circular and overt attempt to modify a partner's mental states. This requires each party involved to ...

Although the notion of collective intentionality has received considerable attention over the past decade, accounts of collective belief and intention remain individualistic. Most accounts analyze group intentional states in terms of a complex set of ...

Some types of species exploit the external environment to support their cognitive processes, in the sense of patterns created in the environment that function as external mental states and serve as an extension to their mind. In the case of social ...

In natural language dialogue, the way a responder 'takes up' the initiative of a participant, largely influences the further course of the dialogue. This uptake mechanism can be understood as a negotiation at a meta level: an initiative counts as a bid ...

This paper presents a methodology for the analysis of the entities which the discourse on collective intentionality usually refers to. We aim, in particular, at characterizing the notion of intentional collective. Based on reviews of the relevant ...

In this paper, a formal theoretical analysis of the notion of collective autonomy is proposed. Collective agents are defined as multi-agent strategies for goals not necessarily shared by the agents that are interdependent in achieving them. Two ...

Synthesizing existing work from diverse disciplines, this paper introduces a culture-gene coevolutionary approach to human behavior and psychology, and applies it to the evolution of cooperation. After a general discussion of cooperation in humans, this ...

This paper aims to reconcile radical anti-individualism about people, according to which people are dynamic products of social dynamics, with neoclassical economic formalism and standard evolutionary game theory. The point of doing so is to face ...

An adequate formulation of collective intentionality is crucial for understanding group activity and for modeling the mental state of participants in such activities. Although work on collective intentionality in philosophy, artificial intelligence, and ...

Social obligations are typical external reasons for action. In this paper two notions of reason for action are distinguished: a reason for the agent and the agent's reason. The focus will be on the latter notion. It deals with the agent's own ...

Group beliefs, or collective doxastic states, are states analogous to beliefs but attributed to groups instead of individuals. In this paper, existing views on the nature of certain types of group beliefs, non-summative group beliefs, are critically ...

Recent accounts of institutional and social facts share at least three theses. (1) Performativity: a shared attitude of certain type towards an institutional fact may contribute to the truth of a sentence describing the fact. (2) Reflexivity: if a ...

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of institutional actions from the standpoint of cognitive science. The notion of constitutive rules have been proposed to describe the conceptual nature of institutions. In this paper it is extended to ...