Bering and colleagues (2004, 2005) reported that the expectation that conscious mental states cease with the onset of death (discontinuity reasoning) emerges developmentally, and discontinuity reasoning for some states (emotions, desire, epistemic) remains lower than for others (psychobiological, perceptual). Cormier (2005) reported very similar findings for the context of sleep and proposed a modular explanation of these effects (“intentional persistence”) and suggested that intentional persistence represents an evolved adaptation designed to maintain vigilance and behavioral preparedness while in the presence of animals of ambiguous agency status (e.g., death, sleep, hibernation, feigned death). The current study extended this line of research to realistic animal characters. Although results revealed patterns of discontinuity reasoning and intentional persistence that were consistent with those of previous studies, the prediction that intentional persistence would be more pronounced for predators was not fulfilled. A newly proposed evolutionary product, “Cooptation,” was introduced to further explain the results. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

People gesture every day and everywhere. They gesture in communication, speech, and for themselves while thinking. A large number of studies have explored the gestures in speech and communication under a variety of conditions. However, gestures for thinking did not draw much attention, yet they are natural and spontaneous behaviors of the human being and can reveal the way people process information. Gestures in thinking are also believed to be beneficial in comprehension and memory. Previous studies have demonstrated that people gesture for spatial thinking tasks such as map reading and text navigation test. Theories on embodied cognition and grounded cognition claim that gestures are needed when people visualize the models in mind. What if the models are not inherently spatial? Will people gesture for abstract information? Or on the contrary, what if the models are already presented in visual spatial form that you can simply copy the image, not build one on your own? Will people gesture for diagrams and maps? If so, what kind of gestures will they use? Will gesture improve comprehension and memory? This work provides evidence that people gesture for not inherently spatial models and spatial models that are presented in diagrammatic format. For information that is not inherently spatial, participants use representational gestures to facilitate the visualization. For instance, a temporal schedule can be visualized into a two-dimension table. For linear order text, people create a list of items that are organized by a certain order. When the spatial and not inherently spatial models are presented in maps or diagrams, representational gestures were still observed and beneficial for the memory test. Due to the limited sample size and other limitations of the lab setting experiment, these studies did not provide strong results that support the hypotheses that gestures help people comprehend and memorize information. Gestures were found beneficial for only one type of stimuli (mechanical systems) and an overall effect on memory test scores across text and diagram stimuli. Even though the effect of gestures was not significant between different types and formats of stimuli, it was in the right direction. Future research with more sensitive measurements could further explore gestures for thinking.

This dissertation is about the structure of thought. Following Gottlob Frege, I define a thought as the sort of content relevant to determining whether an assertion is true or false. The historical component of the dissertation involves interpreting Frege’s actual views on the structure of thought. I argue that Frege did not think that a thought has a unique decomposition into its component senses, but rather the same thought can be decomposed into senses in a variety of distinct ways. I extend Frege’s position and use it to develop an account of the hierarchy of senses, the senses expressed by indexicals and demonstratives, and the distinction between logical and non-logical structure. I also discuss various connections with the nature of meta-representation, our capacity for reflective judgment, some aspects of the structure of conscious experience, the way we perceive regions of space and durations of time, and our conscious awareness of our own perceptions and events of thinking.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-251). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2001. / Bibliography: leaves 116-117.

Thesis--Gothenburg. / Extra t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references (p. 168-177).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2001. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-251). Also available on the Internet.

This thesis is an investigation of the relation between language and thought in terms of the Saussurean concept of linguistic sign. However, it is not an empirical study of the relation between language and thought and, therefore, not a study of the Whorfian problem of linguistic relativity, but rather a study of how we understand the nature of language and thought such that we think they are related in a certain way. This thesis is an investigation of the “metaphysical” picture that underlies our understanding of the relation between language and thought. In this study, we believe that how we understand the nature of language and thought is implicitly related to how we understand their relation. Therefore, we cannot really deduce the relation between language and thought from our understanding of language and thought independently of how the relation is initially understood. The whole matter is indeed about what is the larger picture within which we understand the nature of language and thought. And, we think the Saussurean concept of linguistic sign, which deals with the problem of the duality of forms and ideas, provides us with such a picture. This is primarily the reason that motivates the present study. In investigating the relation between language and thought from the Saussurean semiological perspective, we will also take into account the problem of the origin of language, which we think, represents another picture of language in that it represents an attempt to study the nature of language from a naturalistic perspective. Therefore, we want to contrast the Saussurean picture of language with this naturalistic picture of language; we want to see how the problem of the origin of language is understood from a semiological perspective. This would allow us to see how language is understood from a synchronic perspective in the Saussurean picture of language. Finally, it is hoped the present study would contribute to our understanding of how language and thought is in fact always inseparable in our conception from a Saussurean perspective, that is, in terms of our existence as speakers. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

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