People are systematically biased against the possibility that ideas are innate. Berent (2020) traces these attitudes to an ontological dissonance, arising from the collision of two fundamental principles of human cognition -- dualism and essentialism. Carruthers (this issue) challenges this hypothesis and attributes our empiricist bias primarily to mindreading intuitions. Here, I counter Carruthers' concerns and show that mindreading cannot be the sole source of the empiricist bias. Specifically, mindreading fails to explain why our empiricist intuitions depend on the (...) perceived immateriality of ideas. The ontological dissonance hypothesis accounts for these facts. Because essentialism requires innate traits to be material, and because, per dualism, ideas are immaterial, people conclude that ideas cannot be innate. (shrink)

Quine's arguments against the attribution of essential properties de re to individuals have been the motivation for attempts at reinstating essentialism as a respectable metaphysical thesis and at defending the coherence of modal logic in general.I shall argue here along somewhat different lines, that the particular version of essentialism Quine objects to is in fact untenable but that this conclusion is far from entailing a commitment to some version of conventionalism, and in particular that it does not entail the view (...) that the only kind of necessity that is coherent is de dicto necessity.In what follows, I shall assume, without arguing for it, that de re essentialism and subjunctive conditionals are intimately related, and in particular, that any version of de re essentialism which conflicts with our basic intuitions about subjunctive conditionals is untenable. (shrink)

Quine's arguments against the attribution of essential properties de re to individuals have been the motivation for attempts at reinstating essentialism as a respectable metaphysical thesis and at defending the coherence of modal logic in general.I shall argue here along somewhat different lines, that the particular version of essentialism Quine objects to is in fact untenable but that this conclusion is far from entailing a commitment to some version of conventionalism, and in particular that it does not entail the view (...) that the only kind of necessity that is coherent is de dicto necessity.In what follows, I shall assume, without arguing for it, that de re essentialism and subjunctive conditionals are intimately related, and in particular, that any version of de re essentialism which conflicts with our basic intuitions about subjunctive conditionals is untenable. (shrink)

In this paper I wish to illuminate the Hobbesian-Aristotelian controversy from a new angle. I suggest that contrary to what has been assumed from Hobbes's time down to this day, the Greek polis was not a State, or what Hobbes called a Common-wealth, but rather what anthropologists call a stateless community. The latter is characterized by the absence of coercive apparatuses, which means that the ability to apply force is more or less evenly distributed among the armed, or potentially armed, (...) members of the community. In Hobbesian terminology this means that we are dealing with a political community without a �common power� or without a sovereign, or a political community in the �state of nature�, but these are, of course, absurdities. (shrink)

People exhibit conflicting intuitions concerning the mind/body links. Here, I explore a novel explanation for these inconsistencies: Dualism is a violable constraint that interacts with Essentialism. Two experiments probe these interactions. In Experiment 1, participants evaluated the emergence of psychological traits in either a replica of one's body, or in the afterlife—after the body's demise. In line with Dualism, epistemic (i.e., disembodied) traits (e.g., knowing the contrast between good/bad) were considered more likely to emerge (relative to sensorimotor/affective traits) only in (...) the afterlife. However, so were innate traits (in line with Essentialism). To further gauge Essentialism, Experiment 2 presented the same traits to innateness judgments. Here, sensorimotor/affective (i.e., embodied) traits were considered more likely to be innate, suggesting that innateness intuitions are informed by embodiment. Moreover, innateness judgments (in Experiment 2) and embodiment intuitions (in Experiment 1) correlated. These results suggest that Dualism tacitly constrains reasoning about one's innate origins and its persistence after death. But since Dualism is “soft” and interacts with Essentialism, supernatural intuitions are chimeric, not purely ethereal. (shrink)

