We propose that humans are adapted to transfer knowledge to, and receive knowledge from, conspecifics by teaching. This adaptation, which we call 'pedagogy', involves the emergence of a special communication system that does not presuppose either language or high-level theory of mind, but could itself provide a basis facilitating the development of these human-specific abilities both in phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms. We speculate that tool manufacturing and mediated tool use made the evolution of such a new social learning mechanism necessary. However, the main body of evidence supporting this hypothesis comes from developmental psychology. We argue that many central phenomena of human infant social cognition that may seem puzzling in the light of their standard functional explanation can be more coherently and plausibly interpreted as reflecting the adaptations to receive knowledge from social partners through teaching.

Abstract: It is widely believed that what distinguishes the social cognition of humans from that of other animals is the belief-desire psychology of four-year-old children and adults (so-called theory of mind). We argue here that this is actually the second ontogenetic step in uniquely human social cognition. The first step is one year old children’s understanding of persons as intentional agents, which enables skills of cultural learning and shared intentionality. This initial step is ‘the real thing ’ in the sense that it enables young children to participate in cultural activities using shared, perspectival symbols with a conventional/normative/reflective dimension—for example, linguistic communication and pretend play—thus inaugurating children’s understanding of things mental. Understanding beliefs and participating in collective intentionality at four years of age—enabling the comprehension of such things as money and marriage—results from several years of engagement with other persons in perspective-shifting and reflective discourse containing propositional attitude constructions. By all appearances, the cognitive skills of human beings are very different from those of other animal species, including our nearest primate relatives. Human

ABSTRACT: Gratitude is an important component of positive psychology and essential to living the good life, but until recently psychologists have largely ignored it. Although the developmental trajectory of gratitude remains unclear, children seem to first experience and express gratitude around 6–8 years of age. Unfortunately, gratitude measures designed specifically for youth are currently nonexistent. Therefore, although data support using adult gratitude scales with children and adolescents, youth measures are needed. Gratitude is related to a host of positive outcomes, including subjective well-being, relational support, and prosocial behavior. Counting blessings daily for 2 weeks has been associated with greater school satisfaction at immediate posttest and at 3-week follow-up. Beyond improving social and emotional functioning, gratitude also may promote academic gains via achievement motivation. School psychologists should consider gratitude a viable path for promoting positive youth development in the context of both assessment and intervention. Practical implications for school psychologists are discussed. There is a calmness to a life lived in gratitude, a quiet joy. —Ralph Blum

The contribution of this dissertation is to show how interlocutors in dialogue can reason probabilistically about natural language interpretation, dialogue state (context), and natural language generation in a way that is consistent with three fundamental claims made by mainstream theories of pragmatic reasoning in human-human dialogue: 1. interlocutors track and exploit the evolving context to coordinate their individual contributions; 2. the current context depends on what the previous utterances of both interlocutors have meant (contributed); 3. what a speaker can recognizably mean (contribute) by a specific choice of words depends on the current context. Mainstream pragmatic theories depend on these assumptions to explain how a speaker can make linguistic choices that the hearer will interpret as intended, but these theories do not lend themselves to straightforward probabilistic reasoning. Engineering approaches to building dialogue systems implement straightforward probabilistic reasoning, but sacrifice one or more (sometimes all) of these fundamental aspects of pragmatic theory in order to do so. This dissertation shows how we can achieve the robustness and data-driven methodology enjoyed by engineering approaches while keeping

We are victims of an illusion that makes us believe that we have created what actually grasps our volition from without. Durkheim: The rules of sociological method (1895/1982, p. 13) Abstract. The paper starts from a general consideration of three programs in cognitive science: the internalist, the externalist, and the social approaches to cognition. In the social domain, some new approaches propose that human sociality is to be treated as part of our biological nature. Several research programs were born out of these considerations. There are some among them that propose general theories for the distribution of representations. The paper analyses two of these, the meme theory put forward by RICHARD DAWKINS, and the epidemiological theory proposed by DAN SPERBER. It points out that while for DAWKINS the essential aspect is replication, for SPERBER it is transmission of representations where biological analogies become crucial. For both theories, to turn them into working models, a lot of detailed elaboration is needed from data on social science.