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Comprehensive accounts of resource-rational attempts to maximise utility shouldn't ignore the demands of constructing utility representations. This can be onerous when, as in humans, there are many rewarding modalities. Another thing best not ignored is the processing demands of making functional activity out of the many degrees of freedom of a body. The target article is almost silent on both.

There is an enduring tension in thinking about the architecture of systems that select behaviours, including evolved organisms. One line of reasoning supports convergence in control systems and conversion of the values of all options into a common currency, in part because this seems the best or only way of trading off costs and benefits associated with outcomes of varying types. A competing consideration supports parallelism or other forms of fragmentation, because of inefficiencies associated with integration, and suspicion towards general-purpose cognitive systems. In addition, recent neuroscience has given particular attention to the question of how partly independent ‘habit based’ and ‘planning based’ decision-systems might interact. The issues here are, at least in part, a special case of the more general integration versus parallelism tension. This tension provides a useful framework for thinking about the implementation of different kinds of sensitivity to risks of various types, the variety of mechanisms by means of which risk sensitivity might be modulated, and how risk might be traded off against other components of value or disincentive. I describe the tension, briefly survey some of the relevant empirical evidence, and conclude with tentative observations on the topic of risk.

In this paper we characterise a tension between two views about how an agent could achieve efficient action selection. On one hand, it is common in some of the cognitive and behavioural sciences to maintain that efficient action selection requires that the value of all actions or options available to an agent are represented on a unidimensional scale of values, in other words that action selection make use of a "common currency". On the other hand, early work in situated, embodied robotics and distributed control associated with Rodney Brooks maintained that "intelligence" could be achieved without the instantiation of any representations at all, and without centralised control systems. This line of thinking has exerted significant influence in situated and enactivist approaches to human cognition. If what situated roboticists count as "intelligence" includes capacity for efficient action selection, then their claim that intelligence can be achieved without representations is in tension with the views of those who argue that efficient action selection requires that a common currency be represented. We argue here that the apparent tension is genuine, develop an analysis of the tension itself, and offer a preliminary overview of the considerations relevant to navigating it.

A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and processes referred to by functionalist cognitive scientists are epiphenomenal. It further contends that the problem lies in functionalism itself, and that, to save the causal significance of mind, it is necessary to re-embrace reductionism.We argue that the prescribed return to reductionism would be disastrous for the cognitive and behavioral sciences, requiring the dismantling of most existing achievements and placing intolerable restrictions on further work. However, this argument fails to answer the metaphysical challenge on its own terms. We meet that challenge by going on to argue that the new metaphysical skepticism about functionalist cognitive science depends on reifying two distinct notions of causality (one primarily scientific, the other metaphysical), then equivocating between them. When the different notions of causality are properly distinguished, it is clear that functionalism is in no serious philosophical trouble, and that we need not choose between reducing minds or finding them causally impotent. The metaphysical challenge to functionalism relies, in particular, on a naïve and inaccurate conception of the practice of physics, and the relationship between physics and metaphysics.

Clark and Chalmers [Analysis 58 (1998) 7] defend the hypothesis of an `extended mind', maintaining that beliefs and other paradigmatic mental states can be implemented outside the central nervous system or body. Aspects of the problem of `language acquisition' are considered in the light of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather than `language' as typically understood, the object of study is something called `utterance-activity', a term of art intended to refer to the full range of kinetic and prosodic features of the on-line behaviour of interacting humans. It is argued that utterance-activity is plausibly regarded as jointly controlled by the embodied activity of interacting people, and that it contributes to the control of their behaviour. By means of specific examples it is suggested that this complex joint control facilitates easier learning of at least some features of language. This in turn suggests a striking form of the extended mind, in which infants' cognitive powers are augmented by those of the people with whom they interact.

It is argued that the account of Savage-Rumbaugh's ape language research in Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker and Taylor (1998. Apes, Language and the Human Mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford) is profitably read in the terms of the theoretical perspective developed in Clark (1997. Being There, Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). The former work details some striking results concerning chimpanzee and bonobo subjects, trained to make use of keyboards containing ‘lexigram’ symbols. The authors, though, make heavy going of a critique of what they take to be standard approaches to understanding language and cognition in animals, and fail to offer a worthwhile theoretical position from which to make sense of their own data. It is suggested that the achievements of Savage-Rumbaugh's non-human subjects suggest that language ability need not be explained by reference to specialised brain capacities. The contribution made by Clark's work is to show the range of ways in which cognition exploits bodily and environmental resources. This model of ‘distributed’ cognition helps makes sense of the lexigram activity of Savage-Rumbaugh's subjects, and points to a re-evaluation of the language behaviour of humans.

