Wilhelm (Forthcom Synth 199:6357–6369, 2021) has recently defended a criterion for comparing structure of mathematical objects, which he calls Subgroup. He argues that Subgroup is better than SYM \(^*\), another widely adopted criterion. We argue that this is mistaken; Subgroup is strictly worse than SYM \(^*\). We then formulate a new criterion that improves on both SYM \(^*\) and Subgroup, answering Wilhelm’s criticisms of SYM \(^*\) along the way. We conclude by arguing that no criterion that looks only to the (...) automorphisms of mathematical objects to compare their structure can be fully satisfactory. (shrink)

Perspectives on Quine, now available in paperback, is a collection of twenty-one new essays dealing with the thought of America's most distinguished living philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine. After the editors' brief introduction to Quine's thought, the volume opens with an important new essay by Quine entitled Three Indeterminacies. The essays that follow, written by leading philosophers, are rich with insights into a wide variety of Quine's concerns ranging from logic and set theory to natural language, truth, evidence, natural kinds, (...) naturalized epistemology, and much more. Each essay concludes with a summary and response from Quine himself. (shrink)

Rendell and Whitehead's thorough review dispels notions that culture is an exclusive faculty of humans and higher primates. We applaud the authors, but differ with them regarding the evolution of cetacean culture, which we argue resulted from the availability of abundant but spatially and temporally patchy prey such as schooling fish. We propose two examples of gene-culture coevolution: (1) acoustic abilities and acoustic traditions, and (2) transmission of environmental information and longevity.

The study of intellectual humility is still in its early stages and issues of definition and measurement are only now being explored. To inform and guide the process of defining and measuring this important intellectual virtue, we conducted a series of studies into the implicit theory – or ‘folk’ understanding – of an intellectually humble person, a wise person, and an intellectually arrogant person. In Study 1, 350 adults used a free-listing procedure to generate a list of descriptors, one for (...) each person-concept. In Study 2, 335 adults rated the previously generated descriptors by how characteristic each was of the target person-concept. In Study 3, 344 adults sorted the descriptors by similarity for each person-concept. By comparing and contrasting the three person-concepts, a complex portrait of an intellectually humble person emerges with particular epistemic, self-oriented, and other-oriented dimensions. (shrink)

The significance of informed consent in research involving humans has been a topic of active debate in the last decade. Much of this debate, we submit, is predicated on an ideology of individualism. We draw on our experiences as anthropologists working in Western and non Western (Iban) health care settings to present ethnographic data derived from diverse scenes in which consent is gained. Employing classical anthropological ritual theory, we subject these observational data to comparative analysis. Our article argues that the (...) individualist assumptions underlying current bioethics guidelines do not have universal applicability, even in Western research settings. This is based on the recognition that the social world is constitutive of personhood in diverse forms, just one of which is individualistic. We submit that greater attention must be paid to the social relations the researcher inevitably engages in when conducting research involving other people, be this in the context of conventional medical research or anthropological field work. We propose, firstly, that the consenting process continues throughout the life of any research project, long after the signature has been secured, and secondly, that both group and individual dimensions of consent, and the sequence in which these dimensions are addressed, should be carefully considered in all cases where consent is sought. (shrink)

Everett (1957a, b, 1973) relative-state formulation of quantum mechanics has often been taken to involve a metaphysical commitment to the existence of many splitting worlds each containing physical copies of observers and the objects they observe. While there was earlier talk of splitting worlds in connection with Everett, this is largely due to DeWitt’s (Phys Today 23:30–35, 1970) popular presentation of the theory. While the thought of splitting worlds or parallel universes has captured the popular imagination, Everett himself favored the (...) language of elements, branches, or relative states in describing his theory. The result is that there is no mention of splitting worlds or parallel universes in any of Everett’s published work. Everett, however, did write of splitting observers and was willing to adopt the language of many worlds in conversation with people who were themselves using such language. While there is evidence that Everett was not entirely comfortable with talk of many worlds, it does not seem to have mattered much to him what language one used to describe pure wave mechanics. This was in part a result of Everett’s empirical understanding of the cognitive status of his theory. (shrink)

