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  1. Information and meaning in life, humans and robots (FIS 2005).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    Information and meaning exist around us and within ourselves, and the same information can correspond to different meanings. This is true for humans and animals, and is becoming true for robots. We propose here an overview of this subject by using a systemic tool related to meaning generation that has already been published (C. Menant, Entropy 2003). The Meaning Generator System (MGS) is a system submitted to a constraint that generates a meaningful information when it receives an incident information that (...)
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  2. Cognition as management of meaningful information. Proposal for an evolutionary approach (IACAP Aarhus July 2011).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    Humans are cognitive entities. Our ongoing interactions with the environment are threaded with creations and usages of meaningful information. Animal life is also populated with meaningful information related to survival constraints. Information managed by artificial agents can also be considered as having meanings, as derived from the designer. Such perspective brings us to propose an evolutionary approach to cognition based on meaningful information management. We use a systemic tool, the Meaning Generator System (MGS), and apply it consecutively to animals, humans (...)
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  3. Evolution of meaningful information generation through the evolution of life (Biosemiotics Gatherings 2003).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    In this paper, we use the Meaning Generator System (MGS) presented at Gathering in Biosemiotics 2 [1] to analyse the evolution of meaningful information generation through different steps of the evolution of life. Taking as a starting point the usage of MGS for vital constraint satisfaction in basic life (paramecium), we develop its application for more complex living elements up to the case of non-human primate. The thread we follow is relative to the identification of new constraints that can appear (...)
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  4. From biosemiotics to semiotics (Biosemiotics Gatherings 2002).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    Biosemiotics and Semiotics have similarities and differences. Both deal with signal and meaning. One difference is that Biosemiotics covers a domain (life) that is less complex that the one addressed by Semiotics (human). We believe that this difference can be used to have Biosemiotics bringing added value to Semiotics. This belief is based on the fact that a theory of meaning is easier to build up for living elements than for humans, and that the results obtained for life can make (...)
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  5. Introduction to a Systemic Theory of Meaning (Jan 2010 update).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    Information and Meaning are present everywhere around us and within ourselves. Specific studies have been implemented in order to link information and meaning: - Semiotics - Phenomenology - Analytic Philosophy - Psychology No general coverage is available for the notion of meaning. We propose to complement this lack by a systemic approach to meaning generation.
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  6. Introduction to a Systemic Theory of Meaning (July 2014 update).Christophe Menant - manuscript
    Information and Meaning are present everywhere around us and within ourselves. Specific studies have been implemented in order to link information and meaning: - Semiotics - Phenomenology - Analytic Philosophy - Psychology No general coverage is available for the notion of meaning. We propose to complement this lack by a systemic approach to meaning generation.
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  7. Evolved cognitive mechanisms and human behavior.H. Clark Barrett - manuscript
    In Crawford, C. & Krebs, D. (eds.) Foundations of evolutionary psychology: Ideas, issues, applications and findings. (2nd Ed.) Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum Associates.
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  8. Individuating Cognitive Characters: Lessons from Praying Mantises and Plants.Carrie Figdor - forthcoming - Philosophy of Science.
    This paper advances the development of a phylogeny-based psychology in which cognitive ability types are individuated as characters in the evolutionary biological sense. I explain the character concept and its utility in addressing (or dissolving) conceptual problems arising from discoveries of cognitive abilities across a wide range of species. I use the examples of stereopsis in the praying mantis, internal cell-to-cell signaling in plants, and episodic memory in scrub jays to show how anthropocentric cognitive ability types can be reformulated into (...)
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  9. Affording Affordances.David Spurrett - forthcoming - Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy.
    A striking feature of the latest version of Dennett’s ‘big picture’ of the evolution of life and mind is frequent reference to ‘affordances’. An affordance is, roughly, a possibility for action for a creature in an environment. Given more than one possibility for action, a good question is: what will the creature actually do? I argue that affordances pose a problem of selection, and that a good general solution to this problem of mind-design is to implement a system of preferences.
