The evolutionary stability of sexual reproduction requires advantages sufficient to overcome the substantial costs of cross-fertilization (Williams, 1975; Maynard Smith, 1978; Bell, 1982; Lively & Lloyd, 1990). Such advantages have been sought primarily among those known to be associated with the production of variable offspring (but see Bernstein et al., 1985). Of those considered, two advanta...

1. Kinds and psychosemantics – not a match made in heaven Reductive, naturalistic psychosemantic theories do not have a good track record when it comes to accommodating the representation of kinds. In this paper, I will suggest a particular teleosemantic strategy to solve this problem, grounded in the neurocomputational details of the cerebral cortex. It is a strategy with some parallels to one...

We use category theory to propose a unified approach to the Schur–Weyl dualities involving the general linear Lie algebras, their polynomial extensions and associated quantum deformations. We define multiplicative sequences of algebras exemplified by the sequence of group algebras of the symmetric groups and use them to introduce associated monoidal categories. Universal properties of these cat...

Although theories of mental simulations have used different formulations of the premises of ‘thought experiments’, they can be fitted under a minimalist hypothesis stating that mental simulations are run under situations of uncertainty to turn that uncertainty into approximate answers. Three basic assumptions of mental simulations were tested by using naturalistic data from engineering design. ...

The Minimalist Program, by Noam Chomsky, is a collection of four articles, ‘The Theory of Principles and Parameters ’ (written with Howard Lasnik, –), ‘Some notes on Economy of Derivation and representation’ (–), ‘A Minimalist Program for linguistic theory’ (–), and ‘Categories and transformations’ (–). The first three articles have appeared elsewhere, and are reprinted h...