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Modérateurs
·Gloria Origgi
·Anne Reboul
Invités
·David Eagleman
·York Hagmayer
·Daniel Povinelli
·Juan Rosas
·Laurie Santos
·Michael Waldmann
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La causalité une notion centrale dans la représentation de l’action, notion qui gouverne le comportement observé chez de nombreuses espèces. La causalité lie les éventualités et prédit les conséquences des actions. C’est l’origine des comportements qui permettent aux animaux, et notamment aux êtres humains, d’agir sur leur environnement et de le modifier. A contrario, le comportement peut être l’indice d’un raisonnement causal chez les animaux. Qui plus est, la causalité est aussi la base cognitive de l’acquisition et de l’usage des catégories et des concepts chez l’enfant. En tant que telle, c’est la fondation de la rationnalité.
Le séminaire réunira psychologues, anthropologues, philosophes, linguistes, primatologues, pour essayer d'éclairer les questions suivantes: : y a-t-il une spécificité de la cognition causale chez l’espèce humaine et, si c’est le cas, le langage joue-t-il ou non un rôle dans cette spécificité ? Quel est le rôle de l’apprentissage et de la mémoire associative dans le raisonnement causal? En partenariat avec
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Causal Maps and Bayes Nets. A cognitive and computational account of causal learning and therory formation
Alison Gopnik
Nous proposons que les théories intuitives des enfants sont des "cartes causales", des représentations cohérentes des relations causales entre les évènements. Le formalisme en réseau de Bayes est une façon computationnelle de représenter et d'apprendre des cartes causales. Les autres animaux semblent comprendre que leurs propres interventions peuvent avoir des effets causaux ( comme dans le conditionnement opérant) et indépendamment peuvent détecter des corrélations entre des évènements dans le monde qui indiquent la causalité ( comme dans le conditionnement classique). Ils ne semblent pas cependant assembler ces deux sortes de connaissance pour former des cartes causales.
Date de publication : 5 décembre 2006
Expressing Causality in Natural Language. A Pragmatic Perspective
Jacques Moeschler
This paper is devoted to the semantics and the pragmatics of causal constructions in natural language, mainly causative constructions, causative predicates and causal discourses with and without connective. I will argue that the representation of causality in discourse (the order effect-cause) is connected to the semantics of causal constructions, whose necessary argument is the patient (of the effect) and whose predicate denotes the resulting state of the causal event.
Date de publication : 25 mars 2006
The Possible Influence of Perception of Causal Events on the Development of “if P then Q” Conditionals and Causal Reasoning
Peter Ford F. Dominey
This note will address the development of a generalized 'if P then Q’ schema based on accumulated real-world experience with the perception of causal events, in a constructionist context.
Date de publication : 15 février 2006
Causality vs. Explanation. Objective Relations vs. Subjective Interests.
Denis Hilton
I will argue that a strong distinction needs to be made between causal attribution and causal explanation. Whereas causal attribution is a cognitive process that involves referring an event to its source, whether it be a painting to its author, or an event to its origin, explanation is a three-place predicate describing a social interaction whereby someone explains something to someone else. As such causal explanation must obey the rules of conversation: A good explanation must be probably true, informative given an interlocutor?s state of knowledge, relevant to her interests, and expressed clearly. Whereas causality is objective, explanation is subjective (or intersubjective) in nature.
Date de publication : 16 janvier 2006
Delusion as an abnormal causal reasoning process. A search for a common ground in schizophrenia and dementia in older people
Sebastien Carnicella
Philippe Oberling
Delusion is an abnormal causal reasoning, whose process seems rooted in the inability to compute probability estimates (contingency judgment). We will analyse the psychological and neurobiological substrates of such a defect in both human and non-human species in order to provide an unitary framework of delusion disorders.
Date de publication : 8 décembre 2005
Associative Learning in Animals and Humans
Leyre Castro
Edward A. Wasserman
No one would dispute that humans are able to learn causal relationships. But do animals also possess this capacity? Both humans and animals have been subjected to similar evolutionary histories and they currently experience common survival demands: to predict and control the environment. Close correspondence between animal and human cognition might therefore not be at all farfetched. We propose that associative learning theories provide an applicable and promising viewpoint from which to understand many of the phenomena observed in animal conditioning and human causality learning.
Date de publication : 14 novembre 2005
Causal Inferences. Evolutionary Domains and Neural Systems
Clark Barrett
Pascal Boyer
Causal perception is a domain in which cognitive neuroscience studies and developmental psychology findings should be confronted. We still have no good description of the neural correlates of such simple causal thinking as
connecting two events because of temporal contiguity. In particular, this causal binding of events could be operated either by specialised, modality specific low-level systems or higher-level contingency detection, or both.
It would be useful to examine how developmental results illuminate this question.
Date de publication : 15 octobre 2005
Death as an Empirical Backdoor to the Representation of Mental Causality
Jesse M. Bering
Investigating peoples’ understanding of death may help to disentangle the complex relationship between the causal construals of self and other. From a simulationist perspective of other minds, because representations of postmortem mental states cannot be informed by firsthand experience with personal death, theoretical constructs dealing with the self and others’ minds after death suffer from the logical impoverishment of hypothesis disconfirmation. As lamented by the Spanish philosopher de Unamuno, “the effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing” (1954, p. 38). Simulation constraints may lead to a number of telltale errors, namely Type I errors (inferring mental states when in fact there are none), regarding the psychological status of dead agents. But even if one does not embrace simulation theory, reasoning about the fate of minds after death in a materialist fashion is problematic.