Humans are an exceptionally cooperative species, but there is substantial variation in the extent of cooperation across societies. Understanding the sources of this variability may provide insights about the forces that sustain cooperation. We examined the ontogeny of prosocial behavior by studying 326 children 3–14 y of age and 120 adults from six societies (age distributions varied across societies). These six societies span a wide range of extant human variation in culture, geography, and subsistence strategies, including foragers, herders, horticulturalists, and (...) urban dwellers across the Americas, Oceania, and Africa. When delivering benefits to others was personally costly, rates of prosocial behavior dropped across all six societies as children approached middle childhood and then rates of prosociality diverged as children tracked toward the behavior of adults in their own societies. When prosocial acts did not require personal sacrifice, prosocial responses increased steadily as children matured with little variation in behavior across societies. Our results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of acquired cultural norms in shaping costly forms of cooperation and creating cross-cultural diversity. (shrink)

Using a conceptual model consisting of three intersecting spheres of concern (environmental protection, human needs provision, and economic welfare) central to most environmental issues, we map six major Christian traditions of thought. Our purpose is to highlight the complementarities among these diverse responses in order to inform a more holistic Christian environmentalism founded on one or more of the major tenets of each of the six core traditions. Our approach also incorporates major premises of at least the more moderate versions (...) of biocentrism, ecocentrism, and anthropocentrism. We label this holistic approach “cosmocentrism” and use it as the basis for a preliminary description of the notion of “pluralistic stewardship.” We argue that only such holistic environmental perspectives, where societal needs are more directly coupled with environmental protection, and a pluralism of worldviews are acknowledged as potentially contributing to such efforts are capable of successfully addressing the complex issues we face today. We note that, at the international level in particular, Christian thought and secular environmentalism already have been moving in such a direction. (shrink)

Media exposure influences mental health symptomology in response to salient aversive events, like terrorist attacks, but little has been done to explore the impact of news coverage that varies more subtly in affective content. Here, we utilized an existing data set in which participants self-reported physical symptoms, depressive symptoms, and anxiety symptoms, and completed a potentiated startle task assessing their physiological reactivity to aversive stimuli at three time points (waves) over a 9-month period. Using a computational linguistics approach, we then (...) calculated an average ratio of words with positive vs. negative affective connotations for only articles from news sources to which each participant self-reported being exposed over the prior 2 weeks at each wave of data collection. As hypothesized, individuals exposed to news coverage with more negative affective tone over the prior 2 weeks reported significantly greater physical and depressive symptoms, and had significantly greater physiological reactivity to aversive stimuli. (shrink)

