Cultural evolution studies are characterized by the notion that culture evolves accordingly to broadly Darwinian principles. Yet how far the analogy between cultural and genetic evolution should be pushed is open to debate. Here, we examine a recent disagreement that concerns the extent to which cultural transmission should be considered a preservative mechanism allowing selection among different variants, or a transformative process in which individuals recreate variants each time they are transmitted. The latter is associated with the notion of “cultural (...) attraction”. This issue has generated much misunderstanding and confusion. We first clarify the respective positions, noting that there is in fact no substantive incompatibility between cultural attraction and standard cultural evolution approaches, beyond a difference in focus. Whether cultural transmission should be considered a preservative or reconstructive process is ultimately an empirical question, and we examine how both preservative and reconstructive cultural transmission has been studied in recent experimental research in cultural evolution. Finally, we discuss how the relative importance of preservative and reconstructive processes may depend on the granularity of analysis and the domain being studied. (shrink)

Cultural evolution researchers use transmission chain experiments to investigate which content is more likely to survive when transmitted from one individual to another. These experiments resemble oral storytelling, wherein individuals need to understand, memorize, and reproduce the content. However, prominent contemporary forms of cultural transmission—think an online sharing—only involve the willingness to transmit the content. Here I present two fully preregistered online experiments that explicitly investigated the differences between these two modalities of transmission. The first experiment (_N_ = 1,080 participants) (...) examined whether negative content, information eliciting disgust, and threat-related information were better transmitted than their neutral counterpart in a traditional transmission chain setup. The second experiment (_N_ = 1,200 participants) used the same material, but participants were asked whether or not they would share the content in two conditions: in a large anonymous social network or with their friends, in their favorite social network. Negative content was both better transmitted in transmission chain experiments and shared more than its neutral counterpart. Threat-related information was successful in transmission chain experiments but not when sharing, and finally, information eliciting disgust was not advantaged in either. Overall, the results present a composite picture, suggesting that the interactions between the specific content and the medium of transmission are important and, possibly, that content biases are stronger when memorization and reproduction are involved in the transmission—as in oral transmission—than when they are not—as in online sharing. Negative content seems to be reliably favored in both modalities of transmission. (shrink)

We experimentally investigated the influence of context-based biases, such as prestige and popularity, on the preferences for quotations. Participants were presented with random quotes associated to famous or unknown authors, or with random quotes presented as popular, i.e. chosen by many previous participants, or unpopular. To exclude effects related to the content of the quotations, all participants were subsequently presented with the same quotations, again associated to famous and unknown authors, or presented as popular or unpopular. Overall, our results showed (...) that context-based biases had no, or limited, effect in determining participants’ choices. Quotations preferred for their content were preferred in general, despite the contextual cues to which they were associated. We conclude discussing how our results fit with the well-known phenomenon of the spread and success of misattributed quotations, and we draw some more general implications for cultural evolution research. (shrink)

Folk-economic beliefs may be regarded as “evidential fictions” that exploit the natural tendency of human cognition to organize itself in narrative form. Narrative counter-arguments are likely more effective than logical debunking. The challenge is to convey sound economic reasoning in narratively conspicuous forms – an opportunity for economics to rethink its role and agency in public discourse, in the spirit of its old classics.

ABSTRACTThe presence of emotional words and content in stories has been shown to enhance a story’s memorability, and its cultural success. Yet, recent cultural trends run in the opposite direction. Using the Google Books corpus, coupled with two metadata-rich corpora of Anglophone fiction books, we show a decrease in emotionality in English-speaking literature starting plausibly in the nineteenth century. We show that this decrease cannot be explained by changes unrelated to emotionality, and that, in our three corpora, the decrease is (...) driven almost entirely by a decline in the proportion of positive emotion-related words, while the frequency of negative emotion-related words shows little if any decline. Consistently with previous studies, we also find a link between ageing and negative emotionality at the individual level. (shrink)

An interpretation of Jacobi's philosophical realism.

The articles in the symposium “Teaching Early Modern Philosophy: New Approaches” provide theoretical reflections and practical advice on new ways of teaching undergraduate survey courses in early modern philosophy. This introduction lays out the rationale for the symposium and summarizes the articles that compose it.