A recurring claim in a number of behavioural, cognitive and neuro-scientific literatures is that there is, or must be, a unidimensional ‘common currency’ in which the values of different available options are represented. There is striking variety in the quantities or properties that have been proposed as determinants of the ordering in motivational strength. Among those seriously suggested are pain and pleasure, biological fitness, reward and reinforcement, and utility among economists, who have regimented the notion of utility in a variety of ways, some of them incompatible. This topic deserves philosophical attention for at least the following reasons. (1) Repeated invocation of the ‘common currency’ idiom isn’t merely terminological coincidence because most of the claims are competing explanations either of manifest pattern in choices, or of order in the processes producing choice. (2) We can’t suppose that the different currency claims within each area are compatible, because there are significant obstacles to identifying pairs of members of either the ‘pattern’ or ‘process’ group. (3) There are, finally, seriously opposed positions about the relationships (generally, and in specific cases including that of humans) between the pattern facts and the process facts. There are philosophical positions both favouring and opposing a common currency. But direct consideration of the abstract relationships between claims about common currencies across scientific settings, and the arguments for and against these claims, is relatively rare. There is, though, much of philosophical interest to be found here. South African Journal of Philosophy 2014, 33(2): 211–221

Clark's synthesis of much recent work on sensory and motor systems in the brain is at once radical and curiously traditional. It is radical, among other things, concerning what representations are, how they are constructed, and what sensory and motor representations have in common. But it is traditionally cognitivist in viewing the main task of brains as being that of representing the world. What this traditional orientation tends to neglect is the role of the brain as a system for selecting among available actions. This phenomenon has an ultimate aspect regarding the external standards relevant to assessing actions. Various behavioral ecological schemes for ranking actions in terms of their contribution to quantities such as fitness, and economic models of revealed preference, are the leading theoretical players here. The phenomenon also has a proximal aspect, which concerns the specific biological mechanisms, including neural ones, by means of which the values of different available actions might be represented, and selections between them made. On this topic the recent explosion of neuroeconomic research on decision processes in the brain is urgently relevant. Natural agents have limited means of action, and those means have alternative – sometimes mutually exclusive – uses. That is to say the predicament of natural agents is fundamentally an economic one, even if it is not necessary that selection converge on a system for responding to the predicament in which economic variables are explicitly represented. Furthermore there is considerable evidence from behavioral ecology and other fields that many vertebrate behaviors in natural settings are economically efficient. Neither the ultimate nor the proximal aspects of the problem of selecting between behaviors play a significant role in Clark's account. Natural selection, fitness, and biological descendents are not mentioned at all, and cognate concepts like adaptiveness feature in diluted form. There's similarly little mention of decision and choice as theoretically understood in economics including neuroeconomics, none of incentives, and reward and utility appear only in the course of musing over whether it is possible that cognitive neuroscience could do without reference to either (section 5.1). Clark does make some important points about action-centric representations, but even here does not consider the problem of action selection. Of course, no survey can cover anything that anyone thinks is relevant, and it's very easy to complain about things that are left out. Clark's lack of engagement with neuroeconomics means missing a specific opportunity to make his general case even more compelling, because what is emerging in that field complements his case about sensory and motor systems in deep ways. In his section (3.2) Clark apparently takes seriously the concern that an agent with the sort of brain that he's been describing would be expected to “seek a nice dark room and stay in it”. Clark disposes of the worry by pointing out that creatures with real biological needs should “expect” to follow exploratory strategies, and that these expectations themselves should recruit both perception and action. This is part of a reasonable and interesting response, but action selection under those conditions (as with most others) would still require some way of dealing with specific questions, such as where and how to forage, and how to trade off foraging with other expected behaviors such as predator avoidance and reproduction. A related move appears later, in section (5.1) when he considers an austere vision of cognition that does without reference to goals and rewards, in favor of comprehensive analysis in terms of expectations. Clark correctly holds back from endorsing this possibility, but for relatively generic reasons to the effect that even if some description is in principle replaceable, it may be convenient to continue using it. This misses the main chance. Recent work on the neural implementation of decision in various vertebrates including humans has produced a body of results highly congenial to the unifying vision Clark supports. Consider saccadic movements in rhesus monkeys. A key component in the neural implementation of these movements is the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), which comprises a topographic map integrating locations in the visual field and aspects of the muscular plans that would effect the centering of gaze on those locations. It, along with a network of other maps with varying topographies in the frontal eye fields, superior colliculus and related areas, provides a striking illustration of what Clark calls an “action-centric” representation. In addition, as studies including Platt and Glimcher (1999) and Dorris and Glimcher (2004) have shown, some activity in LIP neurons of rhesus monkeys on visually identical trials varies in precise ways with the relative expected rewards (or relative subjective value) from saccades to the represented location. These representations are not merely “action-centric” insofar as they combine answers to the questions “where is it?” with “how do I gaze at it?” They also include identifiable activity corresponding to the answer to “what's it probably worth for me to look at it?” There's more. The expected relative reward values attached to saccadic and other movements are not sui generis. They are predictions, and ones that get updated in the light of ongoing experience. Among the key findings on this topic is that dopamine neurons do not – as previously supposed – directly encode hedonic value (because if they did they would respond in the same to expected and unexpected rewards of equivalent hedonic worth). Rather it turns out that they encode some aspects of the difference between experienced and expected reward (Montague et al., 1997, see also Bayer and Glimcher, 2005). While many details about the operation of this system, and its interaction with other neural systems, have yet to be determined, it is nonetheless clear that crucial features of the neural systems for attaching values to sensory events and actions operate by means of prediction error. In this respect they suggest a way of expanding the scope of Clark's claim about the importance of minimizing prediction error as a general goal of neural systems.