This is a collection of twenty-seven essays written by its author between 1962 and 1989 on topics in the history of science, the philosophy of science, and "the relevance of scientific practice to other parts of philosophy and culture". Twenty-one have been previously published, the remainder hitherto aired only as public presentations. The papers are gathered under six section-headings, including "Explanation," "Hume's Problem," "Logic and Causality," "Machines and Practices," "Scientific Knowledge--Its Scope and Limits," and "Science and Subjectivity"; yet their actual (...) range is both more diverse and less in keeping with prevailing currents in the philosophy of science than these tidily familiar rubrics suggest. "Explanation," for example, flirts with mainstream subject-matter in a much deserved encomium to Hempel's contributions in philosophy of science that reaches beyond the titular subject to the whole of Hempel's work. The section also embraces a discussion of General Systems Theory that distinguishes a doctrinaire, a prioristic approach to the study of science from a pragmatic-pluralistic version, urging the ills of the former and the virtues of the latter. It culminates in two presentations of the view that the theory of evolution rests on "circumstantial evidence" only as it involves the "logical fallacy" of "the inference of causes from effects" : the one is a historical piece on the little-known nineteenth-century naturalist, Phillip Henry Gosse, highlighting his creationistic "Omphalos" theory of the origins of biological species and the fossil record; the other is a short treatment of some conceptual issues involved in the creationist controversy. If the remaining five sections are not so heterogeneous in the scatter of subjects on which their articles touch, they are for the most part more idiosyncratic in the issues they address, the questions they raise, and the answers they suggest. Typical are "On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time," an argument for the ultimacy of subjectivity on the basis of relativity theory, and "Truth and Presence," explicating the attempt of Gaston Bachelard to blend science and poetry as complementary aspects of the human imagination. Sometimes they are also eyebrow-raising. "The Paradox of Induction and the Inductive Wager," would "show the impossibility of... logical proof [of the principle of induction]... by locating it among the paradoxes". Caw's case for paradox is simply that if inductive inference is legitimate then our past inability to justify such inference warrants the inductive conclusion that we shall never be able to justify it. But even if nothing else were suspect in this argument, its force is presumably at most probabilistic, making it hard to see how it could establish the "impossibility" of anything. Another paper, "Three Logics, or the Possibility of the Improbable," concerns "the logic of incredible events", touting the merits of so construing the natural world that events with zero probability occasionally occur and initiate spontaneous causal chains. Yet it is thoroughly unclear what interpretation of probability theory could both license identifying uncaused with impossible events and yet allow that such events may occur. Still another, "Rethinking Intentionality," includes the puzzling contention that "there can't be a science of intention because science presupposes intention". Unlike these last examples, most of the essays in the collection are provocative rather than upsetting, bearing the earmark of the independent, iconoclastic, speculative mind from which they spring, a former physicist not aligned with any of the current schools in philosophy of science, and more influenced by the classic giants of the Western philosophical tradition and by Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre than by empiricist philosophers of science or the recent analytic tradition. Thus, it is no surprise that the issues Caws addresses are nonstandard, and that his manner of addressing them embodies a looser, more broad-stroked, more humanistic, and more metaphysically self-conscious approach than is common in recent mainstream philosophy of science. This orientation doubtless accounts, too, for the somewhat subjective-idealistic stance, the view that one cannot definitively progress beyond one's own sensations and ideas, argued in "Yorick's World or the Universe in a Single Skull," and manifest in the tone, substance, and central thrust of a number of the essays in the collection. It is thus appropriate that Caws should have borrowed from this title to name the anthology itself.-Robert B. Barrett, Washington University in St. Louis. (shrink)

This paper explains and offers a criticism of the technical solutions that have been proposed in recent years to address Africa's hunger problems, summarizes selected results of some of these approaches, and suggests a more useful conceptualization of African hunger for policymakers. Hunger is a problem with multifactorial causality. As such, it is not given to solution by the sequence of reductionist approaches that have been applied in recent years. Widespread adoption by African governments of ultimately unsuccessful reductionist conceptualizations of (...) hunger has had much to do with foreign aid dependency, the general absence from central policymaking circles of senior government officials with responsibility for hunger-related policies, and political preference for centralized bureaucracy. The paper concludes with some recommendations for community-based strategies of hunger alleviation. (shrink)

Studies of the association between wealth and fertility in industrial populations have a rich history in the evolutionary literature, and they have been used to argue both for and against a behavioral ecological approach to explaining human variability. We consider that there are strong arguments in favor of measuring fertility (and proxies thereof) in industrial populations, not least because of the wide availability of large-scale secondary databases. Such data sources bring challenges as well as advantages, however. The purpose of this (...) article is to illustrate these by examining the association between wealth and reproductive success in the United States, using the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979. We conduct a broad-based exploratory analysis of the relationship between wealth and fertility, employing both cross-sectional and longitudinal approaches, and multiple measures of both wealth (income and net worth) and fertility (lifetime reproductive success and transitions to first, second and third births). We highlight the kinds of decisions that have to be made regarding sample selection, along with the selection and construction of explanatory variables and control measures. Based on our analyses, we find a positive effect of both income and net worth on fertility for men, which is more pronounced for white men and for transitions to first and second births. Income tends to have a negative effect on fertility for women, while net worth is more likely to positively predict fertility. Different reproductive strategies among different groups within the same population highlight the complexity of the reproductive ecology of industrial societies. These results differ in a number of respects from other analyses using the same database. We suggest this reflects the impossibility of producing a definitive analysis, rather than a failure to identify the “correct” analytical strategy. Finally, we discuss how these findings inform us about (mal)adaptive decision-making. (shrink)