This article focusses on the generality of the entities involved in a geometric proof of the kind found in ancient Greek treatises: it shows that the standard modern translation of Greek mathematical propositions falsifies crucial syntactical elements, and employs an incorrect conception of the denotative letters in a Greek geometric proof; epigraphic evidence is adduced to show that these denotative letters are ‘letter-labels’. On this basis, the article explores the consequences of seeing that a Greek mathematical proposition is fully general, (...) and the ontological commitments underlying the stylistic practice. (shrink)

In Ockhamist branching-time logic [Prior 67], formulas are meant to be evaluated on a specified branch, or history, passing through the moment at hand. The linguistic counterpart of the manifoldness of future is a possibility operator which is read as `at some branch, or history (passing through the moment at hand)'. Both the bundled-trees semantics [Burgess 79] and the $\langle moment, history\rangle$ semantics [Thomason 84] for the possibility operator involve a quantification over sets of moments. The Ockhamist frames are (3-modal) (...) Kripke structures in which this second-order quantification is represented by a first-order quantification. The aim of the present paper is to investigate the notions of modal definability, validity, and axiomatizability concerning 3-modal frames which can be viewed as generalizations of Ockhamist frames. (shrink)

This chapter discusses the relation between Christian Wolff's philosophy and the methodological views of early modern experimental philosophers. The chapter argues for three claims. First, Wolff's system relies on experience at every step and his views on experiments, observations, hypotheses, and the a priori are in line with those of experimental philosophers. Second, the study of Wolff's views demonstrates the influence of experimental philosophy in early eighteenth-century Germany. Third, references to Wolff's empiricism and rationalism are best identified or replaced with (...) references to his endorsement of the tenets of experimental philosophers and of a mathematical demonstrative method. (shrink)

People’s awareness of tactile stimuli has been investigated in far less detail than their awareness of stimuli in other sensory modalities. In an attempt to fill this gap, we provide an overview of studies that are pertinent to the topic of tactile consciousness. We discuss the results of research that has investigated phenomena such as “change blindness”, phantom limb sensations, and numerosity judgments in tactile perception, together with the results obtained from the study of patients affected by deficits that can (...) adversely affect tactile perception such as neglect, extinction, and numbsense. The similarities as well as some of the important differences that have emerged when visual and tactile conscious information processing have been compared using similar experimental procedures are highlighted. We suggest that conscious information processing in the tactile modality cannot be separated completely from the more general processing of spatial information in the brain. Finally, the importance of considering tactile consciousness within the larger framework of multisensory information processing is also discussed. (shrink)

A completeness theorem is established for logics with congruence endowed with general semantics (in the style of general frames). As a corollary, completeness is shown to be preserved by fibring logics with congruence provided that congruence is retained in the resulting logic. The class of logics with equivalence is shown to be closed under fibring and to be included in the class of logics with congruence. Thus, completeness is shown to be preserved by fibring logics with equivalence and general semantics. (...) An example is provided showing that completeness is not always preserved by fibring ligics endowed with standard (non general) semantics. A categorial characterization of fibring is provided using coproducts and cocartesian liftings. (shrink)

We study the computability-theoretic complexity and proof-theoretic strength of the following statements: (1) "If X is a well-ordering, then so is ε X ", and (2) "If X is a well-ordering, then so is φ(α, X)", where α is a fixed computable ordinal and φ represents the two-placed Veblen function. For the former statement, we show that ω iterations of the Turing jump are necessary in the proof and that the statement is equivalent to ${\mathrm{A}\mathrm{C}\mathrm{A}}_{0}^{+}$ over RCA₀. To prove the (...) latter statement we need to use ω α iterations of the Turing jump, and we show that the statement is equivalent to ${\mathrm{\Pi }}_{{\mathrm{\omega }}^{\mathrm{\alpha }}}^{0}{-\mathrm{C}\mathrm{A}}_{0}$ . Our proofs are purely computability-theoretic. We also give a new proof of a result of Friedman: the statement "if x is a well-ordering, then so is φ(x, 0)" is equivalent to ATR₀ over RCA₀. (shrink)

This major publication is a history of the semantic tradition in philosophy from the early nineteenth century through its incarnation in the work of the Vienna Circle, the group of logical positivists that emerged in the years 1925-1935 in Vienna who were characterised by a strong commitment to empiricism, a high regard for science, and a conviction that modern logic is the primary tool of analytic philosophy. In the first part of the book, Alberto Coffa traces the roots of (...) logical positivism in a semantic tradition that arose in opposition to Kant's theory that a priori knowledge is based on pure intuition and the constitutive powers of the mind. In Part II, Coffa chronicles the development of this tradition by members and associates of the Vienna Circle. Much of Coffa's analysis draws on the unpublished notes and correspondence of many philosophers. The book, however, is not merely a history of the semantic tradition from Kant 'to the Vienna Station'. Coffa also critically reassesses the role of semantic notions in understanding the ground of a priori knowledge and its relation to empirical knowledge and questions the turn the tradition has taken since Vienna. (shrink)

