Brette criticizes the notion of neural coding because it seems to entail that neural signals need to “decoded” by or for some receiver in the head. If that were so, then neural coding would indeed be homuncular (Brette calls it “dualistic”), requiring an entity to decipher the code. But I think Brette's plea to think instead in terms of complex, interactive causal throughput is preaching to the converted. Turing (not Shannon) has already shown the way. In any case, the metaphor of neural coding has little to do with the symbol grounding problem.

Were we just the Darwinian adaptive survival/reproduction machines von Hippel & Trivers invoke to explain us, the self-deception problem would not only be simpler, but also nonexistent. Why would unconscious robots bother to misinform themselves so as to misinform others more effectively? But as we are indeed conscious rather than unconscious robots, the problem is explaining the causal role of consciousness itself, not just its supererogatory tendency to misinform itself so as to misinform (or perform) better.

Machery suggests that the concept of “concept” is too heterogeneous to serve as a “natural kind” for scientific explanation, so cognitive science should do without concepts. I second the suggestion and propose substituting, in place of concepts, inborn and acquired sensorimotor category-detectors and category-names combined into propositions that define and describe further categories.

The following is an attempt to make explicit some of the questions to which commentators appear to have furnished default answers of their own, answers that have perhaps given rise to certain misunderstandings. It is hoped that in this explicit form the questions will allow Professor Skinner's position to be equally explicitly formulated. (Please note that there is some overlap with Professor Catania's questions 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10.)

Christiansen & Chater (C&C) suggest that language is an organism, like us, and that our brains were not selected for Universal Grammar (UG) capacity; rather, languages were selected for learnability with minimal trial-and-error experience by our brains. This explanation is circular: Where did our brain's selective capacity to learn all and only UG-compliant languages come from?

steels & belpaeme's (s&b's) simulations contain all the right components, but they are put together wrongly. color categories are unrepresentative of categories in general and language is not merely naming. language evolved because it provided a powerful new way to acquire categories (through instruction, rather than just the old way of other species, through trial-and-error experience). it did not evolve so that multiple agents looking at the same objects could let one another know which of the objects they had in mind, co-coining names for them on the fly.

Many strands are woven into the ideas and work of Jeffrey Gray. From a background of classical languages and a spell in military intelligence spent honing skills in languages and typing, he took two BA degrees (in modern languages and psychology) at Oxford University. He then trained as a clinical psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry (IOP), London, capping this with a PhD on the sources of emotional behaviour.