Property Generation Task

In this paper, we outline the embodied perspective of language comprehension indicating some of its limitations. We claim that the notions of language as a tool , might be useful to overcome a view focused only on referential aspects of language. Words, in quality of tools, can: a. facilitate communication among speakers; b. influence categorization; c. have a different impact on concrete and abstract words; d. allow us to construct an inner speech. Finally, we discuss how thinking about language as tool can help inform future research on thought, language and body.

This study addresses the issue of artifact kinds from a psychological and cognitive perspective. The primary interest of the investigation lies in understanding how artifacts are categorized and what are the properties people rely on for their identification. According to a classical philosophical definition artifacts form an autonomous class of instances including all and only those objects that do not exist in nature, but are artificial, in the sense that they are made by an artĭfex. This definition suggests that artifacts are classified primarily on the basis of the recognition of their artificial nature. Nevertheless, many psychological and cognitive studies maintain that artifacts are categorized mainly on the basis of the recognition of the function they have been made to accomplish. Since tools are also categorized primarily on the basis of their function, this would imply that artifacts and tools are represented in the same way. In the study participants categorized a set of objects (denoted by words) once as tools and once as artifacts. Results show that reaction times (RTs) are faster in the artifact categorization condition than in the tool categorization condition. This pattern indicates that artifacts and tools are not represented in the same way and that the identification of the members of each class is carried out in the basis of different criteria.

The opposition between nature and culture has always been paradigmatic in the philosophy of society, and in this sense it is certainly striking that, in contemporary theories of collective acceptance in social ontology-theories which actually entail the presence of individual mental content in the form of (at least dispositional) beliefs-the shaping role of culture has not found significant recognition. However, it cannot but be trivially true that cultural presuppositions play a role in the maintenance and development of beliefs on rules and other kinds of abstract artifacts. But once we recognize that the reality of social institutions is at least culturally-dependent, the question emerges whether there is still room for nature as a possible determinant of social reality. Many authors maintain that there is and argue that there are objective natural features shared by human beings which are necessary conditions to explain the emergence of institutional structures within society. This is a culture-independent relation between nature and social institutions. In this paper, however, I will try to argue that there is another, very peculiar, way in which nature can work as a possible determinant of social reality, a way which is instead culture-dependent. In particular, I will give three examples of this kind of culture-dependent relationsexamples about states, corporations, and contracts-and I will introduce a new concept to account for it, that of ''institutional mimesis.'' I will then provide an explanation of how institutional mimesis can have an impact on the content of collective acceptance by appealing to two influential theories in contemporary cognitive psychology (those regarding conceptual metaphors and conceptual blending). Finally, I will explain the ontological significance of institutional mimesis using Ian Hacking's concept of historical ontology.

Are legal institutions artifacts? If artifacts are conceived as entities whose existence depends on human beings, then yes, legal institutions are, of course, artifacts. But an artifact theory of law makes a stronger claim, namely, that there is actually an explanatory gain to be had by investigating legal institutions as artifacts, or through the features of ordinary artifacts. This is the proposition explored in this chapter: that while this understanding of legal institutions makes it possible to find common ground between legal positivism and legal realism, it does not capture all of the insights offered by these two traditions. An artifact theory of law can therefore be necessary in explaining the law, but it will not suffice to that end. This chapter also posits that legal artifacts bear a relevant connection to certain conceptions of nature, thus vindicating one of the original insights behind natural law theory.

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Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media Dordrecht. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com".

The sensorimotor system plays a critical role in several cognitive processes. Here, we review recent studies documenting this interplay at different levels. First, we concentrate on studies that have shown how the sensorimotor system is flexibly involved in interactions with objects. We report evidence demonstrating how social context and situations influence affordance activation, and then focus on tactile and kinesthetic components in body–object interactions. Then, we turn to word use, and review studies that have shown that not only concrete words, but also abstract words are grounded in the sensorimotor system. We report evidence that abstract concepts activate the mouth effector more than concrete concepts, and discuss this effect in light of studies on adults, children, and infants. Finally, we pinpoint possible sensorimotor mechanisms at play in the acquisition and use of abstract concepts. Overall, we show that the involvement of the sensorimotor system is flexibly modulate...

