A swan, a pike, and a crawfish walk into a bar

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Acknowledgements

I thank Barb Finlay for a much-needed reality check on my expository style, Rick Dale for editorial comments on a draft of this paper and Eric Dietrich and JETAI for hosting this invigorating exchange of views.

Notes

Notes

1. A concise and highly accessible discussion of the pitfalls of relativism can be found in the recent book Walking the Tightrope of Reason by Fogelin (2003).

2. In the study of signs or semiotics, ‘semiosis’ refers to the process of arriving at the meaning of a sign. In Eco's parlance, semiosis becomes ‘unlimited’ when this process is pursued beyond its reasonable conclusion, e.g, by forcing deeper and deeper ‘interpretations’.

3. For a discussion of the importance for cognitive science of the other main sense of the term ‘abduction’, which can mean simply ‘abstraction’, see Edelman (2003).

4. Here again is the relevant passage from my target article: ‘In terms of the levels of analysis framework, the contribution of connectionism was to highlight the multiple possible ways of implementing a given function, as well as the interdependence between levels, as when the characteristics of the available implementational substrate constrain the computations that it can perform, and therefore also the tasks that can be addressed (for an example from the domain of vision, see Edelman 1999, Chap.1)’.

5. The last of the cognitive sciences that clings to the imaginary distinction between syntax and semantics is formalist (Chomskyan) linguistics, and even there it is being rolled back under the onslaught of the new Empiricism (Goldsmith 2007).

6. As it happens, a lucid illustration of Dennett's idea of intentional stance can be found in this issue, in Spivey and Anderson's discussion of the Game of Life, which, as they point out, gives rise to a ‘powerful illusion of meaningfulness’. Thus, Van Orden's hopes notwithstanding, no blink is intrinsically a wink.

7. Spivey and Anderson manage to keep a straight face while invoking this term, which I myself cannot imagine being used outside scare quotes, for reasons detailed in my target article.

8. In the way of clarification, here and in the target article the term ‘epistemology’ refers to ways of knowing about some things, while ‘ontology’ refers to the way those things actually are.

9. Such emergence has been demonstrated in game-theoretic studies such as that of Puglisi, Baronchelli and Loreto (2008), who write: ‘The linguistic level emerges as totally self-organised and is the product of the (cultural) negotiation process among the individuals.’

10. By defending radical pluralism rather than the more, how should I put it, pluralistic, garden variety that I profess here, Dietrich, himself an inveterate pluralist (Markman and Dietrich 2000; Dietrich and Markman 2003), makes me seem what in Romanian is described as mai catolic decât Papa (‘more catholic than the Pope’).

11. This phrase, sans the qualification, is the motto of the Hog's Breath Saloon, 400 Front Street, Key West, FL.

12. Here is the original quote from Mencken: ‘No one in this world, so far as I know  – and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me  – has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people’ (Notes on Journalism, Chicago Tribune, 19 September 1926).

13. Philosopher Otto Neurath's boat metaphor, which originally appeared in Protokollsaetze, Erkenntnis 3:204–214 (1932), is best explained by another quote from Quine (1960, p. 3): ‘We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction’.