Date de publication : 3 octobre 2005
Thinking About Action. The Logic of Intervention in Reasoning and Decision Making
Steven Sloman
The fundamental idea of the causal modeling framework is that people represent causal systems by decomposing them into autonomous mechanisms that support intervention, both actual interventions on the world and counterfactual interventions in imagination. I will discuss the adequacy of this view as a description of human behavior in one or more of three domains: reasoning, decision making, and learning.
Date de publication : 5 septembre 2005
Inferring Causality and Making Predictions. Some Misconceptions in the Animal and Human Learning Literature
Helena Matute
Miguel A. Vadillo
A common assumption in studies on associative learning is that inferring causal relations, assessing predictive relations, and making predictions are closely related processes. In spite of the interdependencies between them, evidence (and simple intuition) indicates that people perform these processes differently and that they cannot be attributable to a common, single underlying mechanism. As we will show, this evidence has both methodological and theoretical implications.
Date de publication : 20 juin 2005
Left with the association, naked as if it were? Ideas from honeybee learning
Martin Giurfa
The brain of a honeybee contains only 960 000 neurons and its volume represents only 1 mm3. However, it supports impressive behavioural capabilities. Honeybees are equipped with sophisticated sensory systems and have well developed learning and memory capacities, whose essential mechanisms do not differ drastically from those of vertebrates. But, which regularities can honeybees extract from their environment besides those underlying simple forms of associative learning? Here, I focus on non-elemental forms of learning by honeybees. I show that bees exhibit learning abilities that have been traditionally ascribed to a restricted portion of vertebrates, as they go beyond simple stimulus–stimulus or response–stimulus associations.
Date de publication : 6 juin 2005
Causality in Non-Humans
Jennifer Vonk
We have recently argued that one fundamental difference between the conceptual systems of humans and other primates may be that humans alone are capable of reasoning about ‘imperceptibles’, defined as abstract theoretical constructs that can not be directly perceived through the senses. One particular class of ‘imperceptibles’ is the class of constructs that indexes causal forces. Although non-humans are extremely keen observers of perceptual features in the environment, and appear to understand the role of observable contingencies in the outcome of various events, we argue that they do not posit the existence of causal forces underlying these observable behaviors and events. Non-humans may not reason about ‘imperceptibles’, (including causal forces), because of a second key distinction between human and non-human conceptual systems; humans alone strive to explain as well as to predict events. This second distinction, which is inextricably tied to the first, may inspire a fruitful avenue of research in comparative psychology.
Date de publication : 23 mai 2005
Physical causality in human infants
Susan Hespos
I would like to focus on whether there is specificity in causal cognition and how language influences this ability. Data from preverbal infants suggest that there is a set of perceptual and conceptual capacities that are common to everyone and rich enough to capture the core meanings expressed by any language. Language learning develops by linking linguistic forms to universal, pre-existing representations of meaning.
Date de publication : 10 mai 2005
Do young children possess dinstinct causalities for the three core domains of thought?
Kayoko Inagaki
Giyoo Hatano & Kayoko Inagaki
A growing number of developmentalists agree that even young children possess coherent bodies of knowledge about a few important aspects of the world and that naive physics, psychology and biology are surely included among them. The acquisition of these core domains of thought is believed to be early, easy, and almost universal. How early do young children possess these naive theories of the world? Do they acquire three distinct causalities for these domains approximately at the same time? In the first half of this paper we discuss these issues. Our tentative conclusion is: whereas even three-year-olds have surely acquired and use differentially causalities for naive physics and psychology, a causal explanatory framework unique for biological properties and processes is established a little later.
In the last half of the paper we speculate how young children can acquire these characteristic causal devices.
Date de publication : 26 avril 2005
Causal logic and the intentional stance
John Watson
Dennett introduced the concept of the 'intentional stance' as a
strategy used by humans in their coping with the behavior of each other and
with the behavior of complex animals. This stance attributes mental states
as causal factors for the behavior being explained or predicted.
In this paper, I argue that
the intentional stance may well be more than a pragmatic choice. It can be
viewed as a logically necessary choice given certain observed behavior and
the causal logic of a primitive 'determinist stance.' Implications and
potential assessment of this logical trigger are discussed.
Date de publication : 11 avril 2005
Consciousness, Intentionality and Causality
Walter Freeman
On the basis of brain dynamics I conceive and describe causality as our phenomenological experience of the intention-action-perception-assimilation cycle that underlies all human knowledge, and infer that causality is not a property or law of the material world but a quale and percept derived in the brain.
Date de publication : 14 mars 2005
Similarités et différences entre la causalité humaine et non humaine
Anne Reboul
Hume remarquait que les humains déduisaient la causalité par induction sur la base de trois facteurs: la contiguïté spatio-temporelle de la cause et de l'effet, la contingence de l'effet à la cause et l'antériorité de la cause. Il remarquait aussi que la base inductive de la causalité était l'association de la cause et de l'effet. Les trois facteurs qu'il voyait comme déclenchant la notion d'un lien causal sont très proches de ceux utilisés dans les analyses de l'apprentissage associatif chez les animaux. Cependant, la plupart des chercheurs en cognition animale ne voudraient pas reconnaître que la cognition causale chez les animaux non humains est équivalente à sa contrepartie humaine. Etant donné les similarités, quelles sont les différences et d'où proviennent-elles?
Date de publication : 28 février 2005
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