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A Paper on the Problems with Perceptual Symbol Systems

By mixingmemory on July 5, 2006.

If you found yesterday's post on perceptual symbol systems and related theories interesting, you might like this paper by Edouard Machery that is in press at Cognition. The paper is titled "Concept Empiricism: A Methodological Critique." The critique is aimed at "neo-empiricism" in concept research, and uses Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory as its primary example. Here's the abstract:

Thanks to Barsalou's, Damasio's, Glenberg's, Prinz' and others' work, neo-empiricism is gaining a deserved recognition in the psychology and philosophy of concepts. I argue, however, that neo-empiricists have underestimated the difficulty of providing evidence against the amodal approach to concepts and higher cognition. I highlight three key problems: the difficulty of sorting out amodal predictions from neo-empiricist predictions, the difficulty of finding experimental tasks that are not best solved by imagery and the difficulty of generalizing findings concerning a given cognitive process in a given context to other cognitive processes or other contexts. Finally, solutions to these three problems are considered.

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cognitive psychology

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Is it possible to design satisfactory experiments to "solve" the PSS versus propopsitional problem? You'll never get people to agree that your manipulations are adequate. For example,

Reviewer A: There are some interesting ideas in this proposal. Experiment 1 in particular should provide interesting and informative results.

Reviewer B: However, it is not entirely clear what Experiment 1 will contribute to our understanding of interaction of verbal and nonverbal processing...

Fred, the solution Machery gives is to test individual models, rather than modal vs. amodal theories in general. I think that's the best way to go about it. If you can show that the best modal theory handles the data better than the best current amodal theory, then you have a reason to adopt a modal perspective until a better amodal theories come out.