Van der Henst argues that the theory of mental models lacks a pragmatic component. He fills the gap with the notion that reasoners draw the most relevant conclusions. We agree, but argue that theories need an element of “nondeterminism.” It is often impossible to predict either what will be most relevant or which particular conclusion an individual will draw.

Rolls emphasizes the role of emotion in behavior. My commentary provides some balance to that position by arguing that stored social knowledge dominates our behavior and controls emotional states, thereby reducing emotions to a subservient role in behavior.

In reply to Wierzbicka's advocacy of semantic primitives we argue that talk of the semantic primitives (like to see) repeats the fallacies addressed in the target article at a higher level. In reply to Malcolm's plea for a Wittgensteinian grammar of colour words, we argue that he uses words like “we” and “us” too easily, falling into the trap of “silly relativism.” In reply to McManus's science of word counts, we reiterate the nineteenth-century criticism that this method is based on an illegitimate application of seemingly rigorous statistical methods.

Schmitt has equivocated about the underlying psychology of sociosexuality, but from the data presented in the target article, it would appear that he has drawn out the underlying cognitive architecture. In this commentary, I describe this architecture and discuss two emerging hypotheses about heterosexual and homosexual male sociosexuality.

Atran reifies Fodor's metaphor of modularity to create a truth-producing apparatus to generate a priori taxonomies or natural kinds that lock a tautology in place.

Grodzinsky's hypotheses need different theories of grammar for comprehension and for production. These predictions are undesirable. Hungarian data are incompatible with the Trace Deletion Hypothesis.

The locus equation proposal ignores a fundamental difference between human speech perception and nonhuman echolocation and sound localization, offers a questionable account of the function of consonant-vowel coarticulation, and is further undermined if the effects of other forms of coarticulation are considered. The function of coarticulation is to convey phonetic information rapidly and reliably.

Somewhat in contrast to their proposal of two separate somatosensory streams, Dijkerman & de Haan (D&dH) propose that tactile recognition involves active manual exploration, and therefore involves parietal cortex. I argue that interactions from perception for action to object recognition can be found also in vision. Furthermore, there is evidence that perception for action and perception for recognition rely on similar processing principles.

Atran's account of cultural transmission can be further refined by considering constraints from early-developed, domain-specific intuitive ontological understanding. These suggest specific predictions about the cultural survival of “memes,” depending on the way they activate intuitive understanding. There is no general dynamic of cultural inheritance; only complex predictions for domain-specific competencies that cut across cultural domains.

We concentrate on two aspects of the article by Pothos & Busemeyer (P&B): the relationship between classical and quantum probability and quantum probability as a basis for rational decisions. We argue that the mathematical relationship between classical and quantum probability is not quite what the authors claim. Furthermore, it might be premature to regard quantum probability as the best practical rational scheme for decision making.

Pothos & Busemeyer (P&B) argue how key concepts of quantum probability, for example, order/context, interference, superposition, and entanglement, can be used in cognitive modeling. Here, we suggest that these concepts can be extended to analyze neurophysiological measurements of cognitive tasks in humans, especially in functional neuroimaging investigations of large-scale brain networks.

Rational models vary in their goals and sources of justification. While the assumptions of some are grounded in the environment, those of others – which I label probabilistic models – are induced and so require more traditional sources of justification, such as generalizability to dissimilar tasks and making novel predictions. Their contribution to scientific understanding will remain uncertain until standards of evidence are clarified.

Gigerenzer, Todd, and the ABC Research Group give an interesting account of simple decision rules in a variety of contexts. I agree with their basic idea that animals use simple rules. In my commentary I concentrate on some aspects of their treatment of decision rules in behavioural ecology.

Advancing second-person neuroscience will need strong theories, as well as the new methods detailed by Schilbach et al. I assess computational theories, enactive theories, and cognitive/information processing theories, and argue that information processing approaches have an important role to play in second-person neuroscience. They provide the closest link to brain imaging and can give important insights into social behaviour.

Though it draws on the grammatical metaphor of person (first, third, second) in terms of representations, Schilbach et al.'s target article does not consider an orthogonal line of evidence for the centrality of interaction to social cognition: the many grammatical phenomena, some widespread cross-linguistically and some only being discovered, which are geared to supporting real-time interaction. My commentary reviews these, and the contribution linguistic evidence can make to a fuller account of social cognition.

The logic of the basic taste concept is discussed in relation to the physiology and psychophysics of color vision. An alternative version of the basic taste model, analogous to opponent-process theory is introduced. The logic of quality naming experiments is clarified.

In order to develop sophisticated models of the core domains of knowledge that support complex cognitive processing in infants and children, developmental psychologists have mapped out the content of these knowledge domains. This research strategy may provide a blueprint for advancing research on adult cognitive processing. I illustrate this suggestion with examples from analogical reasoning and decision making.

Although the momentum metaphor is successful in many ways, there remain problems with the adequacy of the notion of a force in the behavioral sense and the question of whether the conditions used to apply force can truly be separated from the conditions that establish and maintain behavioral mass.

What people report is, at times, the best evidence we have for what they experience. Newell & Shanks (N&S) do a service for debates regarding the role of unconscious influences on decision making by offering some sound methodological recommendations. We doubt, however, that those recommendations go far enough. For even if people have knowledge of the factors that influence their decisions, it does not follow that such knowledge is conscious, and plays a causal role, at the time the decision is made. Moreover, N&S fail to demonstrate that unconscious thought plays no role at all in decision making. Indeed, such a claim is quite implausible. In making these points we comment on their discussion of the literature on expertise acquisition and the Iowa Gambling Task.

Sussman et al. describe an ecological property of the speech signal that is putatively functional in perception. An important issue, however, is whether their putative cue is an emerging feature or whether the second formant (F2) onset and the F2 vowel actually provide independent cues to perceptual categorization. Regardless of the outcome of this issue, an important goal of speech research is to understand how multiple cues are evaluated and integrated to achieve categorization.