Distinguishing explicit from implicit knowledge on the basis of the active representation of certain propositional attitudes fails to provide an explanation for dissociations in learning performance under implicit and explicit conditions. This suggests an account of implicit and explicit knowledge grounded in the presence of multiple learning mechanisms, and multiple brain systems more generally. A rough outline of a connectionist account of this kind is provided.

The dynamical hypothesis is strong in that, for it to be true, every cognitive phenomenon must be best modeled by a dynamical system. Depending on how it is interpreted, however, the hypothesis may be seen as probably false or even unfalsifiable. Strengthening the hypothesis to require unification, or at least coherence, across models in different cognitive domains alleviates this problem.

Rich sensorimotor interaction facilitates language learning and is presumed to ground conceptual representations. Yet empirical support for early stages of embodied word learning is currently lacking. Finding evidence that sensorimotor interaction shapes learned linguistic representations would provide crucial support for embodied language theories. We developed a gamified word learning experiment in virtual reality in which participants learned the names of six novel objects by grasping and manipulating objects with either their left or right hand. Participants then completed a word–color match (...) task in which they were tested on the same six words and objects. Participants were faster to respond to stimuli in the match task when the response hand was compatible with the hand used to interact with the named object, an effect we refer to as affordance compatibility. In two follow up experiments, we found that merely observing virtual hands interact with the objects was sufficient to acquire a smaller affordance compatibility effect, and we found that the compatibility effect was driven primarily by responses with a compatible hand and not by responses in a compatible spatial location. Our results support theoretical views of language which ground word representations in sensorimotor experiences, and they suggest promising future routes to explore the sensorimotor foundations of higher cognition through immersive virtual experiments. (shrink)

By means of an example, shows the possibility of beliefs that are separately rational whilst together inconsistent.

This chapter contains sections titled: The Nature of Beauty Truth, Goodness, and Beauty Beauty and the Blues Notes.

This is the first book-length study of the development of civility in Chinese societies. Although some social scientists and political philosophers have discussed civility, none has defined it as an analytical tool to systematically measure attitudes and behavior, and few have applied it to a non-Western society. By comparing the development of civility in mainland China and Taiwan, Civility and Its Development: The Experiences of China and Taiwan analyzes the social conditions needed for civility to become established in a society. (...) Schak argues that the attempts to impose civility top-down from the state are ineffective. Civility appeared in Taiwan only after state efforts to impose it ceased at the end of the 1980s when Taiwan began to democratize, and the PRC government civility campaigns have so far had only limited success. The book concludes with an examination of various differences between Taiwan and the PRC relevant to Taiwan’s having become a society with civility while the PRC still encounters difficulties in doing so. The essential factor in developing civility in Taiwan, Schak contends, was its evolution from a place composed of myriad small, inward-looking communities to a society in which everyone shares a strong identity and civic consciousness, and people consider others as fellow members, not anonymous strangers. “This book represents the most thorough review of what social scientists once called ‘the civilizing process’ in Chinese society. David C. Schak builds on the earlier studies on this issue and goes well beyond the established literature.” —James Watson, Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society and Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, Harvard University “This is a topic that people talk about all the time, and David C. Schak draws a lot of material together in a systematic and comprehensive way that can stimulate important discussions beyond the academy.” —Thomas Gold, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley. (shrink)

Many worry that global warming may produce dire consequences not just for humankind, but for many other living organisms on the planetEarth. This has raised concerns about the desirability of the political and economic policies that brought us to this point in history, a period of markedly higher levels of consumptionConsumption that produce higher levels of CO2. That, in turn, has raised new concerns about the ideologies and theoretical paradigms upon which such political and economic policies are based. Many now (...) call for a rejection of free marketFree Market economies to make room for more centrally planned economic systems. Even the idea of Homo EconomicusHomo Economicus – the primary actor in the modern free marketFree Market economy – is under fire in favor of a new conceptualization of the primary actor: Homo CuratorHomo Curator. This essay explains why these changes are both unnecessary and dangerous. I argue they are unnecessary by showing: (1) Homo Economicus and excessive consumptionConsumption are not the root of the problem, and (2) how the theory of market failure already gives us proven means to address problems like global warming. I argue that abandoning Homo Economicus and the free marketFree Market economy is dangerous because it will inevitably lead to a world that is far less likely to support individual and collective human flourishing; one that poorer, less free, and less respectful of the sanctity of the individual. (shrink)

