Figures of speech have been suggested to play important pragmatic roles in language. Yet the nature of these pragmatic functions has not been specified in detail, and it is not clear what particular social-communicative purposes metaphors fulfill. I propose that metaphors are utilized in two distinct ways in communication. First, similarly to indirect speech, they enable social bargains: by expressing intentions, beliefs and desires in a veiled manner, they put the burden of interpretation on the hearer, which makes them revocable and thus a great tool for negotiations. Secondly, metaphors can be used to transform the meaning of words so that they describe phenomena and refer to concepts that do not have a lexical entry, by transferring an abstract sense figuratively to a new domain. The latter use is not only a tool of verbal creativity but a means of linguistic change as it adds novel senses to words. Metaphor does not seem to be a mere example of loose language use but a sophisticated communicational tool, either to deliberately create ambiguity in a deniable manner or to extend word meaning beyond the public lexicon, which puts the fundamental mechanisms of abstract thought to figurative use.

Variation in cognitive abilities has had an unusual status ever since the birth of psychology. For a number of reasons, it developed separately from mainstream experimental psychology, leading to a duality that Cronbach called the ‘two disciplines of scientific psychology’. The applied measurement of abilities became a huge and successful industry which resulted in the development of advanced methods of statistical analysis and modelling. This came at the cost of appropriate theoretical foundations. The concept of working memory capacity changed the scene: measures of individual differences in an established cognitive construct were able to predict important real-life outcomes. In turn, test constructors became more and more influenced by theory. The paper surveys the history of this separation and the current efforts that aim to end it, emphasizing the relevance of William Stern’s century old, but mostly ignored proposal for a common framework.

Thoughts are mechanisms that regulate behaviour. In humans, conscious thoughts play a larger role than in animals, because they can be mulled and decided upon. As brain mass increases across species, memory capacity surges significantly, rapidly multiplying the number of possible thought combinations that regulate behaviour. One such tool that allows thought combinations is chunking thoughts. It is apparent that instead of uttering a whole thought, we can use a single signal that promptly changes the other’s behaviour (e.g., “Don’t!”). These fragments may just as well be called words. When humans started using words to designate some of the behaviour-regulating thoughts, a fascinating array of possibilities opened up. The chunking of thoughts and denoting each chunk with a sound or a word equipped the human group to use several types of thoughts, several types of words in a cooperative fashion. There have been great debates about when and why spoken language appeared and what relation it had with other requirements of social life. This paper proposes a scenario for the emergence of language.

Two outstanding achievements of experimental memory research over the past fifty years have been the description of multiple memory systems and the demonstration that recall is the most effective form of long-term learning. The most important contribution of the former was to show that so-called declarative forms of memory can be described with different psychological characteristics and neurological background mechanisms than procedural memory, which plays a fundamental role in skill learning. Perhaps the most successful research trend in recent years has pointed out that memory recall, a declarative test, fundamentally changes memory representation and its long-term accessibility. In this chapter, we try to combine these two research fields and we aim to present the results of behavioral and brain research that support the assumption that declarative recall causes changes in retrieved memory content that are best understood within the mechanisms of the procedural memory system.

The cornerstone of modern linguistic semantics is, of course, the concept of meaning. Alternative names of this concept are sense (Frege’s Sinn) and intension, and its content has been largely undisputed within linguistics proper, if we disregard so-called cognitivist approaches. Ever since (Frege, Zeitschrift Für Philosophie Und Philosophische Kritik 100:25–50, 1892) Über Sinn und Bedeutung, the aim of this concept was to capture the intuition that linguistic signs have a property that allows people to use them for making themselves understood, and that the property in question has to do something with the relationship of a sign to its intended referent (nominatum, denotatum, Frege’s Bedeutung). Unfortunately, no version of this approach to meaning is prepared to account for the cognitive aspect of acquiring and using linguistic signs. Frege himself, while recognising that signs, in addition to their meaning, are also associated with an image (Frege’s Vorstellung) in each speaker’s mind who is familiar with the sign, he seems to assume that images are irrelevant from the point of view of meanings, in the same way as the mental processes that take place in the audience’s mind. In general, it seems that modern formal semantics not only disregards all psychological phenomena related to semantics, such as associations, (non-conventional) figurative uses, phylo- and ontogenetic semantic changes etc., but it is also unable to offer a framework for treating them. This paper is not a manifesto in favour of cognitivist semantics. As a matter of fact, I will not be concerned with that alternative movement at all, because I believe they have also failed to establish a link between the cognitive aspects mentioned above, on the one hand, and the central concepts of mainstream semantic theories, on the other. (By “mainstream semantics” I mean those theories which, following Richard Montague’s work, think of the explanation of interpretation as a production line starting from a linguistic representation, going through disambiguation, then logical representation, then model theoretic interpretation.) Instead, I will focus on the origins and nature of the gap between the highly abstract concept of sense and the rather concrete mental aspects of language use. I will conclude that Frege’s original proposal about senses would be worth taking more seriously than his followers did, and that it has an inherently cognitive character, although Frege himself does not dwell upon that aspect, which is related to the interaction between speakers and addressees. Thus I claim that there is a way of filling the cognitive gap while being true to Frege’s ideas. Furthermore, I will argue that, under that view, models themselves must have a cognitive character, and the relations between senses and referents (speaker’s and hearer’s) are stochastic rather than deterministic.

