Research into child language reveals that it takes a long time for children to learn the correct mapping of colour words. Steels & Belpaeme’s (S&B’s) guessing game, however, models fast learning of words. We discuss computational studies based on cross-situational learning, which yield results that are more consistent with the empirical child language data than those obtained by S&B.

it is argued in the target article that hemispheric lateralization is advantageous when faced with conflicting choices. as decision-making processes must have been subject to a strong selection pressure, the sensitivity of response latencies could suggest a modular and hierarchical organization of behavioral execution, as was formulated by tinbergen (1951).

sunstein aims to provide a nonsectarian account of moral heuristics, yet the account rests on a controversial meta-ethical view. further, moral theorists who reject act consequentialism may deny that sunstein's examples involve moral mistakes. but so what? within a theory that counts consequences as a morally weighty feature of actions, the moral judgments that sunstein points to are indeed mistaken, and the fact that governmental action at odds with these judgments will be controversial doesn't bar such action.

if, as is not implausible, the correct moral theory is indexed to human capacity for moral reasoning, then the thesis that moral heuristics exist faces a serious objection. this objection can be answered by embracing a wide reflective equilibrium account of the origins of our normative principles of morality.

The simulations of Steels & Belpaeme (S&B) suggest that communication could lead to color categories that are closely shared within a language and potentially diverge across languages. We argue that this is opposite of the patterns that are actually observed in empirical studies of color naming. Focal color choices more often exhibit strong concordance across languages while also showing pronounced variability within any language.

successful application of heuristics depends on how a problem is represented, mentally. moral imagination is a good technique for reflecting on, and sharing, mental representations of ethical dilemmas, including those involving emerging technologies. future research on moral heuristics should use more ecologically valid problems and combine quantitative and qualitative methods.

steels & belpaeme (s&b) ask how autonomous agents can derive perceptually grounded categories for successful communication, using color categorization as an example. their comparison of nativism, empiricism, and culturalism, although interesting, does not include key biological and technological constraints for seeing color or learning color categories in realistic environments. other neural models have successfully included these constraints.

The interesting and deep commentaries on our target article reflect the continued high interest in the problem of colour categorisation and naming. Clearly, colour remains for many cognitive science related disciplines a fascinating microworld in which some of the most fundamental issues for cognition and culture can be studied. Although our target article took the stance of practically oriented engineers who are trying to find the best solution for orchestrating the self-organisation of communication systems in artificial agents, most commentators focus on the implications for cognitive science and we will do the same in our reply.

steels & belpaeme (s&b) are clearly interested in the possible test their models may provide for human language theories. however, they only superficially address the assumptions underlying their own agent architecture, while these are of crucial relevance to the topic of human language. these assumptions fit an augustinian picture of language, which wittgenstein challenges in his philosophical investigations. it is too early to draw conclusions regarding human language evolution from such models.

heuristics are necessary but far from sufficient explanations for moral judgment. this commentary stresses: (a) the need to complement cold, cognitive-economizing functionalist accounts with hot, value-expressive, social-identity-affirming accounts; and (b) the importance of conducting reflective-equilibrium thought and laboratory experiments that explore the permeability of the boundaries people place on the “thinkable.”

vallortigara & rogers (v&r) propose a fundamental role of the environment in determining population-level lateralisation and suggest that genes play no primary function in this phenomenon. here i argue that genes involved in the coordination of visceral organ laterality and in coupling of different forms of lateralisation do play a role in the control of lateralisation within the population.

the claim of consistent hemispheric specialisations across classes of chordates is undermined by the absence of population-based directional asymmetry of paw/hand use in rodents and primates. no homologue of the cerebral torque from right frontal to left occipital has been established in a nonhuman species. the null hypothesis that the torque is the sapiens-specific neural basis of language has not been disproved.

sunstein represents moral heuristics as rigid rules that lead us to jump to moral conclusions, and contrasts them with reflective moral deliberation, which he represents as independent of heuristics and capable of supplanting them. following john dewey's psychology of moral judgment, i argue that successful moral deliberation does not supplant moral heuristics but uses them flexibly as inputs to deliberation. many of the flaws in moral judgment that sunstein attributes to heuristics reflect instead the limitations of the deliberative context in which people are asked to render judgments.

in considering a domain of knowledge – language, music, mathematics, or morality – it is necessary to derive principles that can describe the mature state and explain how an individual reaches this state. although sunstein's heuristics go some way toward a description of our moral sense, it is not clear that they are at the right level of description, and as stated, they provide no guidelines for looking at the acquisition process – the problem of explanatory adequacy.

Sunstein’s characterization of moral blunders jointly indicts an intuitive process and the structure of heuristics. But intuitions need not lead to error, and the problems with moral heuristics apply also to moral principles. Accordingly, moral development may well involve more, rather than less, intuitive responsiveness. This suggests a novel trajectory for future research into the development of appropriate moral judgments.

Sunstein is right that poorly informed heuristics can influence moral judgment. His case could be strengthened by tightening neurobiologically plausible working definitions regarding what a heuristic is, considering a background moral theory that has more strength in wide reflective equilibrium than “weak consequentialism,” and systematically examining what naturalized virtue theory has to say about the role of heuristics in moral reasoning.

are color categories the evolutionary product of their usefulness in communication, or is this an accidental benefit they give us? it is argued here that embodiment constraints on color categorization suggest that communication is an add-on at best. thus, the steels & belpaeme (s&b) model may be important in explaining coordination, but only at the margin. furthermore, the concentration on discrimination is questionable: coclassification is at least as important.

recent computer simulations of evolving neural networks have shown that population-level behavioral asymmetries can arise without social interactions. although these models are quite limited at present, they support the hypothesis that social pressures can be sufficient but are not necessary for population lateralization to occur, and they provide a framework for further theoretical investigation of this issue.

This commentary explores the use of interaction between moral heuristics and emotional intelligence (EI). The main insight presented is that the quality of moral decisions is very sensitive to emotions, and hence this may lead us to a better understanding of the role of emotional abilities in moral choices. In doing so, we consider how individual differences (specifically, EI) are related to moral decisions. We summarize evidence bearing on some of the ways in which EI might moderate framing effects in different moral tasks such as “the Asian disease problem” and other more real-life problems like “a divorce decision.”

emphasizing that agents gain from culture-based patterns, i consider the etiology of meaning. since the simulations show that “shared categories” are not based in learning, i challenge steels & belpaeme's (s&b's) folk view of language. instead, i stress that meaning uses indexicals to set off a replicator process. finally, i suggest that memetic patterns – not words – are the grounding of language.