The organism is one of the fundamental concepts of biology and has been at the center of many discussions about biological individuality, yet what exactly it is can be confusing. The definition that we find generally useful is that an organism is a unit in which all the subunits have evolved to be highly cooperative, with very little conflict. We focus on how often organisms evolve from two or more formerly independent organisms. Two canonical transitions of this type—replicators clustered in (...) cells and endosymbiotic organelles within host cells—demonstrate the reality of this kind of evolutionary transition and suggest conditions that can favor it. These conditions include co-transmission of the partners across generations and rules that strongly regulate and limit conflict, such as a fair meiosis. Recently, much attention has been given to associations of animals with microbes involved in their nutrition. These range from tight endosymbiotic associations like those between aphids and Buchnera bacteria, to the complex communities in animal intestines. Here, starting with a reflection about identity through time, we consider the distinctions between these kinds of animal–bacteria interactions and describe the criteria by which a few can be considered jointly organismal but most cannot. (shrink)

We explore ways in which purely qualitative belief change in the AGM tradition throws light on options in the treatment of conditional probability. First, by helping see why it can be useful to go beyond the ratio rule defining conditional from one-place probability. Second, by clarifying what is at stake in different ways of doing that. Third, by suggesting novel forms of conditional probability corresponding to familiar variants of qualitative belief change, and conversely. Likewise, we explain how recent work on (...) the qualitative part of probabilistic inference leads to a very broad class of 'proto-probability' functions. (shrink)

While environmental claims are increasingly used by companies to appeal consumers, they also attract greater scrutiny from independent parties interested in consumer protection. Consumers are now able to compare corporate environmental claims against external, often disconfirming, information to form their brand attitudes and purchase intentions. What remains unclear is how the level of information specificity of both the environmental claims and external disconfirming information interact to influence consumer reactions. Two experiments address this gap in the CSR communication literature. When specific (...) claims are countered by specific external information, consumers report more negative brand attitudes and lower purchase intentions. The effect is serially mediated by skepticism toward the claims and lack of corporate credibility. We conclude by discussing strategies that firms can utilize to avoid information dilution and ensure that external disconfirming information percolates to consumers as specific. (shrink)

I argue that thought experiments are a form of experimental reasoning similar to real experiments. They require the same ability to participate by following a narrative as real experiments do. Participation depends in turn on using what we already know to visualize, manipulate and understand what is unfamiliar or problematic. I defend the claim that visualization requires embodiment by an example which shows how tacit understanding of the properties of represented objects and relations enables us to work out how such (...) objects might behave in a postulated world. This knowledge is that of embodied agents. That thought experiments require embodied participation is what makes them experiments rather than arguments. Unlike real experiments, from which ordinary perception has been displaced by instrumentation, thought experiments still appeal to relatively unmediated common sense, even when their purpose is to criticize or subvert common sense notions. (shrink)

William James is frequently considered one of America's most important philosophers, as well as a foundational thinker for the study of religion. Despite his reputation as the founder of pragmatism, he is rarely considered a serious philosopher or religious thinker. In this new interpretation David Lamberth argues that James's major contribution was to develop a systematic metaphysics of experience integrally related to his developing pluralistic and social religious ideas. Lamberth systematically interprets James's radically empiricist world-view and argues for an (...) early dating for his commitment to the metaphysics of radical empiricism. He offers a close reading of Varieties of Religious Experience; and concludes by connecting James's ideas about experience, pluralism and truth to current debates in philosophy, the philosophy of religion, and theology, suggesting James's functional, experiential metaphysics as a conceptual aid in bridging the social and interpretive with the immediate and concrete while avoiding naive realism. (shrink)

In philosophy of aesthetics, scholars commonly express a commitment to the premise that there is a distinctive type of judgment that can be meaningfully labeled “aesthetic”, and that these judgments are distinctively different from other types of judgments. We argue that, within an Aristotelian framework, there is no clear avenue for meaningfully differentiating “aesthetic” judgment from other types of judgment, and, as such, we aim to question the assumption that aesthetic judgment does in fact constitute a distinctive kind of judgment (...) that is in need of, or can be subject to, distinctive theorizing. We advance our argument primarily through demonstrating that leading contemporary accounts of aesthetic judgment do not successfully distinguish a type of judgment in that they do not tell us how making an aesthetic judgment differs substantially from judging that 2 + 3 = 5, that football is entertaining, or that today is Tuesday. (shrink)

Kin selection is a core aspect of social evolution theory, but a small number of critics have recently challenged it. Here I address these criticisms and show that kin selection remains an important explanation for much social evolution. I show how many of the criticisms rest on historical idiosyncrasies of the way the field happened to develop, rather than on the real logic and evidence.