Abortion is largely accepted even for reasons that do not have anything to do with the fetus' health. By showing that (1) both fetuses and newborns do not have the same moral status as actual persons, (2) the fact that both are potential persons is morally irrelevant and (3) adoption is not always in the best interest of actual people, the authors argue that what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion (...) is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled. (shrink)

This open access book discusses individual, collective, and institutional responsibilities with regard to vaccination from the perspective of philosophy and public health ethics. It addresses the issue of what it means for a collective to be morally responsible for the realisation of herd immunity and what the implications of collective responsibility are for individual and institutional responsibilities. The first chapter introduces some key concepts in the vaccination debate, such as ‘herd immunity’, ‘public goods’, and ‘vaccine refusal’; and explains why failure (...) to vaccinate raises certain ethical issues. The second chapter analyses, from a philosophical perspective, the relationship between individual, collective, and institutional responsibilities with regard to the realisation of herd immunity. The third chapter is about the principle of least restrictive alternative in public health ethics and its implications for vaccination policies. Finally, the fourth chapter presents an ethical argument for unqualified compulsory vaccination, i.e. for compulsory vaccination that does not allow for any conscientious objection. The book will appeal to philosophers interested in public health ethics and the general public interested in the philosophical underpinning of different arguments about our moral obligations with regard to vaccination. (shrink)

Book 1 of Euclid's Elements opens with a set of unproved assumptions: definitions, postulates, and ‘common notions’. The common notions are general rules validating deductions that involve the relations of equality and congruence. The attested postulates are five in number, even if a part of the manuscript tradition adds a sixth, almost surely spurious, that in some manuscripts features as the ninth, and last, common notion. The postulates are called αἰτήματα both in the manuscripts of the Elements and in the (...) ancient exegetic tradition. It is not said, however, that this denomination is original, as it coincides with the nomen rei actae associated with the verbal form introducing the postulates themselves. Since antiquity it has been recognized that the postulates naturally split into two groups of quite different character: the first three are rules licensing basic constructions, the fourth and the fifth are assertions stating properties of particular geometric objects. I transcribe postulates 1–3 in the text established by Heiberg : ᾐτήσθω ἀπὸ παντὸς σημείου ἐπὶ πᾶν σημεῖον εὐθεῖαν γραμμὴν ἀγαγεῖνκαὶ πεπερασμένην εὐθεῖαν κατὰ τὸ συνεχὲς ἐπ᾽ εὐθείας ἐκβαλεῖνκαὶ παντὶ κέντρῳ καὶ διαστήματι κύκλον γράϕεσθαι. (shrink)

The identification of a “new” handwriting of Manuel Chrysoloras allows to assign to him a number of hitherto unpublished witnesses, all preceding his teaching activity in Florence from 1397. This new dossier illustrates Chrysoloras’ youth in Constantinople, providing precious and so far unknown information on his family, his father John, his studies in the anti-Palamite milieux with Isaac Argyros and Demetrios Kydones, and, of course, his books, his graphic education, and his readings. Among these, a special place is occupied by (...) Aristotle’s logic: particular attention is therefore paid to a mock-up of a manuscript containing Aristotle’s Organon with a marginal commentary, here attributed to Chrysoloras and realized in a well-known manuscript by his master Argyros. (shrink)

General remarks about Cornelio Fabro's works on philosophical anthropology.

A brief theoretical review of the current state of the art of embodiment research in clinical psychology has been expounded in order to highlight the key role that embodied conceptualization has on the understanding and explanation of several mental disorders, such as eating disorders, schizophrenia and depression. Evidence has suggested that mental disorders may be explained as disturbances of embodiment, from the disembodiment to the hyperembodiment. In order to understand how some clinical conditions are affected by cultural models, we propose (...) and define a new framework called Exbodiment, complementary to the Embodiment approach to cognition. Mental disorder is strictly related to the subject-culture interaction that may be explained as a two way process in which embodiment and exbodiment are complementary points of view. In this perspective, embodiment may be seen as the “top-down” process, while exbodiment the “bottom-up” one. The introduction of exbodiment conceptualization highlights how subject is both receiver and interpreter of social influence. Subject is the target of a cultural pressure and, at the same time, enacts its own embodied culture in world. Exbodiment conceptualization may help clinicians to better understand and explain the role of culture in the onset and maintenance of mental disorders. (shrink)

