Kinds of minds

Insect Minds For Human Minds

This chapter was originally published in the book Human Learning: Biology, Brain, and Neuroscience. The copy attached is provided by Elsevier for the author’s benefit and for the benefit of the author’s institution, for non-commercial research, and educational use. This includes without limitation use in instruction at your institution, distribution to specific colleagues, and providing a copy ...

Kinds of Kinds: Sources of Category Coherence

A fundamental question in the study of concepts is what makes sets of examples cohere as categories. We present results of three studies designed to compare standard taxonomic categories with categories that take their meaning from relationships extending outside of the individual example. An exemplar generation task is used to differentiate relational categories from taxonomic kinds and to com...

Three Levels of Semiosis: Three Kinds of Kinds

In philosophy, there is an as yet unresolved discussion on whether there are different kinds of kinds and what those kinds are. In particular, there is a distinction between indifferent kinds, which are unaffected by observation and representation, and interactive kinds, which respond to being studied in ways that alter the very kinds under study. This is in essence a discussion on ontologies a...

Two Kinds of Universals and two Kinds of Groups

Philosophers have long debated about two ways of conceiving of universals: as Platonic universals and as Aristotelian universals. Roughly, Aristotelian universals are inherent in the particulars that instantiate them; they can be multiply located (located just where the instances are located), and they exist only if they have at least one instance. Platonic universals, by contrast, are truly ab...

Three kinds of ethics for three kinds of engineering