Biologists and philosophers differ on whether selection should be analyzed at the level of the gene or of the individual. In Peter Godfrey-Smith’s book, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection, he argues that individuals can be good members of Darwinian populations, whereas genes rarely can. I take issue with parts of this view, and suggest that Godfrey-Smith’s scheme for thinking about Darwinian populations is also applicable to populations of genes.

Book reviewed in this article: Balancing Act: The New Medical Ethics of Medicine's New Economics. By E. Haavi Morreim.

Despite its long tradition in social psychology, we consider that Cognitive Dissonance Theory presents serious flaws concerning its methodology which question the relevance of the theory, limit breakthroughs, and hinder the evaluation of its core hypotheses. In our opinion, these issues are mainly due to operational and methodological weaknesses that have not been sufficiently addressed since the beginnings of the theory. We start by reviewing the ambiguities concerning the definition and conceptualization of the term cognitive dissonance. We then review the (...) ways it has been operationalized and we present the shortcomings of the actual paradigms. To acquire a better understanding of the theory, we advocate a stronger focus on the nature and consequences of the cognitive dissonance state itself. Next, we emphasize the actual lack of standardization, both in the ways to induce cognitive dissonance and to assess it, which impairs the comparability of the results. Last, in addition to reviewing these limits, we suggest new ways to improve the methodology and we conclude on the importance for the field of psychology to take advantage of these important challenges to go forwards. (shrink)

The article offers an approach to inquiry about, the foundation of medical ethics by addressing three areas of conceptual presupposition basic to medical ethical theory. First, medical ethics must presuppose a view about the nature of medicine. it is argued that the view required by a cogent medical morality entails that medicine be seen both as a healing relationship and as a practical art. Three ways in which medicine inherently involves values and valuation are presented as important, i.e., in being (...) aimed at the good of health, in being a cognitive art evaluating towards that good, and as a manifestation of a virtuous disposition concerning that good. Finally, a value ontology drawn from these considerations is seen as necessarily underlying medical ethics. A set of three such basic values are promoted as crucial: the value of health; the value of the individual patient; and the value of altruism that mediates the class of potential patients. (shrink)

I offer a critical analysis of a view that has become a dominant aspect of recent thought on the relationship between evolution and morality, and propose an alternative. An ingredient in Michael Ruse's 'error theory' (Ruse 1995) is that belief in moral (prescriptive, universal, and nonsubjective) guidelines arose in humans because such belief results in the performance of adaptive cooperative behaviors. This statement relies on two particular connections: between ostensible and intentional types of altruism, and between intentional altruism and morality. (...) The latter connection is problematic because it makes morality redundant, its role having already been fulfilled by the psychological dispositions that constitute intentional altruism. Both behavioral ecology and moral psychology support this criticism, and neither human behavioral flexibility nor the self-regard / other-regard distinction can provide a defense of the error theory. I conclude that morality did not evolve to curb rampant selfishness; instead, the evolutionarily recent 'universal law' aspect of morality may function to update behavioral strategies which were adaptive in the paleolithic environment of our ancestors (to which our psychological dispositions are best adapted), by means of norms more appropriate to our novel social environment. (shrink)

Plagiarism has been a long standing concern within higher education. Yet with the rapid rise in the use and availability of the Internet, both the research literature and media have raised the notion that the online environment is accelerating the decline in academic ethics. The majority of research that has been conducted to investigate such claims have involved self-report data from students. This study sought to collect empirical data to investigate the potential influence the prevalence of the Internet has had (...) on significant higher education artifacts by comparing dissertations written prior to widespread use of the Internet with those written in a period in ubiquitous Internet use. Due to the prestige associated with the doctoral degree and the fact that the majority of the effort necessary to achieve such a degree resides within the dissertation, this study utilized Doctor of Philosophy dissertations written in English and published by accredited universities in the U.S. and Canada. A sample of 384 dissertations were analyzed by Turnitin plagiarism detection software. The mean similarity indices for pre-Internet and post-Internet eras were 14.5 and 12.3 %, respectively. A Mann Whitney U test indicated that the differences between groups was significant, however opposite than has been purported within the exigent literature. When comparing the counts of dissertations for each time era considering those with plagiarism versus those that had little/no evidence thereof, there was no statistically significant difference. The findings of this study suggest that the Internet may not be significantly impacting the prevalence of plagiarism in advanced levels of higher education. (shrink)