In recent works, Chomsky has once more endorsed a computational view of rulefollowing, whereby to follow a rule is to operate certain computations on a subject’s mental representations. As is well known, this picture does not conform to what we may call the grammatical conception of rule-following outlined by Wittgenstein, whereby an elucidation of the concept of rule-following is aimed at by isolating grammatical statements regarding the phrase ‘to follow a rule’. As a result, Chomskyan and Wittgensteinian treatments of topics (...) immediately connected with rule-following, namely linguistic competence and understanding, are utterly different from one another. There are two possible stances that computationalists like Chomsky may adopt with regard to the discrepancy between the two aforementioned modes of dealing with rule-following, namely a conciliatory and a non-conciliatory attitude. According to the former attitude, grammatical remarks on and computationallyoriented theories of rule-following investigate one and the same topic although admittedly at different levels, namely a conceptual and an empirical one. According to the latter attitude, grammatical remarks are just a preliminary step in the investigation of rule-following which scientific advancement, presently represented by computationally-oriented theories on this matter, is well entitled to put aside. In what follows, however, I will try to show that both stances are problematic. The conciliatory attitude simply does not work, for it hardly copes with the fact that the concept of rule-following does not supervene, even weakly, on the property of rule-following, namely the property instantiated in the mental/cerebral phenomena that computationally-oriented theories of rule-following study. To take the contrary attitude, on the other hand, is to end up with another disappointing result, namely that the computational treatment of rule-following ultimately deals with something different from that which we wished to gain knowledge of when we began our inquiry into rule-following.. (shrink)

ArgumentThis article presents ancient documents on the subject of homeomeric lines. On the basis of such documents, the article reconstructs a definition of the notion as well as a proof of the result, which is left unproved in extant sources, that there are only three homeomeric lines: the straight line, the circumference, and the cylindrical helix. A point of particular historiographic interest is that homeomeric lines were the only class of lines defined directly as the extension of a mathematical property, (...) a move that is unparalleled in Greek mathematics. The far-reaching connections between mathematical homeomery and key issues in the ancient cosmological debate are extensively discussed here. An analysis of its relevance as a foundational theme will be presented in a companion paper in a future issue of Science in Context. (shrink)

In ancient China, art has never been a substitute for the category of ‘truth’ in the sense of Western aestheticism, but a mimic for goodness and beauty. The image in traditional Chinese aesthetics never transcended the idea to the level of Western abstraction, and that is because the artistic expression bore a social synthesis, rather than metaphysical, between human beings, reality, and the world. However, the Ming Dynasty introduces a Dionysian discourse that challenges the Apollonian tradition.

The basic notions in Prior's Ockhamist and Peircean logics of branching-time are the notion of moment and that of history. In the tree semantics, histories are defined as maximal linearly ordered sets of moments. In the geometrical approach, both moments and histories are primitive entities and there is no set theoretical dependency of the latter on the former. In the topological approach, moments can be defined as the elements of a rank 1 base of a non-Archimedean topology on the set (...) of histories. In this paper, it will be shown that the topological approach, and hence the other approaches, can be reconstructed in a framework in which the basic notions are those of history and of relative closeness relation among histories. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to present and discuss the language of the «givens», a typical stylistic resource of Greek mathematics and one of the major features of the proof format of analysis and synthesis. I shall analyze its expressive function and its peculiarities, as well as its general role as a deductive tool, explaining at the same time its particular applications in subgenres of a geometrical proposition like the locus theorems and the so-called «porisms». The main interpretative theses (...) of this study are the following: the language of the «givens» (1) is the standard idiom in which “existence and uniqueness” of a mathematical object was proved, (2) was conceived as an unified framework reducing to a strictly deductive format disparate argumentative steps such as deductions, constructions, and calculations. (shrink)

In just the last decade, many conference proceedings have been published on Plato’s Timaeus and its influence on the history of philosophy. The present vo­lume, which is the result of a symposium held at Seoul National University in September 2011, testifies to the enduring and widespread interest the Platonic dia­logue is able to elicit. The nine studies here collected by Euree Song center on the figure of the demiurge as maker of the world and they all deal with authors who, (...) while having di... (shrink)

ArgumentThis article is the sequel to an article published in the previous issue ofScience in Contextthat dealt with homeomeric lines (Acerbi 2010). The present article deals with foundational issues in Greek mathematics. It considers two key characters in the study of mathematical homeomery, namely, Apollonius and Geminus, and analyzes in detail their approaches to foundational themes as they are attested in ancient sources. The main historiographical result of this paper is to show thatthere wasa well-establishedmathematicalfield of discourse in “foundations of (...) mathematics,” a fact that is by no means obvious. The paper argues that the authors involved in this field of discourse set up a variety of philosophical, scholarly, and mathematical tools that they used in developing their investigations. (shrink)

The branching-time logic called Peircean by Arthur Prior is considered and given an infinite axiomatization. The axiomatization uses only the standard deduction rules for tense logic.