I. INTRODUCTION It has become a commonplace in contemporary historiography to note the frequency of war in ancient Greece. Yvon Garlan says that, during the century and a half from the Persian wars to the battle of Chaeronea , Athens was at war, on average, more than two years out of every three, and never enjoyed a period of peace for as long as ten consecutive years. ‘Given these conditions’, says Garlan, ‘one would expect them to consider war as a (...) problem …. But this was far from being the case.’ The Greek acceptance of war as inevitable was contrasted by Momigliano and others with the attention given to constitutional changes and to the prevention of stasis: ‘the Greeks came to accept war like birth and death about which nothing could be done …. On the other hand constitutions were men-made and could be modified by men.’ Moralist overtones were not absent from this re-evaluation of Greek civilization. Havelock observed that the Greeks exalted, legitimized, and placed organized warfare at the heart of the European value system, and Momigliano suggested that: The idea of controlling wars, like the idea of the emancipation of women and the idea of birth control, is a part of the intellectual revolution of the nineteenth century and meant a break with the classical tradition of historiography of wars. (shrink)

In a collection of articles based on my Cambridge doctoral thesis I have argued that, contrary to what has been traditionally assumed, the Greek polis was not a State but rather what anthropologists call ‘a stateless society’. The latter is characterized by the absence of ‘government’, that is, an agency which has separated itself out from the rest of social life and which monopolizes the use of violence. In a recent article Mogens Herman Hansen discusses and rejects my notion of (...) the stateless polis. This paper is a rejoinder to Hansen’s criticism and offers critical analysis of the concept of ‘The Greek State’ which has been employed by Hansen and by other ancient historians. Among the questions discussed: To what extent did the polis have amonopoly on violence? To what extent do the relations between the polis and its territory resemble those of stateless communities? Could the State/Society distinction be applied to the Greek polis? How is the Greek distinction between the private and the public different from its modern counterpart and how is this difference related to the statelessness of the Greek polis? (shrink)

I. INTRODUCTIONIt has become a commonplace in contemporary historiography to note the frequency of war in ancient Greece. Yvon Garlan says that, during the century and a half from the Persian wars (490 and 480–479 B.C.) to the battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.), Athens was at war, on average, more than two years out of every three, and never enjoyed a period of peace for as long as ten consecutive years. ‘Given these conditions’, says Garlan, ‘one would expect them (i.e. (...) the Greeks) to consider war as a problem …. But this was far from being the case.’ The Greek acceptance of war as inevitable was contrasted by Momigliano and others with the attention given to constitutional changes and to the prevention ofstasis: ‘the Greeks came to accept war like birth and death about which nothing could be done …. On the other hand constitutions were men-made and could be modified by men.’Moralist overtones were not absent from this re-evaluation of Greek civilization. Havelock observed that the Greeks exalted, legitimized, and placed organized warfare at the heart of the European value system, and Momigliano suggested that:The idea of controlling wars, like the idea of the emancipation of women and the idea of birth control, is a part of the intellectual revolution of the nineteenth century and meant a break with the classical tradition of historiography of wars. (shrink)

A large campaign has sought to destigmatize psychiatric disorders by disseminating the view that they are in fact brain disorders. But when psychiatric disorders are associated with neurobiological correlates, laypeople's attitudes toward patients are harsher, and the prognoses seem poorer. Here, we ask whether these misconceptions could result from the essentialist presumption that brain disorders are innate. To this end, we invited laypeople to reason about psychiatric disorders that are diagnosed by either a brain or a behavioral test that were (...) strictly matched for their informative value. Participants viewed disorders as more likely to be innate and immutable when the diagnosis was supported by a brain test as compared to a behavioral test. These results show for the first time that people spontaneously essentialize psychiatric conditions that are linked to the brain, even when the brain probe offers no additional diagnostic or genetic information. This bias suggests that people consider the biological essence of living things as materially embodied. (shrink)