We make the case that scientifically accurate and politically feasible responses to the climate crisis require a complex understanding of human cultural practices of niche construction that moves beyond the adaptive significance of culture. We develop this thesis in two related ways. First, we argue that cumulative cultural practices of niche construction can generate stable equilibria and runaway selection processes that result in long-term existential risks within and across cultural groups. We dub this the back of the invisible hand. Second, (...) we argue that the ability of cultural groups to innovate technological solutions to environmental problems is highly constrained in ways that are exacerbated by sustained intergroup conflict, inequality and by inherently unpredictable cascades in climate change and human migration patterns. After developing these theoretical points about human cultural practices of niche construction in detail, we conclude our discussion with some tentative practical suggestions about the way that cultural evolutionary history can more fruitfully be used in efforts to remit the climate crisis and contribute to sustainable practices of human climate change adaptation. (shrink)

According to the conceptual act theory, emotions emerge when physical sensations in the self and physical actions in others are meaningfully linked to situations during a process that can be called both cognitive and perceptual (creating emotional experiences, and emotion perceptions, respectively). There are key four hypotheses: (a) an emotion (like anger) is a conceptual category, populated with instances that are tailored to the environment; (b) each instance of emotion is constructed within the brain’s functional architecture of domain-general core systems; (...) (c) the workings of each system must be holistically understood within the momentary state of the brain, the body, and the surrounding context; (d) being emergent states, emotional episodes have functional features that physical states, alone, do not have. Similarities and differences to other theoretical approaches to emotion are discussed. (shrink)

In this paper, we examine the relationship between general relativity and the theory of Einstein algebras. We show that according to a formal criterion for theoretical equivalence recently proposed by Halvorson and Weatherall, the two are equivalent theories.

Human moral judgement may have evolved to maximize the individual's welfare given parochial culturally constructed moral systems. If so, then moral condemnation should be more severe when transgressions are recent and local, and should be sensitive to the pronouncements of authority figures (who are often arbiters of moral norms), as the fitness pay-offs of moral disapproval will primarily derive from the ramifications of condemning actions that occur within the immediate social arena. Correspondingly, moral transgressions should be viewed as less objectionable (...) if they occur in other places or times, or if local authorities deem them acceptable. These predictions contrast markedly with those derived from prevailing non-evolutionary perspectives on moral judgement. Both classes of theories predict purportedly species-typical patterns, yet to our knowledge, no study to date has investigated moral judgement across a diverse set of societies, including a range of small-scale communities that differ substantially from large highly urbanized nations. We tested these predictions in five small-scale societies and two large-scale societies, finding substantial evidence of moral parochialism and contextual contingency in adults' moral judgements. Results reveal an overarching pattern in which moral condemnation reflects a concern with immediate local considerations, a pattern consistent with a variety of evolutionary accounts of moral judgement. (shrink)

Psychological construction constitutes a different paradigm for the scientific study of emotion when compared to the current paradigm that is inspired by faculty psychology. This new paradigm is more consistent with the post-Darwinian conceptual framework in biology that includes a focus on (a) population thinking (vs. typologies), (b) domain-general core systems (vs. physical essences), and (c) constructive analysis (vs. reductionism). Three psychological construction approaches (the OCC model, the iterative reprocessing model, and the conceptual act theory) are discussed with respect to (...) these ideas. (shrink)

This paper makes an observation about the ``amount of structure'' that different classical and relativistic spacetimes posit. The observation substantiates a suggestion made by Earman and yields a cautionary remark concerning the scope and applicability of structural parsimony principles.

