Sperber and Wilson (1987) have criticised Fodor's (1983) pessimistic view about the possibility of a science of central systems. Fodor's pessimism stems from the holistic nature of central systems – people can access anything that they know when engaging in belief fixation. It is argued that Sperber and Wilsons theory of how relevance is realized during verbal comprehension fails to elucidate this crucial aspect of central processes. Their claims about how a context is selected are shown to presuppose the ability to realize relevance.

Chiappe & Kukla argue that relevance theory fails to solve the frame problem as defined by Fodor. They are right. They are wrong, however, to take Fodor's frame problem too seriously. Fodor's concerns, on the other hand, even though they are wrongly framed, are worth addressing. We argue that relevance theory helps address them.

Peer review poses many challenges for journals. A downside of high rejection rates and sometimes delayed responses in publication decision by journals is a long time period between original submission of a manuscript and its ultimate acceptance and publication. One way of accelerating the process which might be worth considering is multiple submission. This commentary addresses that issue.

Rl In response to Somit & Peterson's call for multiple journal manuscript submissions, and consistent with Cicchetti (1991a and 1991b), counterarguments are presented. The policy for multiple submissions is difficult to defend scientifically ana would place an unwarranted burden on both reviewers and journal editors. As such the policy is again rejected. R2 As earlier hypothesized, referee agreement on manuscripts submitted to a major journal in chemistry was significantly higher for acceptance than for rejection. This is consistent with the high acceptance rate (>70%) of this journal. There is significantly more referee agreement on rejection than on acceptance for manuscripts submitted to major journals, in behavioral science and medicine. These journals have high rejection rates (often >70%).

Velmans (1991a; 1991b) proposed that consciousness plays a minor explanatory role in the information processing approach and that unconscious mechanisms process stimuli and responses and intervene between them. In contrast, the present commentary describes a thought experiment suggesting that, although input information is initially processed unconsciously, subsequent processing involves consciousness, and consciousness plays an important role in the explanation of behavior.

Viewed from a first-person perspective, consciousness appears to be necessary for complex, novel human activity. Viewed from a third-person perspective, however, consciousness appears to play no role in the activity of brains – producing a“causal paradox.” To resolve this paradox one needs to distinguish consciousness of processing from consciousness accompanying processing or causing processing. Accounts of consciousness/brain causal interactions switch between first- and third-person perspectives. However, epistemically, the differences between first-and third-person access are fundamental. First- and third-person accounts are complementary and mutually irreducible.

The new notation for mental-models theory proposed by Johnson-Laird and Byrne (1991; 1993) makes predictions that are inconsistent with those made previously by those authors. Notably, two frequently observed reasoning fallacies are not predicted by the theory. Moreover, the assumption made in the domain of syllogistic reasoning, that arbitrary numbers of individuals are used to represent premises, is also shown to cause problems for the prediction of problem difficulty.

We resolve the two problems that Hardman raises. The first problem arises from a misunderstanding: the crucial distinction is between one-model and multiple-model problems. The second problem illuminates a deeper principle: conclusions depend on the procedures for interpreting models. We describe an algorithm that obviates the problem and empirical work that reveals a new view of syllogistic reasoning.

Dunbar (1993) emphasizes the role of cooperative language use in the evolution of human linguistic capacity and neglects to consider the role that manipulative language use would have played. I argue that as group size and neocortieal size increased during human evolution, the adaptive value of using language to benefit oneself at the expense of others would also have increased. I discuss how selection pressures for manipulative language use would have operated in the contexts of mating, status striving, and social exchange.

It is suggested that language evolved to enable ancestral humans to use deception to manipulate each other rather than simply for the exchange of social information. I argue that any such usage must have been a byproduct of language evolution rather than the principal selection pressure.

Is schedule theory necessary? Or is Killeen (1994a) explaining clever laboratory contrivances that have no necessary relevance to understanding the role of behavior in life? We still await a psychological correspondence principle that can establish a sound basis for this elegant and essentially biological theory of reinforcement schedules.

Zeiler appreciates my organism-centered approach but believes that it issues from the wrong framework and focuses on the wrong phenomena. He is a “sharpener,” I a “leveler”; I believe that the full complexities of organisms in their natural environments should be the terminus, not the origin of our scientific enquiry. The study of schedule performance is oblique but not orthogonal to that terminus, and offers us a secure footing for the next step upward in complexity.

Saccadic eye movements create (at least) two related but distinct problems for the visual system: they cause rapid image motion and a displacement of the retinal image. Although it is often assumed that the motion is too fast to be resolved, this is certainly not the case for low-spatial-frequency images. Recent experiments have suggested that the reason we are unaware of the motion during saccades is because motion channels are selectively suppressed, possibly by suppression of the magno-cellular (but not the parvocellular) pathway. This suppression may explain why there is no sensation of motion during saccades, but it leaves open the problem of perceiving a stable world despite continual image displacements.

The array seen when saccading across a point light source blinking in the dark is displaced in the direction of the saccade. This displacement reflects an abrupt shift of spatiotopic coordinates that precedes the actual eye movement. The extraretinal signal mediating this discrete shift appears to be an oculomotor reference signal, specifying intended eye orientation, that changes discretely before saccades.

Saccadic suppression is selective, inhibiting only low spatial frequencies. High spatial frequencies need not be inhibited during saccades, for a rapidly moving retina lacks the temporal resolution to detect them. Low spatial frequencies are inhibited by suppressing magnocellular channels. Thus color information is not suppressed, as confirmed in two laboratories. Targets flashed during and just before saccades can be mislocalized because vision normally ignores presaccadic position information.

Although conditional stimulus (CS)/unconditional stimulus (US) contingency awareness appears to be necessary for human Pavlovian autonomie conditioning, only a selective review of the literature and the forgetting of certain basic, brute facts can allow the cognitive conclusion that awareness causes, or even is important for, conditioning. That conclusion is theoretically barren for explaining the phenomenon and is also of little potential practical use.

Shanks and St. John (1994a) suggest that “human learning is almost invariably accompanied by conscious awareness (of what is being learned).” From the viewpoint of a computer scientist who tries to construct learning systems, that claim seems rather implausible. In this commentary I wish to suggest why, in the hopes of shedding light on the relationship between consciousness and learning.

In the original target article (Shanks & St. John 1994), one of our principal conclusions was that there is almost no evidence that learning can occur outside awareness. The continuing commentaries raise some interesting questions, especially about the definition of learning, but do not lead us to abandon our conclusion.

A formal language to implement a computational-level theory of memory cannot be based on standard (Zermelo-Fraenkel) set theory. For correct models of a memory database to exist, non-well-founded sets must be permitted. This is illustrated by modifying an example from Barwise & Moss (1991).

Colonius suggests that, in using standard set theory as the language in which to express our computational-level theory of human memory, we would need to violate the axiom of foundation in order to express meaningful memory bindings in which a context is identical to an item in the list. We circumvent Colonius's objection by allowing that a list item may serve as a label for a context without being identical to that context. This debate serves to highlight the value of specifying memory operations in set theoretic notation, as it would have been difficult if not impossible to formulate such an objection at the algorithmic level.