Multiple supervenience is a problematic notion whose role can well be served by a contextualized or properly restricted standard notion of supervenience. It is furthermore not needed to defend functionalism against Kim's charge that cross-classifying taxonomies imply a serious form of dualism; nor does Ross & Spurrett's (R&S's) Kitcherian account of the metaphysics of causation crucially depend on multiple supervenience.

Pickering & Garrod (P&G) describe a mechanism by which the situation models of dialog participants become progressively aligned via priming at different levels. This commentary attempts to characterize how alignment and routinization can be extended into the language acquisition domain by establishing links between alignment and joint attention, and between routinization and grammatical construction learning.

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) mechanistic theory of dialogue is a major advance for psycholinguistics. But the commitment to representational parity in production and comprehension is problematic. Recent research suggests that speakers frequently produce a structure that listeners find ungrammatical and have trouble understanding. If the grammars of the two systems are different, then the assumption of representational parity must be relaxed.

Some data concerning visual illusions are hardly compatible with the perception–action model, assuming that only the perception system is influenced by visual context. The planning–control dichotomy offers an alternative that better accounts for some controversy in experimental data. We tested the two models by submitting the patient I. G. to the induced Roelofs effect. The similitude of the results of I. G. and control subjects favoured Glover's model, which, however, presents a paradox that needs to be clarified.

The crying curve across early infancy may reflect the developing interaction between circadian and homeostatic processes of sleep-wake regulation. Excessive crying may be interpreted as a misalignment of the two processes. On the basis of the proposed mechanism, excessive crying may be an honest signal of need, namely, to elicit parental resources to modulate the behavioral state.

There are reasons to endorse Krueger & Funder's (K&F's) critique, but also to disagree with their diagnosis. A “problem-seeking approach” is hardly the cause of imbalance and lack of theoretical integration. Precommitted, ideological theories afford a more appropriate explanation.

In the case of religion, explanations based on emotion should be privileged over those based on “cold” cognition. The origins of religious beliefs are as critical to understanding religion as are the group phenomena which sustain them. In addition, religion's relationship to the growth of knowledge is neglected by the target authors. The balance between the costs and benefits of religion will vary depending upon the phase of an individual society's cultural evolution.

Ross & Spurrett (R&S) fail to take metaphysics seriously because they do not make a clear enough distinction between how we understand the world and what the world is really like. Although they show that the behavioral and cognitive sciences are genuinely explanatory, it is not clear that they have shown that these special sciences identify properties that are genuinely causal.

Glover's planning–control model accommodates a substantial number of findings from subjects who have motor deficits as a consequence of brain lesions. A number of consistently observed and robust findings are not, however, explained by Glover's theory; additionally, the claim that the IPL supports planning whereas the SPL supports control is not consistently supported in the literature.

In addition to the “universal glue,” which is the local mechanical causation, the standard explanatory scheme of classical science presumes two “universal vessels,” which are global space and time. I call this outdated metaphysical setting “black-and-white” because it allows for only two principal scales. A prospective metaphysics able to bind existing sciences together needs to be “colored,” that is, allow for scale relativity and diversification by domain.

This excellent outline of evolutionary hypotheses is compromised by severe reductionism. Other writings succeed in granting theism ontological significance without compromising rigor. The discussion of counterintuitiveness neglects coherence in memory. Bearing in mind our severely limited working memory capacity, susceptibility to religious mythologies may comprise an adaptive heuristic approach to summarizing the contingencies of the most far-reaching of life's problems.

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) theory of dialogue production cannot completely explain recent data showing that when interactants in referential communication tasks have different views of a physical space, they accommodate their language to their partner's view rather than mimicking their partner's expressions. Instead, these data are consistent with the hypothesis that interactants are taking the perspective of their conversational partners.

The “straw man” prior expectation of the dominant social psychology paradigm is that humans should behave with perfect rationality and high ethical standards. The more modest claim of evolutionary psychologists is that humans have evolved specific adaptations for adaptive problems that were reliably present in the ancestral environment. Outside that restricted range of problems, one should not expect optimal behavior.

Soltis' paper contains little data on the underlying neural substrate of the discussed signal function of early infant crying – probably because there is amazingly little known about it. We here discuss the interest of functional neuroimaging as an objective measurement of brain activity in (1) early infants during crying and (2) parents hearing their offspring cry.

Pickering & Garrod's (P&G's) claim that conversationalists do not explicitly keep track of their interlocuters' information states is important. Nonetheless, via alignment, they seem to create a virtually symmetrical view of the information states of speaker and addressee – a key component of their accounts of collaborative utterances and of self-monitoring. As I show, there is significant evidence for intrinsic contextual misalignment between conversationalists that can persist across turns.

In this commentary I attempt to extend the argument made by Atran and Norenzayan in two ways. First, I distinguish between the causes and the consequences of religious belief and speculate on the positive and negative consequences of religion. Second, I raise some questions about individual differences in religiosity and suggest that the origins of nonbelief are worth investigating.

Very young children occasionally commit scale errors, which involve a dramatic dissociation between planning and control: A child's visual representation of the size of a miniature object is not used in planning an action on it, but is used in the control of the action. Glover's planning–control model offers a very useful framework for analyzing this newly documented phenomenon.

Although Ross & Spurrett (R&S) successfully fend off the threat of Kim's “supervenience argument” by showing that it conflates different notions of causation, their proposal for a dynamic systems answer to the mind-body problem is itself yet another supervenience claim in need of an explanation that justifies it. The same goes for their notion of “multiple supervenience.”

The colic cry as a signal of undifferentiated vigour, and not a disease, is good news. This hypothesis also has neurobiological perspectives. Feeding increases the pain threshold of the infant and has an effect on its brain functions. These may contribute, by neurobiological mechanisms, to the gradual decline in the tendency for excessive crying during the first months of life.

In following the form of a standard “bias” paper, the authors highlight a potentially serious bias of uncertain magnitude. A negative focus in research has certain adaptive features in terms of professional and public support, as well as theory generation. The bias deserves attention and correction, but in ways that do not exaggerate its liabilities or overlook its virtues.