Do newborns think-do they know that 'three' is greater than 'two'? Do they prefer 'right' to 'wrong'? What about emotions--do newborns recognize happiness or anger? If they do, then how are our inborn thoughts and feelings encoded in our bodies? Could they persist after we die? Going all the way back to ancient Greece, human nature and the mind-body link are the topics of age-old scholarly debates. But laypeople also have strong opinions about such matters. Most people believe, for example, (...) that newborn babies don't know the difference between right and wrong-such knowledge, they insist, can only be learned. For emotions, they presume the opposite-that our capacity to feel fear, for example, is both inborn and embodied. These beliefs are stories we tell ourselves about what we know and who we are. They reflect and influence our understanding of ourselves and others and they guide every aspect of our lives. In a twist that could have come out of a Greek tragedy, Berent proposes that our errors are our fate. These mistakes emanate from the very principles that make our minds tick: our blindness to human nature is rooted in human nature itself. An intellectual journey that draws on philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and Berent's own cutting-edge research, The Blind Storyteller grapples with a host of provocative questions, from why we are so infatuated with our brains to what happens when we die. The end result is a startling new perspective on our humanity. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 3, March 2022.

Talking about action comes easily to us. We quickly make distinctions between voluntary and non-voluntary actions; we think we can tell what intentions are; we are confident about evaluating reasons offered in rational justification of action. Berent Enc provides a philosopher's sustained examination of these issues: he portrays action as belonging to the causal order of events in nature, a theory from which new and surprising accounts of intention and voluntary action emerge. Philosophers and cognitive scientists alike will find (...) How We Act a provocative and enlightening read. (shrink)

People naturally intuit that an agent's ethereal thoughts can cause its body to move. Per intuitive physics; however, one body can only interact with another. Are people, then, covertly puzzled by the capacity of thoughts to command the body? Experiment 1 first confirms that thoughts (e.g., thinking about a cup) are indeed perceived as ethereal—as less detectible in the body (brain), and more likely to exist in the afterlife relative to matched percepts (e.g., seeing a cup). Experiments 2–5 show that (...) thoughts are considered less likely to cause behavior than percepts (e.g., thinking of a cup vs. seeing one). Furthermore, mind–body causation is more remarkable when its bodily consequences are salient (e.g., moving an arm vs. brain activation). Finally, epistemic causes are remarkable only when they are ascribed to mental‐ (e.g., “thinking”) but not to physical states (“activation”). Together, these results suggest that mind–body interactions elicit a latent dualist dissonance. (shrink)

The Greek word stasis meant ‘faction’, ‘civil war’ but also ‘political standing’. This seems a strange contradiction, particularly since we credit the Greeks with having invented politics. This strange contradiction is partly explained by the nature of the Greek polis, which was not a State, but rather what anthropologists call a stateless community. The latter is a relatively unstratified egalitarian community characterized by the absence of public coercive apparatuses. However, though stateless, the Greek polis was also different from stateless communities (...) studied by anthropologists as it was not tribal.The fear of stasis was directly related to the absence of public means to check seditious factions or to deal with divisions which might be the outcome of having political standings. However, the absence of central authority, social hierarchy and kinship identity, gave room for much individual deliberation and made politics indispensable. Thus the Greeks indeed invented politics, yet the Greek concept of politics was different from the modern one in being predominantly ethical, that is, in seeking to curb ‘political standings’ by morality, education and self restraint. (shrink)

This study focuses on the prediction of the engagement of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in environmental management practices, based on a random sample of 689 SMEs. The study finds that several endogenous factors, including tangibility of sector, firm size, innovative orientation, family influence and perceived financial benefits from energy conservation, predict an SME’s level of engagement in selected environmental management practices. For family influence, this effect is found only in interaction with the number of owners. In addition to empirical (...) research on SMEs’ environmental behavior, this article draws on the ecological modernization literature as well as the theory of planned behavior. (shrink)

We examine two approaches to functions: etiological and forward-looking. In the context of functions, we raise the question, familiar to philosophers of mind, about the explanatory role of properties that are not supervenient on the mere dispositional features of a system. We first argue that the question has no easy answer in either of the two approaches. We then draw a parallel between functions and goal directedness. We conclude by proposing an answer to the question: The explanatory importance of nonsupervenient (...) properties (like having the function of doing something, or like being goal-directed) does not lie in any special causal mechanism through which these properties bring about their effects; it lies rather in the different classification of the explananda types that these properties generate. (shrink)