It has been common knowledge that the Hungarian complementizer hogy can only occur in finite clauses. Even though it started to occur c. 100 years ago in new contexts, such as in clauses accompanying sentence adverbials, nonfinite clauses were exempt from its occurrence. Recently, however, it began to be used in infinitival clauses. This squib offers an overview of related structures and initial analyses for its structure arguing that it fills a slot in a syntactic paradigm where verbs and adjectives can have both finite and infinitival complement clauses but nouns cannot since they only allow finite clauses. The new construction makes it possible for nouns to have infinitival complements, although with a twist: they must be accompanied by the finite complementizer thus making the resulting construction peculiar. We have also tested two populations by means of a questionnaire in order to investigate the acceptance scale of the construction as tabulated in the paper as based on an established statistical methodology.

Debugging is a commonly used term in computer science to describe processes such as detecting, localizing and resolving glitches in the computer program. Historically, the term is attributed to Grace Murray Hopper, an early computer scientist who found an actual moth in one of the first electromechanical computers in 1947. Since then, minor computer problems are “officially” called bugs. Although debugging is still an inherent segment of computer science, and metaphors coming from that field have always been inspiring for researchers in cognitive science, debugging has not become a metaphor like other terms, such as encoding, control, search, retrieval, etc. have. Scientists are looking at the network properties of the brain, and memory retrieval processes of the mind, but no one is looking for debugging procedures in the mind/brain. We suggest that the concept might be particularly useful for the field of developmental neuroscience. Taking the examples of reverse learning, cortical pruning and developmental unlearning, we argue that these might be fine cases of developmental debugging, or, in other words, de(v)bugging. We also propose that the debugging framework might one day reveal the functional anatomy of natural debugging along with its developmental relevance.

Semantic systems are sytems with an inherent semantics. An example would be systems showing intrinsic intentionality: if a system is genuinely intentional, it must be able to define its own meanings. Searle was a forerunner of the modern idea of semantic systems in his oft-cited “Chinese Room” paper in 1980. The current author has approached the problem from a different angle 30 years ago in his book Self-Modifying Systems (Pergamon), claiming that minds can define their own meanings by virtue of being “material”, in the sense of freely generating new properties on the fly, as do material objects. In the course of the process, meaning should arise because syntax (and therefore any computation that is entirely syntactical) does not fully describe the rich functioning of such systems, so goes the argument. While still attractive, the author has in the meantime abandoned the idea, for at least two reasons. One, fundamentals-seeking has itself been largely abandoned, because the study of questions like “is the mind computational”? has turned out to be non-productive. Two, brute force approaches such as ANN-based deep learning have been “unreasonably” successful, and this fact puts aside arguments about the limits of computational systems. The paper provides an overview of these developments.

The relevance of the social context in development gained specific emphasis from social constructivist approaches, which claimed that specific representational systems emerge from social-communicative interactions. According to this approach, most of the knowledge of a human individual is learnt through interactions, via indirect sources, and not necessarily from direct experience. In contrast, current models of cognitive development focus on the development of the individual independently from the social environment, and share the presumption that there are some innate factors that shape development. These models recognize the importance of the social environment, yet handle it as a specific domain of social relations or agents. I introduce new avenues of developmental research that postulate special innate social capacities that make children able to exploit the routes for indirect learning: learning from others, as well as learning about others. These social cognitive models allow children to exploit the presence of knowledgeable partners in order to fulfill their information seeking motivation. With the help of potential prewired inferential frames, infants filter and follow the behavior of others to maximize the epistemic benefit of social contexts, and to depart on the long route to become experts in understanding other minds.

We like to see who is stronger, richer, better, more clever. Since we humans (1) love lists; (2), are competitive, and (3) are jealous of other people, we like ranking. Students ranked in ascending order based on their heights in a gym reflects objectivity. However, many “Top Ten” (and other) lists are based on subjective categorization and give only the illusion of objectivity. We don’t always want to be seen objectively, since we don’t mind to have a better image or rank than we deserve. While making objective rankings sounds like an appealing goal, there are at least two different reasons why we may not have objectivity: ignorance and manipulation. Persons with less knowledge suffer from illusory superiority due to their cognitive bias, and this phenomenon is called the “Dunning-Kruger effect.” Omnipresent in society is not only ignorance but also manipulation. Manipulators have the intention of gaining personal advantage by adopting different tricks. Computer scientists design ranking algorithms, and computers can now process huge data sets with these algorithms. As we have seen, we are not always happy with the results, so we might ask whether, when, and how the results of a ranking algorithm should be controlled by content curators. Recent public debates about the use and misuse of data reinforce the message: we need a combination of human and computational intelligence. This paper is based on the book: Péter Érdi: RANKING. The Unwritten Rules of the Social Game We All Play. Oxford University Press, Érdi (2019).

