Representational systems need to use symbols as internal stand-ins for distal quantities and events. Barsalou's ideas go a long way towards making the symbol system theory of representation more appealing, by delegating one critical part of the representational burden – dealing with the constituents of compound structures – to image-like entities. The target article, however, leaves the other critical component of any symbol system theory – the compositional ability to bind the constituents together – underspecified. We point out that the binding problem can be alleviated if a perceptual symbol system is made to rely on image-like entities not only for grounding the constituent symbols, but also for composing these into structures.

Ceci et al.'s (2006) findings remind us that tenure rarely serves its intended purpose. I argue that tenure often fails in part because many faculty members possess an insufficient appreciation for the heuristic value of controversy in science and other disciplines. Using two case examples from clinical/personality psychology, I show how controversial positions can draw sharp criticism while facilitating scientific progress.

Evans & Levinson (E&L) perform a major service for cognitive science. The assumption of Chomskyan generative linguistics – that there are absolute unrestricted universals of grammatical structure – is empirically untenable. However, E&L are too reluctant to abandon word classes and grammatical relations in syntax. Also, a cognitive scientist can already draw on a substantial linguistics literature on variationist, evolutionary models of language.

Many now consider “instinct” and “learning” opposite poles of a unidimensional continuum. An alternative model with two independently varying parameters predicts different selective pressures. Behavioral adaptation matches the organism's utilizations of stimuli and responses to their ecological validities: the mean validity over evolutionary time specifies the optimal initial potency of the prepared association; the variance specifies the optimal prepared plasticity.

This commentary focuses on three points: the need to consider semiotic ideologies of both researchers and autistic people, questions of commensurability, and problems with “the social” as an analytical concept. It ends with a call for new research methodologies that are not deficit-based and that consider a broad range of linguistic and non-linguistic communicative practices.

We doubt that primary sociopathy is adaptive, for three reasons: First, its prevalence is too low to require an adaptive explanation. Second, a common sequela of damage to the orbito-frontal lobes is “pseudopsychopathy.” Any pattern of behavior that can be produced by brain damage is unlikely to be adaptive. Third, we argue that most human social behavior is not under tight genetic control, but is produced by open-ended calculation of fitness-contingencies.

(1) The purported evidence for neural filling-in is not evidence for filling-in, but just for long-range dynamic interactions. (2) Vision is perhaps not an “illusion,” but at any rate it is not “pictorial.” (3) The idea of the “world as an outside memory” as well as MacKay's “conditional readiness for action” may help approach an “enactive” theory of vision.

Although the E-Z Reader model accounts well for eye-tracking data, it will be judged by new predictions and consistency with evidence from brain imaging methodologies. The stage architecture proposed for lexical access seems somewhat arbitrary and calculated timings are conservatively slow. There are certain effects in the literature that seem incompatible with the model.

Rules and similarity are two sides of the same phenomenon, but the number of features has nothing to do with transition from similarity to rules; threshold logic helps to understand why.

Intelligent design, though unnecessary in the study of biological evolution, is essential to the study of cultural evolution. However, the intelligent designers in question are not deities or aliens but rather humans going about their lives. The role of intentionality in cultural evolution can be elucidated through the addition of signaling theory to the framework outlined in the target article.