The sensorimotor system plays a critical role in several cognitive processes. Here, we review recent studies documenting this interplay at different levels. First, we concentrate on studies that have shown how the sensorimotor system is flexibly involved in interactions with objects. We report evidence demonstrating how social context and situations influence affordance activation, and then focus on tactile and kinesthetic components in body–object interactions. Then, we turn to word use, and review studies that have shown that not only concrete words, but also abstract words are grounded in the sensorimotor system. We report evidence that abstract concepts activate the mouth effector more than concrete concepts, and discuss this effect in light of studies on adults, children, and infants. Finally, we pinpoint possible sensorimotor mechanisms at play in the acquisition and use of abstract concepts. Overall, we show that the involvement of the sensorimotor system is flexibly modulate...

This study addresses the issue of artifact kinds from a psychological and cognitive perspective. The primary interest of the investigation lies in understanding how artifacts are categorized and what are the properties people rely on for their identification. According to a classical philosophical definition artifacts form an autonomous class of instances including all and only those objects that do not exist in nature, but are artificial, in the sense that they are made by an artĭfex. This definition suggests that artifacts are classified primarily on the basis of the recognition of their artificial nature. Nevertheless, many psychological and cognitive studies maintain that artifacts are categorized mainly on the basis of the recognition of the function they have been made to accomplish. Since tools are also categorized primarily on the basis of their function, this would imply that artifacts and tools are represented in the same way. In the study participants categorized a set of objects (denoted by words) once as tools and once as artifacts. Results show that reaction times (RTs) are faster in the artifact categorization condition than in the tool categorization condition. This pattern indicates that artifacts and tools are not represented in the same way and that the identification of the members of each class is carried out in the basis of different criteria.

Legal institutions, legal systems, law in general are human artefacts. This is an idea that can be seen as an assumption of both legal positivism and legal realism. But, apart from these obvious connections, a possible question is whether the fact that law is an artefact completely rules out its connection with the natural background: Is there a sense in which we can consider legal institutions to be natural, other than artefactual? After all, this was the original intuition of the most ancient among the legal-philosophical conceptions, namely, natural law theory. Is it possible that the way in which legal artefacts are built and conceptualized is connected with the way in which natural and physical phenomena are conceptualized? Is there a connection between law and conceptions of nature? In this paper, we present an experiment conceived and realized to test some conjectures connected with this general problem. Our aim, of course, is not to give a definitive answer to the questions presented above, but rather to provide some experimental results that can be helpful, among other things, to view these general philosophical problems in a new light. Moreover, this paper is also meant to provide new data for research on the embodiment of abstract concepts, and particularly of those specific abstract concepts that depend on an institutional and legal framework. Our research would thus contribute to an important new trend characterizing the most recent studies on abstract concepts.

Semantic feature norms (e.g. STIMULUS: car  RESPONSE: <has 4 wheels>) are commonly used in cognitive psychology to look into salient aspects of given concepts. Semantic features are typically collected in experimental settings and then manually annotated by the researchers into feature types (e.g. perceptual features, taxonomic features, etc.) by means of content analyses, i.e. by using taxonomies of feature types and having independent coders perform the annotation task. However, the way in which such content analyses are typically performed and reported is not consistent across the literature. This constitutes a serious methodological problem that might undermine the theoretical claims based on such annotations.
In this study we first offer a review of some of the released datasets of annotated semantic feature norms and related taxonomies used for the content analysis. We then provide theoretical and methodological insights in relation to the content analysis methodology. Finally, we apply content analysis to a new dataset of semantic features and show how the method should be applied in order to deliver reliable annotations and replicable coding schemes. We tackle the following issues: 1) taxonomy structure; 2) description of categories; 3) coder training; 4) sustainability of the coding scheme, i.e. comparison between the annotations provided by trained vs novice coders.
The outcomes of the project are threefold: we provide methodological guidelines for semantic feature classification; we provide a revised and adapted taxonomy that can (arguably) be applied to concrete and abstract concepts; we provide a dataset of annotated semantic feature norms.

In the psychological literatures on function, four issues have been important: (1) whether function can be a core property of the concepts that represent categories, (2) whether categories based primarily on function provide support for inductive inference, (3) whether functions guide object naming in children, (4) whether function is best understood as affordances or as design history. In these debates, function is often viewed as an independent unitary property that can exist independently of an object's physical structure. We propose instead that function is a complex relational system that links physical structure, settings, action, and design history.

