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Here's your wiki for Penn, et al.

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mutatis mutandis (p. 4)- "by changing those things which need to be changed" or more simply "the necessary changes having been made" sensu stricto (p. 5)- in the narrow sense

Summary:

Comparative cognitive psychology has tended to view differences between human and nonhuman minds as a matter of degree, going back to Darwin's //The Descent of Man.// Similarities are seized upon and claimed to be part of one cognition continuum. This article argues that this approach is mistaken, warning not to conclude from the surprising biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals that the same share a type of mind. Particularly, there is a glaring discontinuity in the difference between humans and all other animals can "approximate the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system". This symbolic-relational discontinuity runs on almost all an iBrain's apps, and goes deeper than would be possible using the machinery of language or culture alone. The article proposes "a representational-level specification" of the differences between human and nonhuman animals' abilities to approximate a physical symbol system. Recent work in symbolic-connectionist models of cognition may be useful in studying the gap between human and nonhuman minds.

-**Pg. 122:** "If the history of animal language research demonstrates nothing else, it demonstrates that you cannot create a human mind simply by taking a nonhuman one and teaching it to use language like symbols." To follow that up please take a moment and peep this subsequent link. It's funny, and highly relevant (I hope you'll all agree): **[]**

(copied from wikipedia)
 * Corvidae** is a [|cosmopolitan] [|family] of [|oscine] [|passerine] birds that contains the [|crows], [|ravens], [|rooks], [|jackdaws], [|jays], [|magpies], [|treepies], [|choughs] and [|nutcrackers].[|[][|1][|]][|[][|2][|]] The common English names used are **corvids** (more technically) or the **crow family** (more informally), and there are over 120 species. The genus //Corvus//, including the jackdaws, crows and ravens, makes up over a third of the entire family.

And might I say.... this is a lot to wade through!

I agree... //**Sine qua non**// //(pronounced as Americanized [|/ˌsaɪnɨ kweɪ ˈnɒn/] or more Latinate [|/ˌsɪneɪ kwɑː ˈnoʊn/] //)[|[][|1][|]] or //**conditio sine qua non**// //(plural: sine quibus non)// refers to an indispensable and essential action, condition, or ingredient. It was originally a [|Latin] [|legal] term for "(a condition) without which it could not be" or "but for..." or "without which (there is) nothing." **(Wikipedia)**

Pg. 114 " Therefore, the claim that nohuman animals are capable of analogical inferences rests solely on Sarah's performance in the test of functional analogies reported by Gillan et al." Later it says that this only happend once and was not replicated by Sarah or any other nonhuman subject. Overall, this section tells me that there needed more tests, that what info there was, was not enough. pg. 118 //**Ceteris paribus**// or //**caeteris paribus**// is a [|Latin] phrase, literally translated as "with other things the same," or "all other things being equal or held constant." It is an example of an [|ablative absolute] and is commonly rendered in English as "all other things being equal." A prediction, or a statement about [|causal] or logical connections between two states of affairs, is qualified by //ceteris paribus// in order to acknowledge, and to rule out, the possibility of other factors that could override the relationship between the [|antecedent] and the [|consequent].[|[1]] **(Wikipedia)**

__**Frequently mentioned theories in the article:**__
 * PSS Hypothesis (or the physical symbol system**) Explanation on page 123: "mental representations are composed of discrete, symbolic tokens, which can be combined into complex representations by forming syntactically structured relations of various types"

Explanation from Wikipedia: A physical symbol system (also called a [|formal system] ) takes physical patterns (symbols), combining them into structures (expressions) and manipulating them (using processes) to produce new expressions." ... " This claim implies both that human thinking is a kind of symbol manipulation (because a symbol system is necessary for intelligence) and that machines can be intelligent (because a symbol system is [|sufficient] for intelligence)."


 * Relational Reinterpretation Hypothesis (or RR)** Explanation on page 111: "only human animals possess the representational processes necessary for systematically reinterpreting first-order perceptual relations in terms of higher-order, role-governed relational structures akin to those found in a physical symbol system (PSS)."


 * Learning and Inference with Schemas and Analogies (or LISA)** Explanation on page 128: "LISA combines the syntactic strengths of a PSS with the semantic flexibility and generalizations capabilities of a distributed connectionist system by using temporal synchrony to approximate the dynamic role-filler binding capabilities of a PSS within a connectionist architecture" and "LISA suggests that approximating the higher-order, role-governed features of a PSS is not likely to be an ability that evolved by accident or as a by-product of increased brain size, greater neural plasticity, or larger processing capacity alone. There must be other substantive differences between human and nonhuman primate brains waiting to be discovered."

The foremost focus of this article proves devout in explicitly showcasing the repeated failures of the scientific community to analogize human and non-human cognitive functions. Of the avian and primate research cited by Penn et al., much dates back into 1970's. The datedness of this non-human cognitive research highlights the scope and tradition, seen here as scholarly preoccupation tasked in its aim of either proving or disproving any, all, or some of the potential homologies/analogies existent between humans and the rest of the biological world. Proof, refutation and ignorance resultant from such research has compelled much contention and appears to be scientifically, politically and religiously charged. In Bickerton's response to this paper (pg. 132), he likens the topic (in his typically exaggeratory manner) to "Holocaust denial and rejection of global warming."

Bickerton also sometimes fails to note his own theoretical freedoms in light of the empirical studies to which he is respondent (pg. 132): "Penn et al. have no answers, because they share with most linguists and cognitive scientists a reluctance to grapple with what is know about human evolution. The many gaps and ambiguities in that record license extreme caution in handling it, but not, surely, ignoring it altogether."

Penn et. al. seem to contradict their claim that they are presenting a clear rebuttal to the current consensus that the differences between human and nonhuman minds are “a matter of degree and not of kind.” Their Relational Reinterpretation hypothesis seems to support both views that nonhuman capacities for symbolic reasoning are built on architectural scaffolding found in other species; and are also based on a much more complex set of capacities for abstraction. In terms of this capacity for abstraction, human minds rely on a cognitive representational map that allows us to make analogies based on internal representations that are basically imaginary extensions of embodied and perceptual cognition. In other words, they say that our capacities are qualitatively different yet they use terms like "degree" and refer to the "scaffolding" that our abilities are built on. The open peer discussion by other experts also seems to bring up ideas that all have validity and are worthy of being incorporated into a broader conceptual model. I speculate that so much new data is being compiled from studies in both animal intelligence and in understanding how the human mind works, that we are nowhere near creating a conclusive conceptual model that completely supports any of the theories presented, let alone adding the evolutionary and neurobiological aspects.