Temporal logic is one of the many areas in which a possible world semantics is adopted. Prior's Ockhamist and Peircean semantics for branching-time, though, depart from the genuine Kripke semantics in that they involve a quantification over histories, which is a second-order quantification over sets of possible worlds. In the paper, variants of the original Prior's semantics will be considered and it will be shown that all of them can be viewed as first-order counterparts of the original semantics.

In the tree-like representation of Time, two histories are undivided at a moment t whenever they share a common moment in the future of t. In the present paper, it will first be proved that Ockhamist and Peircean branching-time logics are unable to express some important sentences in which the notion of undividedness is involved. Then, a new semantics for branching-time logic will be presented. The new semantics is based on trees endowed with an indistinguishability function, a generalization of the (...) notion of undividedness. It will be shown that Ockhamist and Peircean semantics can be viewed as limit cases of the semantics developed in this paper. (shrink)

I argue that there are significant moral reasons in addition to harm prevention for making vaccination against certain common infectious diseases compulsory. My argument is based on an analogy between vaccine refusal and tax evasion. First, I discuss some of the arguments for compulsory vaccination that are based on considerations of the risk of harm that the non‐vaccinated would pose on others; I will suggest that the strength of such arguments is contingent upon circumstances and that in order to provide (...) the strongest defence possible of compulsory vaccination, such arguments need to be supplemented by additional arguments. I will then offer my additional argument for compulsory vaccination: I will argue that in both cases of vaccine refusal and of tax evasion individuals fail to make their fair contribution to important social and public goods, regardless of whether each individual contribution ‘makes a difference’. While fairness considerations have sometimes been used to support a moral duty to vaccinate, they have not been appealed to in order to argue for a legal duty to vaccinate. I will suggest that this is due, among other things, to a misapplication of the principle of the least restrictive alternative in public health. Finally, I will address nine possible objections to my argument. (shrink)

The basic notions in Prior’s Ockhamist and Peircean logics of branching-time are the notion of moment and that of history (or course of events). In the tree semantics, histories are defined as maximal linearly ordered sets of moments. In the geometrical approach, both moments and histories are primitive entities and there is no set theoretical (and ontological) dependency of the latter on the former. In the topological approach, moments can be defined as the elements of a rank 1 base of (...) a non-Archimedean topology on the set of histories. In this paper, it will be shown that the topological approach, and hence the other approaches, can be reconstructed in a framework in which the basic notions are those of history and of relative closeness relation among histories. (shrink)

We describe a form of moral artificial intelligence that could be used to improve human moral decision-making. We call it the “artificial moral advisor”. The AMA would implement a quasi-relativistic version of the “ideal observer” famously described by Roderick Firth. We describe similarities and differences between the AMA and Firth’s ideal observer. Like Firth’s ideal observer, the AMA is disinterested, dispassionate, and consistent in its judgments. Unlike Firth’s observer, the AMA is non-absolutist, because it would take into account the human (...) agent’s own principles and values. We argue that the AMA would respect and indeed enhance individuals’ moral autonomy, help individuals achieve wide and a narrow reflective equilibrium, make up for the limitations of human moral psychology in a way that takes conservatives’ objections to human bioenhancement seriously, and implement the positive functions of intuitions and emotions in human morality without their downsides, such as biases and prejudices. (shrink)

We argue that individuals who have access to vaccines and for whom vaccination is not medically contraindicated have a moral obligation to contribute to the realisation of herd immunity by being vaccinated. Contrary to what some have claimed, we argue that this individual moral obligation exists in spite of the fact that each individual vaccination does not significantly affect vaccination coverage rates and therefore does not significantly contribute to herd immunity. Establishing the existence of a moral obligation to be vaccinated (...) despite the negligible contribution each vaccination can make to the realisation of herd immunity is important because such moral obligation would strengthen the justification for coercive vaccination policies. We show that two types of arguments—namely a utilitarian argument based on Parfit’s Principle of Group Beneficence and a contractualist argument—can ground an individual moral obligation to be vaccinated, in spite of the imperceptible contribution that any single vaccination makes to vaccine coverage rates. We add a further argument for a moral obligation to be vaccinated that does not require embracing problematic comprehensive moral theories such as utilitarianism or contractualism. The argument is based on a “duty of easy rescue” applied to collectives, which grounds a collective moral obligation to realise herd immunity, and on a principle of fairness in the distribution of the burdens that must be borne to realise herd immunity. (shrink)