The paper aims at attempting an inquiry into what the claim that 'law' by its nature or character is an artifact, in fact, would entail and what, in the end, an artifact theory of law might look like. Before embarking on such an inquiry, I will, however, first try to indicate at least some potential payoffs of the artifactual understanding of law (Section 2). In order to be able to answer certain ontological questions concerning legal systems as artifact kinds, I will outline in what follows a general theory of artifacts (Section 3). I will do this by exploring several theories of artifacts developed in general philosophy, drawing mostly on those of R. Hilpinen, A. L. Thomasson, L. R. Baker and P. Bloom, since their theories present themselves as general theories of artifacts, capable of being applied to any artifact kind. Furthermore, since I take legal systems to be institutional in character, and thus different from 'ordinary' artifacts, I will introduce certain elements of social (institutional) ontology and set the ontological grounds for 'institutional artifacts' as a distinct artifact type (Section 4). This will form the basis of a rough sketch of what an artifact theory of law might look like and what the challenges for such a theory might be (Section 5).

In this editorial introduction, we provide some background to the discussions in social ontology and social cognition which form the context for the papers collected together in this volume. In doing so, we also briefly sketch how the individual contributions fit together within this broader context.

Perspectives on Social Ontology and Social Cognition brings together contributions from researchers with a highly diverse range of disciplinary backgrounds – from philosophy to anthropology, economics, psychology, neurosci- ence and linguistics. Although the concepts and the methods that shape their contributions differ greatly, one thing that they all share in common is that they have been inspired in one way or another (indeed, in many ways) by John Searle’s pioneering and foundational work in the philosophy of language and mind and, more recently, society.
The project of editing a collection of essays on some of the most pressing and fascinating questions in current research on social ontology and social cognition started to take shape at the Interacting Minds Centre at the University of Aarhus in Summer 2011. Some of the essays included in this volume were first presented in the context of Objects in Mind, the first Aarhus-Paris conference on social ontol- ogy and social cognition, which was held at the Centre of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience at the University of Aarhus on June 25–26, 2012.

Vaesen and van Amerongen (Philosophical Psychology 21:779-797, 2008) criticize Dennett’s design stance, arguing that as a cognitive thesis about artifact categorization, it is falsified by empirical findings. I assess their criticism in light of both further results and alternate findings the authors acknowledge (but did not discuss in detail). I argue that the design stance still stands in virtue of the conflicting character of these findings, and suggest shifting the domain of empirical scrutiny.

Artefacts are usually understood in contrast with natural kinds and conceived as a unitary kind. Here we propose that there is in fact a variety of artefacts: from the more concrete to the more abstract ones. Moreover, not every artefact is able to fulfil its function thanks to its physical properties: Some artefacts, particularly what we call “institutional” artefacts, are symbolic in nature and require a system of rules
to exist and to fulfil their function. Adopting a standard method to measure conceptual
representation (the property generation task), we have experimentally explored
how humans conceptualise these different kinds of artefacts. Results indicate that
institutional artefacts are typically opposed to social objects, while being more similar
to standard artefacts, be they abstract or concrete.

This study addresses the issue of artifact kinds from a psychological and cognitive perspective. The primary interest of the investigation lies in understanding how artifacts are categorized and what are the properties people rely on for their identification. According to a classical philosophical definition artifacts form an autonomous class of instances including all and only those objects that do not exist in nature, but are artificial, in the sense that they are made by an artĭfex. This definition suggests that artifacts are classified primarily on the basis of the recognition of their artificial nature. Nevertheless, many psychological and cognitive studies maintain that artifacts are categorized mainly on the basis of the recognition of the function they have been made to accomplish. Since tools are also categorized primarily on the basis of their function, this would imply that artifacts and tools are represented in the same way. In the study participants categorized a set of objects (denoted by words) once as tools and once as artifacts. Results show that reaction times (RTs) are faster in the artifact categorization condition than in the tool categorization condition. This pattern indicates that artifacts and tools are not represented in the same way and that the identification of the members of each class is carried out in the basis of different criteria.