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  10. How WEIRD is Cognitive Archaeology? Engaging with the Challenge of Cultural Variation and Sample Diversity.Anton Killin & Ross Pain - 2023 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 14 (2):539-563.
    In their landmark 2010 paper, “The weirdest people in the world?”, Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan outlined a serious methodological problem for the psychological and behavioural sciences. Most of the studies produced in the field use people from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies, yet inferences are often drawn to the species as a whole. In drawing such inferences, researchers implicitly assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that WEIRD populations are generally representative of the (...)
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  11. Cognitive Archaeology and the Minimum Necessary Competence Problem.Anton Killin & Ross Pain - 2023 - Biological Theory 18 (4):269-283.
    Cognitive archaeologists attempt to infer the cognitive and cultural features of past hominins and their societies from the material record. This task faces the problem of _minimum necessary competence_: as the most sophisticated thinking of ancient hominins may have been in domains that leave no archaeological signature, it is safest to assume that tool production and use reflects only the lower boundary of cognitive capacities. Cognitive archaeology involves selecting a model from the cognitive sciences and then assessing some aspect of (...)
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  12. Global Evolutionary Arguments: Self-Defeat, Circularity, and Skepticism about Reason.Diego E. Machuca - 2023 - In Evolutionary Debunking Arguments: Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 333–359.
    In this essay, I consider an evolutionary debunking argument (EDA) that purports to undermine the epistemic justification of the belief in the reliability of our belief-forming processes, and an evolutionary vindicating argument (EVA) that seeks to establish that such a belief is epistemically justified. Whereas the EDA in question seems to fall prey to crippling self-defeat, the EVA under consideration seems to fall prey to vicious circularity. My interest in those arguments and the problems they face lies in what they (...)
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  13. The mnemonic functions of episodic memory.Alexandria Boyle - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (3):327-349.
    Episodic memory is the form of memory involved in remembering personally experienced past events. Here, I address two questions about episodic memory’s function: what does episodic memory do for us, and why do we have it? Recent work addressing these questions has emphasized episodic memory’s role in imaginative simulation, criticizing the mnemonic view on which episodic memory is “for” remembering. In this paper, I offer a defense of the mnemonic view by highlighting an underexplored mnemonic function of episodic memory – (...)
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  14. Cognitive Science: An Introduction to the Study of Mind. (4th edition).Jay Friedenberg, Gordon Silverman & Michael Spivey - 2022 - Sage.
    An introductory text on cognitive science from an interdisciplinary perspective. Containing chapters on philosophy, psychology, cognition, neuroscience, the network and evolutionary approaches. Covers theories and models of mind looking at all major information processing categories: perception, attention, language, emotions, social, and artificial intelligence.
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  15. Culture, genes, selection, and learning: A response to Nichols, Mackey & Moll.Anton Killin & Ross Pain - 2022 - Philosophical Psychology 35 (2):297-300.
  16. What Is the Function of Confirmation Bias?Uwe Peters - 2022 - Erkenntnis 87 (3):1351-1376.
    Confirmation bias is one of the most widely discussed epistemically problematic cognitions, challenging reliable belief formation and the correction of inaccurate views. Given its problematic nature, it remains unclear why the bias evolved and is still with us today. To offer an explanation, several philosophers and scientists have argued that the bias is in fact adaptive. I critically discuss three recent proposals of this kind before developing a novel alternative, what I call the ‘reality-matching account’. According to the account, confirmation (...)
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  17. On the Origin of Negation.Giorgio Sbardolini - 2022 - Erkenntnis:1-20.
    The ability to express negation in language may have been the result of an adaptive process. However, there are different accounts of adaptation in linguistics, and more than one of them may describe the case of negation. In this paper, I distinguish different versions of the claim that negation is adaptive and defend a proposal, based on recent work by Steinert-Threlkeld (2016) and Incurvati and Sbardolini (2021), on which negation is an indirect adaptation.
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  18. Why Socio-Political Beliefs Trump Individual Morality: An Evolutionary Perspective.Walter Veit & Heather Browning - 2022 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 11 (4):290-292.
  19. Toolmaking and the Evolution of Normative Cognition.Jonathan Birch - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (1):1-26.