A series of explanatory hypotheses are examined under the assumption that the logical structure of function attributions is dependent on the methodological constraints which these hypotheses conform to. Two theses are argued for: (1) Given these methodological constraints, if something has the function of doing Y, then normally it is the only kind of thing that can do Y in that kind of system. (2) What distinguishes function attributions from causal attribution is not that function attributions explain the etiology of (...) the causally efficacious object, as Wright has suggested. The distinction lies rather in that the object's having the effect, which is attributed to it as its function, must figure in the explanation of why it does what it does to achieve that effect. (shrink)

In the etiology of teleological functions, what role can be played by accidental occurrences? Douglas Ehring's essay “Accidental Functions” constructs a theory of ideological functions which makes it possible for objects to have functions even when their causal origins are due entirely to accident—be they natural functions or artifact functions. Ehring constructs this view on the basis of a set of putative counterexamples aimed largely at the theories of Enc and Adams. Both of these theories block the attribution of ideological (...) function to structures with entirely accidental causal histories—accidental in originandin the way their effects are causally sustained. (shrink)

The view that scientific reduction succeeds by establishing property identities is challenged. it is argued that, instead of identity statements making reductions successful, the fact that a reduction is successful makes the identity statements possible. the argument proceeds first by showing that an explanatory asymmetry is generated by statements expressing property identities, second by locating the source of the asymmetry in a "generative relation" that obtains between the two properties. it is then argued that reduction succeeds only if the reducing (...) theory embodies a mechanism which accounts for such a generative relation. since this view of reduction is incompatible with the traditional view, an alternate account is outlined. (shrink)

Productivity—the hallmark of linguistic competence—is typically attributed to algebraic rules that support broad generalizations. Past research on spoken language has documented such generalizations in both adults and infants. But whether algebraic rules form part of the linguistic competence of signers remains unknown. To address this question, here we gauge the generalization afforded by American Sign Language (ASL). As a case study, we examine reduplication (X→XX)—a rule that, inter alia, generates ASL nouns from verbs. If signers encode this rule, then they (...) should freely extend it to novel syllables, including ones with features that are unattested in ASL. And since reduplicated disyllables are preferred in ASL, such rule should favor novel reduplicated signs. Novel reduplicated signs should thus be preferred to nonreduplicative controls (in rating), and consequently, such stimuli should also be harder to classify as nonsigns (in the lexical decision task). The results of four experiments support this prediction. These findings suggest that the phonological knowledge of signers includes powerful algebraic rules. The convergence between these conclusions and previous evidence for phonological rules in spoken language suggests that the architecture of the phonological mind is partly amodal. (shrink)

This paper analyses the traditionally recognized dependence between observation statements and theories. The analysis proceeds by working out the interrelationship between classification systems and theoretical frameworks. Cuvier's and Darwin's theories are used as examples to illustrate this issue. The second part of the paper develops a model designed to give an account of the historical development of this interrelationship. It is argued that the interdependence is not circular and that it is an integral part of scientific research. It is suggested (...) that an interdependence of the type reflected in the model can be helpful in evaluating research programmes in the history of all the sciences. (shrink)

1. Introduction. One major concern in cognitive psychology is explaining cognitively motivated behavior. However, attempts to specify the nature of the behavior that psychology is to explain have proved to be somewhat controversial. The aim of this paper is to conduct a preliminary investigation into the kinds of behavior psychology is concerned with.

This paper analyses the traditionally recognized dependence between observation statements and theories. The analysis proceeds by working out the interrelationship between classification systems and theoretical frameworks. Cuvier's and Darwin's theories are used as examples to illustrate this issue. The second part of the paper develops a model designed to give an account of the historical development of this interrelationship. It is argued that the interdependence is not circular and that it is an integral part of scientific research. It is suggested (...) that an interdependence of the type reflected in the model can be helpful in evaluating research programmes in the history of all the sciences. (shrink)