The image of the addict in popular culture combines victimhood and moral failure; we sympathize with addicts in films and novels because of their suffering and their hard-won knowledge. And yet actual scientific knowledge about addiction tends to undermine this cultural construct. In What Is Addiction?, leading addiction researchers from neuroscience, psychology, genetics, philosophy, economics, and other fields survey the latest findings in addiction science. They discuss such questions as whether addiction is one kind of condition, or several; if addiction is neurophysiological, psychological, or social, or incorporates aspects of all of these; to what extent addicts are responsible for their problems, and how this affects health and regulatory policies; and whether addiction is determined by inheritance or environment or both. The chapter authors discuss the possibility of a unifying basis for different addictions (considering both substance addiction and pathological gambling), offering both neurally and neuroscientifically grounded accounts as well as discussions of the social context of addiction. There can be no definitive answer yet to the question posed by the title of this book; but these essays demonstrate a sweeping advance over the simplistic conception embedded in popular culture. Contents â?¢ The Contribution of Executive Dysfunction â?¢ Neurobiology of Pathological Gambling â?¢ Alcoholism as an Exemplar â?¢ Addiction as a Breakdown in the Machinery of Decision Making â?¢ Economic Models of Pathological Gambling â?¢ A Latent Property of the Dynamics of Choice â?¢ Addiction and Altruism â?¢ Hyperbolic Discounting versus Conditioning and Cognitive Framing â?¢ Measuring Dispositions to Bundle Choices â?¢ Anticipatory Processing as a Transdisciplinary Bridge in Addiction â?¢ Impulsivity and Its Association with Treatment Development for Pathological Gambling and Substance Use Disorders â?¢ Medical Models of Addiction â?¢ Addiction and the Diagnostic Criteria for Pathological Gambling â?¢ Irrational Action and Addiction â?¢ Defining Addiction and Identifying the Public Interest in Liberal Democracies

Knobe relies on unhelpful analogies in stating his main thesis about the mind. It isn't clear what saying the mind works, or doesn't work, “like a modern university” or “a scientific investigation” means. We suggest he should say that some think that human cognition respects a ban on fallacies of relevance, where considerations actually irrelevant to truth are taken as evidence. His research shows that no such ban is respected.