    We are all guided by thousands of norms, but how did our capacity for normative cognition evolve? I propose there is a deep but neglected link between normative cognition and practical skill. In modern humans, complex motor skills and craft skills, such as toolmaking, are guided by internally represented norms of correct performance. Moreover, it is plausible that core components of human normative cognition evolved as a solution to the distinctive problems of transmitting complex motor skills and craft skills, especially (...)
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  20. Explorations in Archaeology and Philosophy.Anton Killin & Sean Allen-Hermanson (eds.) - 2021 - Springer Verlag.
    This volume explores various themes at the intersection of archaeology and philosophy: inference and theory; interdisciplinary connections; cognition, language and normativity; and ethical issues. Showcasing this heterogeneity, its scope ranges from the method of analogical inference to the evolution of the human mind; from conceptual issues in assessing the health of past populations to the ethics of cultural heritage tourism. It probes the archaeological record for evidence of numeracy, curiosity and creativity, and social complexity. Its contributors comprise an interdisciplinary cluster (...)
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  21. Not by signalling alone: Music's mosaicism undermines the search for a proper function.Anton Killin, Carl Brusse, Adrian Currie & Ronald J. Planer - 2021 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44.
    Mehr et al. seek to explain music's evolution in terms of a unitary proper function – signalling cooperative intent – which they cash out in two guises, coalition signalling and parental attention signalling. Although we recognize the role signalling almost certainly played in the evolution of music, we reject “ultimate” causal explanations which focus on a unidirectional, narrow range of causal factors.
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  22. The Descent of Preferences.David Spurrett - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (2):485-510.
    More attention has been devoted to providing evolutionary accounts of the development of beliefs, or belief-like states, than for desires or preferences. Here I articulate and defend an evolutionary rationale for the development of psychologically real preference states. Preferences token or represent the expected values available actions given discriminated states of world and agent. The argument is an application of the ‘environmental complexity thesis’ found in Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny, although my conclusions differ from Sterelny’s. I argue that tokening expected utilities (...)
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  23. Normativity, social change, and the epistemological framing of culture.Andrew Buskell - 2020 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 43.
    The authors deploy an epistemic framework to represent culture and model the acquisition of cultural behavior. Yet, the framing inherits familiar problems with explaining the acquisition of norms. Such problems are conspicuous with regard to human societies where norms are ubiquitous. This creates a new difficulty for the authors in explaining change to mutually exclusive organizational structures of human life.
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  24. Crowding out Memetic Explanation.Rosa Cao - 2020 - Philosophy of Science 87 (5):1160-1171.
    Memes have been proposed to explain wide swathes of human culture and language use. I argue that what is really doing the explanatory work in many of these cases is a basic mechanism of information...
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  25. Rethinking prestige bias.Azita Chellappoo - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8191-8212.
    Some cultural evolution researchers have argued for the importance of prestige bias as a systematic and widespread social learning bias, that structures human social learning and cultural transmission patterns. Broadly speaking, prestige bias accounts understand it as a bias towards copying ‘prestigious’ individuals. Prestige bias, along with other social learning biases, has been argued to pay a crucial role in allowing cumulative cultural selection to take place, thereby generating adaptations that are key to our success as a species. However, I (...)
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  26. Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies.Cameron M. Curtin, H. Clark Barrett, Alexander Bolyanatz, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Daniel Fessler, Simon Fitzpatrick, Michael Gurven, Martin Kanovsky, Stephen Laurence, Anne Pisor, Brooke Scelza, Stephen Stich, Chris von Rueden & Joseph Henrich - 2020 - Evolution and Human Behavior 41 (5):415-429.
    Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just (...)
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  27. Why literalism is still the best game in town: Replies to Drayson, Machery, and Schwitzgebel.Carrie Figdor - 2020 - Mind and Language 35 (5):687-693.
    In Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates (Oxford UP, 2018), I argue that psychological predicates used to ascribe cognitive capacities to many nonhuman biological species should be interpreted literally with the same reference for humans and nonhumans alike. In this Mind & