This commentary is an attempt to give a Vygotskian perspective on Carpendale's & Lewis's (C&L's) target article. The article uses ideas that are well familiar to Vygotsky's scholars. However, it develops these ideas further and raises important empirical questions about the role of social interaction in the development of social cognition. The article provides a fresh view on the old problems and frames themes traditional for the English-speaking developmental psychology into a broader international perspective.

Block explains the conflation of phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness by appeal to the ambiguity of the term “consciousness.” However, the nature of ambiguity is not at all clear, and the thesis that “consciousness” is ambiguous between phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness is far from obvious. Moreover, the conflation can be explained without supposing that the term is ambiguous. Block's argument can thus be strengthened by avoiding controversial issues in the semantics of “consciousness.”

Motherese is a form of affective prosody injected automatically into speech during caregiving solicitude. Affective prosody is the aspect of language that conveys emotion by changes in tone, rhythm, and emphasis during speech. It is a neocortical function that allows graded, highly varied vocal emotional expression. Other mammals have only rigid, species-specific, limbic vocalizations. Thus, encephalization with corticalization is necessary for the evolution of progressively complex vocal emotional displays.

Schizophrenia patients exhibit impairments across multiple clinical, cognitive, and functional domains. A fundamental abnormality of the timing and/or efficiency of neural processes across disparate brain regions (i.e., cortico-cortical communications) may underlie many of the deficits in schizophrenia. Because gamma synchrony is temporally correlated with many cognitive processes, probing patterns of gamma activation may shed light on the functional integrity of neural circuits in schizophrenia and related disorders.

As fundamental researchers in the neuroethology of efference copy, we were stimulated by Grush's bold and original synthesis. In the following critique, we draw attention to ways in which it might be tested in the future, we point out an avoidable conceptual error concerning emulation that Grush seems to share with other workers in the field, and we raise questions about the neural correlates of Grush's schemata that might be probed by neurophysiologists.

The constructs of behavioral mass in research on the momentum of operant behavior and associative strength in Pavlovian conditioning have some interesting parallels, as suggested by Savastano & Miller. Some recent findings challenge the strict separation of operant and Pavlovian determiners of response rate and resistance to change in behavioral momentum, renewing the need for research on the interaction of processes that have traditionally been studied separately. Relatedly, Furedy notes that some autonomic responses may be refractory to conditioning, but a combination of operant contingencies and enriched Pavlovian stimulus-reinforcer relations may prove effective.

The specific mechanisms whereby Pavlovian conditioning leads to adaptive behavior need to be elaborated. There is no evidence that it is via reduction in the “destabilizing effect that time lags have on feedback control” (Domjan et al. 2000, sect. 3.3). The adaptive value of Pavlovian conditioning goes well beyond the regulation of social behavior.

The definition of motherese is extended to infant-directed vocalizations in non-hominin mammals. In many species, vocal interactions between mothers and their infants are common. The neural substrates mediating these interactions include the rostral limbic cortex of the frontal lobe. Spoken language may have arisen from hominin females vocalizing to their infants.

Although we agree with the authors' criticism of the reigning approach to children's sociocognitive development, we raise three further issues. First, “mind talk” is not, in fact, any different from the other aspects of the social world about which children learn. Second, there is no choice between either the “single mind” or the “social context.” Finally, there is a spurious separation between organism and environment.

Dualistic approaches to the mind-body relationship are commonplace; however, the adoption of dualistic thinking can often obscure aspects of the way the organism functions as a whole biological entity. Future versions of the emulation theory will, it is hoped, address some of these issues, including the nature of process noise, how distinct iterations can occur, and how to deal with non-emulated aspects of motor control.

It is argued that Block's thought experiment on superblindsight and “the Inverse Anton's syndrome” are not cases of A-consciousness without P-consciousness. “Weak dispositional states” should be excluded from the set of A-conscious states, and a subject's being reflectively conscious of a P-conscious state is suggested as a better candidate for A-consciousness. It is further pointed out that dreams, according to Block's own criterion but contrary to what he claims, are A-unconscious and it is argued that Block should not accept the idea that high-information representational content is an empirically sufficient condition of phenomenality in human beings.

Hallucinations do not originate in a single region of the brain, the thalamus, and cannot be traced back to a single pathological mechanism. They emerge from the complex interaction of several brain regions, and are not necessarily the result of sensory impairment or the effect of a defective filter. In the case of schizophrenia, hallucinations are accessory symptoms, in Bleuler's sense, and are thus not central to this disorder.

For the authors' responses to comments similar to those expressed here by Balsam & Drew, please see: M. Domjan, B. Cusato, & R. Villarreal (2000). Extensions, elaborations, and explanations of the role of evolution and learning in the control of social behavior. BBS 23(2):269–82. [Authors' Response to first round of commentary.]

The computational hypothesis was formulated with due concern for limits and is consistent with imposed intelligibility doctrines. Theories are products of scientific work that impose human classifications and formalisms on nature. The claim that “cognitive agents are dynamical systems” is untenable. Dynamical formalisms imposed on a natural system, given an approximate fit, serve as an explanatory framework and render a represented system predictable and intelligible.

A converging pattern of evidence from laughter, tickling, and motherese suggests that bipedal locomotion plays a critical and unanticipated role in vocal evolution. Bipedalism frees the thorax of its support role during quadrupedal locomotion, which permits the uncoupling of breathing and striding necessary for the subsequent selection for vocal virtuosity and speech.

Grush's framework has epistemological implications and explains how it is possible to acquire offline empirical knowledge. It also complements the extended-mind thesis, which says that mind leaks into the world. Grush's framework suggests that the world leaks into the mind through the offline deployment of emulators that we usually deploy in our experience of the world.

Behrendt & Young (B&Y) propose that a dysfunction in the reticular thalamic nucleus contributes to disinhibition of specific thalamic nuclei, allowing cortical attention mechanisms to engage thalamic relay neurons, causing underconstrained activation of the cortex and hallucinations. The following hypothesis challenges the notion of impaired sensory gating by providing the alternative view that hypofrontality reduces the power of incoming stimuli, causing internal drives to override consciousness, resulting in hallucinations.

Theories of children's understanding of mind benefit from rigorous interpretations of demonstrations of similar understandings in closely related species. This commentary describes how Carpendale & Lewis's (C&L's) argument could be made more persuasive with a more rigorous interpretation of the studies of chimpanzees' understanding of mind.

Theory-of-mind (TOM) competence is under-specified in Carpendale & Lewis's (C&L's) account. In the neo-Vygotskian alternative outlined below, TOM development is driven by the internalisation of dialogic exchanges which preserve the triadic intentional relations of interactions within the epistemic triangle. On this view, TOM competence stems from children's ability to operate flexibly with the multiple perspectives manifested in internalised dialogue.

Lachman claims that the Dynamical Hypothesis (DH) is “untenable.” His own position is a version of the “The DH is epistemological, not ontological,” objection to the target article, which is dealt with in section R2.3 of my original response (van Gelder 1998r). Additional objections are that the coverage of the hypothesis is “vast” and that the DH presupposes we have reached the end point of scientific theorizing. Indeed, the DH is very broad, but it does not presuppose that science has ended; that's why we call it a “hypothesis.”