In their 2010 book, Biology’s First Law, D. McShea and R. Brandon present a principle that they call ‘‘ZFEL,’’ the zero force evolutionary law. ZFEL says (roughly) that when there are no evolutionary forces acting on a population, the population’s complexity (i.e., how diverse its member organisms are) will increase. Here we develop criticisms of ZFEL and describe a different law of evolution; it says that diversity and complexity do not change when there are no evolutionary causes.

These two texts come from a store of papyrus fragments which are at present being examined and worked over at Oxford. They are the property of the Egypt Exploration Society and will be republished in vol. xxxi of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri as Nos. 2544 and 2534; permission for their separate publication here has been granted by the Society in view of the relevance of the former of them to the article by Mr. W. S. Barrett which appears on pp. (...) 58–71 below. We are much indebted to Mr. Barrett and Professor Hugh Lloyd-Jones for many valuable suggestions and criticisms. The nature of both texts was recognized by R. A. Coles, of Magdalen College, Oxford, one of the collaborators in this article. (shrink)

The Great Calming and Contemplation: A Study and Annotated Translation of the First Chapter of Chih-i's Mo-ho Chih-kuan. Neal Donner and Daniel B. Stevenson. The University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 1993. xx, 385 pp. US$45.

A. A. Barrett's recent addition of a raeda to Juvenal 1.155 is a novel and ingenious contribution to the ago-old debate over the text and meaning of the passage in question. His proposal is, however, vulnerable to the following objections. First, it is worth emphasizing that there is no manuscript variant for the traditional reading taeda. In a passage so fraught with problems and textual discrepancies, this is probably suggestive.

Introduction -- Wittgenstein's early conception of value -- An outline of tractarian ontology -- Value, the self, and the mystical -- The lecture on ethics -- Language-games, the private language argument and aspect psychology -- Language-games -- The private language argument -- Aspect psychology -- The soul and attitudes towards the living -- Wittgenstein's general conception of the soul -- Ilham Dilman on the soul and seeing-as -- Religious contexts -- J.B. Watson and the denial of the soul -- Attitudes (...) towards other minds and forms of life -- The soul and the face -- Aspect blindness and dawning -- Particularism, rule-following, and evaluations -- David McNaughton on the property of humanity and particularism -- John McDowell on rule-following and values -- Peter Winch on moral particularism -- The meaning and value of the religious point of view -- Wittgenstein on Frazer's golden bough -- Truth in religion -- Wittgenstein on art : reactions and causes -- Aesthetics, causes, and natural history -- A contemporary evolutionary account of aesthetic value -- Neuro-scientific accounts -- Aesthetic realism and the definition of art -- Aesthetic historicism and relativism -- Institutional and historical theories of art -- Forms of life, moral truth, and justification -- Cora Diamond on forms on seeing-as theory and imagination -- Paul Johnston on moral justification and truth -- D.Z. Phillips and H.O. Mounce on the justification of morality -- Doubt and certainty : framework beliefs and core values -- An overview of certainty -- Avrum Stroll, Anthony O'Hear , and Cyril Barrett on certainty and value -- Cultural relativism and institutional embodiment -- Peter Winch on cultural relativism -- Sabina Lovibond on moral facts and institutional embodiment -- Cyril Barrett on cultural relativism -- Conclusion: How to do things with Wittgenstein. (shrink)

The first of these massive volumes, edited by Aiken, covers American and English philosophy. Royce, Peirce, James, Santayana, and Dewey are given in varying length; there is a chapter from Bradley; and Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein, Wisdom, Austin, and Whitehead are amply and interestingly represented. Aiken's general introduction is well worth reading, and his special introductions should be helpful to the student. In the second volume Barrett presents a much wider variety of opinion: Positivism, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Marxism, Philosophy of History, (...) and Neo-Orthodoxy. The volumes are well printed.--J. B. S. (shrink)