The sense of supernatural agency constitutes a defining characteristic of the religious sphere of life. But what accounts for the continued cross-cultural recurrence of this psychological phenomenon over the course of human history? This paper reviews evidence indicating that the source of panhuman or universal cognitive patterns of thought and behaviour such as this lies in the common characteristics of the evolved human mind. Further, that the sense of the supernatural is constituted by a unique combination of commonly recurring cognitive (...) processes that together give rise to a panhuman conviction in the reality of supernatural agencies able and willing to assist each individual in situations deemed beyond the capacities of that individual. These cognitive processes are driven most acutely by existential anxiety in response to extrinsic physical, economic and social pressures indicating that religiosity is best understood as a social-psychological phenomenon. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to point out the equivalence between three notions respectively issued from recursion theory, computational complexity and finite model theory. One the one hand, the rudimentary languages are known to be characterized by the linear hierarchy. On the other hand, this complexity class can be proved to correspond to monadic second‐order logic with addition. Our viewpoint sheds some new light on the close connection between these domains: We bring together the two extremal notions by providing (...) a direct logical characterization of rudimentary languages and a representation result of second‐order logic into these languages. We use natural arithmetical tools, and our proofs contain no ingredient from computational complexity. (shrink)

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-021-00853-5.

Pour introduire à l’article de Lewis et Langton sur la définition des propriétés intrinsèques, il faut rappeler que les propriétés intrinsèques diffèrent d’autres notions comme les propriétés essentielles, les propriétés monadiques, les propriétés catégoriques, les propriétés qualitatives. Les propriétés intrinsèques sont définies selon David Lewis à partir de la notion plus primitive de propriété « naturelle », ce qu’il a continué à modifier jusqu’à des textes plus récents.

We will be dealing with “sequential circuits” in the sense of E. F. Moore and G. H. Mealy. Each such circuit is assumed to have a finite number of input wires and a finite number of output wires. Each element of such a circuit will be assumed to be an and-circuit, an or-circuit, a not-circuit, or a delay circuit, for some specified temporal delay. Each element has one output wire which, however, may branch in order to serve several purposes simultaneously. (...) The and-circuits and or-circuits have two input wires each, while the not-circuits and the delay circuits have one input wire each. (shrink)

Most traditional systems of metaphysics do not seem to assert that there are such things as propositions. This appears to me to be a defect in such systems, especially as each such system is really itself a class of propositions or a single complex proposition.

This study examines Russian politics in the Soviet and post-Soviet eras using sociologist Robert Merton’s middle-range theory. It analyzes ideology, decision making, political culture, public opinion, and democratization and offers an innovative approach to the study of Russian politics in the twenty-first century.

Schizophrenia is a disturbance of the self, of which the attribution of agency is a major component. In this article, we review current theories of the Sense of Agency, their relevance to schizophrenia, and propose a novel framework for future research. We explore some of the models of agency, in which both bottom-up and top-down processes are implicated in the genesis of agency. We further this line of inquiry by suggesting that ongoing neurological activity (the brain’s resting state) in self-referential (...) regions of the brain can provide a deeper level of influence beyond what the current models capture. Based on neuroimaging studies, we suggest that aberrant activity in regions such as the default mode network of individuals with schizophrenia can lead to a misattribution of internally/externally generated stimuli. This can result in symptoms such as thought insertion and delusions of control. Consequently, neuroimaging can contribute to a more comprehensive conceptualization and measurement of agency and potential treatment implications. (shrink)