David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature is arguably the best candidate for the first ever overarching attempt at a descriptive-explanatory science of the mind. This paper characterizes the key tenets of Hume’s undertaking and situates its central features in the context of then-contemporary science. According to the present argument, Hume’s science of man provides a chemical-organismic account of mental functioning that fits an intellectual environment dominated by post-Newtonian natural philosophy.

We developed a new eye-tracker based technique to investigate the reactions of one-year-old infants to stimulus contingencies generated by their own incidental leg movements. In a split-screen paradigm, infants were presented with two identical images that could dynamically change location. The motion of the image on one side of the screen was perfectly contingent with the participant’s leg movements (being controlled by a motion sensitive computer mouse attached to the infant’s leg), while the image on the other side moved along the same motion coordinates, but was not contingent with the participant’s actions. Replicating earlier results, we found that infants showed more interest in the less predictable non-contingent display, possibly motivated by information-seeking. However, their gaze towards the contingent display triggered larger pupil dilation, suggesting that detecting the high predictability of self-generated contingencies and the corresponding degree of control, manifested also in the reduced level of uncertainty, are rewarding to infants. Thus, the two dissociating measures appear to reflect two relevant functional aspects of contingency exploration and processing, information-seeking and control-seeking, which guide infants’ monitoring of the physical and social environment.

The presence of conspecifics may affect one’s cognitive processing in a variety of ways. Most effects fall beyond simple social facilitation: we are not only faster in performing a task when we do it with others, but also take into consideration their internal mental states, what they see, know or believe. While there may be clear benefits of taking the perspective of another agent for behavioral predictions, serving social coordination, or defeating competitors, it seems that we generate assumptions about others’ mental states even if the situation does not require it. Current debates target how spontaneous these processes are, and whether they are best described with higher- or lower-level mechanisms. Despite the intensity of the debate, however, we have scarce knowledge regarding the nature of these processes and the influence they exert over our first-person interpretations and inferential commitments. Here we propose that another agent’s presence triggers not only considering and sustaining multiple perspectives on the world, but may also influence the level of description that will be prioritized. To illustrate this point, we analyze examples involving linguistic quantification. Specifically, we discuss whether the perspective of others may (i) foster a more fine-grained retention of episodic information when assessing quantified abstractions, which do not presuppose the consideration of these details, and (ii) lead young learners to widen their semantic commitments when interpreting ambiguous statements.

The present chapter aims to clarify the existing associations between social cognitive skills and a productive pragmatic competence enabling the smooth coordination of discourse. It investigates if preschoolers have a sensitivity to the infringement of the Gricean conversational maxims (Maxim of Quantity, Quality, Manner and Relevance), and if their social-cognitive skills influence their success in the recognition of the infringements. Eventually the study reveals the entire trajectory of the levels of mentalization and the correspondence of these levels to the levels of pragmatic complexity, in a pyramid, that encapsulates the entire series of experimental pragmatic investigations by the author on the relationship between mentalization and metaphor (Schnell in Acta Linguistica 54–1:73–104, 2007), irony and humor comprehension (Schnell in Hungarian Humour. Humor and Culture. Tertium Society, 2012; Schnell and Varga in Hungarian humour. Humor and culture 3. Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies, 2012) and the recognition of Maxim infringements (2019). Finally, the findings in the maxim tasks are integrated into the matrix capturing all these levels of pragmatic competence, yielding a trajectory of social-cognitive development and the corresponding levels of pragmatic complexity. Conclusions drawn concerning the Maxim of Relevance being a super-maxim, and findings are embedded in contemporary research in cognitive development and pragmatics.

Evolutionary psychology comprises a wide area of theories and researches. One area focuses on the universal and comprehensive mechanisms of selection which can be utilized to interpret cultural phenomena. Memetic selection, epidemiology of representations, naturalistic approach to culture, and evolutionary epistemology use various principles and methods to explain the origin and spread of the cultural traits. Csaba Pléh, one of the representatives of Darwinian approach to social sciences, has made an effort to integrate these theoretical frameworks. He emphasizes the continuity among biological evolution, hominid development, and cultural differentiation and change. Indeed, understanding mental, behavioral, and material commonalities shared across individuals or groups of individuals requires a multi-level explanation at different types and levels of evolutionary processes that are based on the same organizational principles but also imply quite distinctive procedures for acquiring, interpreting and using information derived from the social world.

According to the dominant view in the literature, several numerical cognition phenomena are explained coherently and parsimoniously by the Approximate Number System (ANS) model, which supposes the existence of an evolutionarily old, simple representation behind many numerical tasks. We offer an alternative account that proposes that only nonsymbolic numbers are processed by the ANS, while symbolic numbers, which are more essential to human mathematical capabilities, are processed by the Discrete Semantic System (DSS). In the DSS, symbolic numbers are stored in a network of nodes, similar to conceptual or linguistic networks. The benefit of the DSS model and the benefit of the more general hybrid ANS–DSS framework are demonstrated using the crucial example of the distance and size effects of comparison tasks.