While infant fearfulness, and its expression via crying, may have been adaptive in our evolutionary history, for modern parents, crying can be challenging to respond to. We discuss how and why prolonged crying can raise the risk for difficulties with adult care. Given that crying is the most-reported trigger for shaking, its potential to elicit maladaptive responses should not be overlooked.

Mood profiling has a long history in the field of sport and exercise. Several novel mood profile clusters were identified and described in the literature recently (Parsons-Smith, Terry, & Machin, 2017). In the present study, we investigated whether the same clusters were evident in an Italian language, sport and exercise context. The Italian Mood Scale (ITAMS; Quartiroli, Terry, & Fogarty, 2017) was administered to 950 Italian-speaking sport participants (659 females, 284 males, 7 unspecified; age range = 16–63 yr., M (...) = 25.03, SD = 7.62) and seeded k-means clustering methodology applied to the responses. Six distinct mood profiles were identified, termed the iceberg, inverse iceberg, inverse Everest, shark fin, surface, and submerged profiles, which closely resembled those reported among English-speaking participants (Parsons-Smith et al., 2017). Significant differences were found in the distribution of specific mood profiles across gender and age groups. Findings supported the cross-cultural generalizability of the six mood profiles and offer new research avenues into their antecedents, correlates and behavioral consequences in Italian-language contexts. (shrink)

Biological evolution provides a creative fount of complex and subtle adaptations, often surprising the scientists who discover them. However, because evolution is an algorithmic process that transcends the substrate in which it occurs, evolution’s creativity is not limited to nature. Indeed, many researchers in the field of digital evolution have observed their evolving algorithms and organisms subverting their intentions, exposing unrecognized bugs in their code, producing unexpected adaptations, or exhibiting outcomes uncannily convergent with ones in nature. Such stories routinely reveal (...) creativity by evolution in these digital worlds, but they rarely fit into the standard scientific narrative. Instead they are often treated as mere obstacles to be overcome, rather than results that warrant study in their own right. The stories themselves are traded among researchers through oral tradition, but that mode of information transmission is inefficient and prone to error and outright loss. Moreover, the fact that these stories tend to be shared only among practitioners means that many natural scientists do not realize how interesting and lifelike digital organisms are and how natural their evolution can be. To our knowledge, no collection of such anecdotes has been published before. This paper is the crowd-sourced product of researchers in the fields of artificial life and evolutionary computation who have provided first-hand accounts of such cases. It thus serves as a written, fact-checked collection of scientifically important and even entertaining stories. In doing so we also present here substantial evidence that the existence and importance of evolutionary surprises extends beyond the natural world, and may indeed be a universal property of all complex evolving systems. (shrink)

Trust is a natural mechanism by which an autonomous party, an agent, can deal with the inherent uncertainty regarding the behaviours of other parties and the uncertainty in the information it shares with those parties. Trust is thus crucial in any decentralised system. This paper builds on recent efforts to use argumentation to reason about trust. Specifically, a set of schemes is provided, and abstract patterns of reasoning that apply in multiple situations geared towards trust. Schemes are described in which (...) one agent, A, can establish arguments for trusting another agent, B, directly, as well as schemes that A can use to construct arguments for trusting C, where C is trusted by B. For both sets of schemes, a set of critical questions is offered that identify the situations in which these schemes can fail. (shrink)

The concept of the sick role entered sociology in 1951 when Talcott Parsons creatively separated the sick person out of the doctor–patient dyad. The idea became fundamental in the subdiscipline of medical sociology. By the 1990s, the concept had almost disappeared from the research literature. Beyond the generational and theoretical changes that explain how the sick role idea could become irrelevant or unnecessary to sociologists, there were two immediate factors: the negative politicization of the concept and the shift of (...) medical sociologists to a focus on applied health behavior. In the later, fragmented discipline of sociology, final, total abandonment was still uncertain. (shrink)

Spade 1988 sugges t s tha t t he r e are ac tua l l y two theo r i e s t o address t h i s ques t i o n t o , an ear l y one and a l a t e r one . 2 Most o f the presen t pape r i s a deve l o pmen t o f t h i s i dea . I sugges t (...) tha t ear l y work by Sherwood and o the r s was a s tudy o f quan t i f i e r s : the i r semant i c s and t he e f f e c t s o f con t e x t on i n f e r e n ce s t ha t can be made f r om quan t i f i e d te rms . La te r , i n the hands o f Bur l e y and o the r s , i t changed i n t o a s tudy o f someth i n g e l se , a s tudy o f what I ca l l g loba l quan t i f i c a t i o n a l e f f e c t . In sec t i o n 1 , I exp l a i n what these two op t i o n s are. (shrink)

Social theory between progress and apocalypse -- Autonomy and domination: Weber's cage -- Barbarism and modernity: Eisenstadt's regret -- Integration and justice: Parsons' utopia -- Despising others: Simmel's stranger -- Meaning evil -- De-civilizing the civil sphere -- Psychotherapy as central institution -- The frictions of modernity and their possible repair.

This is a summarised version of my MSocSc Thesis "The development of 'The Structure of Social Action' in the Early Writings of Talcott Parsons" written in 1978 under the supervision of Professor David Bettison.

This book develops a framework for analysing strategic rationality, a notion central to contemporary game theory, which is the formal study of the interaction of rational agents and which has proved extremely fruitful in economics, political theory and business management. The author argues that a logical paradox lies at the root of a number of persistent puzzles in game theory, in particular those concerning rational agents who seek to establish some kind of reputation. Building on the work of Parsons, (...) Burge, Gaifman and Barwise and Etchemendy, Robert Koons constructs a context-sensitive solution to the whole family of liar-like paradoxes including, for the first time, a detailed account of how the interpretation of paradoxical statements is fixed by context. This analysis provides an understanding of how the rational agent model can account for the emergence of rules, practices and institutions. (shrink)

A brief introductory note to the Monist issue on "Temporal Parts", setting the background for the eight papers included in the rest of the issue (by Y. Balashov, B. Brogaard, K. Fine, M. Heller, R. LePoidevin, J. Parsons, P. M. Simons, and P. van Inwagen).

These essays strip away Nietzsche's flamboyant style, his tragic biography, and his notorious "influence" to reveal him purely as a philosopher, a thinker occupied with problems of justification, value, science and knowledge, truth and God. They discover a profound and very human philosopher who has too long been ignored and distorted by the wrong kinds of admiration and criticism. Contributors include Walter Kaufmann, Arthur Danto, Richard Schacht, Karl Jaspers, Kathryn Pyne Parsons, Max Scheler, Ivan Soll, Thomas Mann, and Herman (...) Hesse. (shrink)

Kathryn Parsons attempts a criticism of the traditional approach to the problem of meaning invariance of predicate expressions when a theory is replaced by a successor. I have considered three types of cases which Parsons presents as counter-examples to Fine's criterion, and find that the first two do not succeed in refuting the criterion. The third, however, does suceed; and I argue that there is no way to revise Fine's criterion in order to remove the difficulty. Hence some (...) non-traditional approach to meaning invariance is required, or subjectivity in the science must be shown to be avoidable in spite of the incommensurability of theories. (shrink)

This is a review of the most comprehensive scholarly account of the contribution to sociology of Talcott Parsons (1902-1979).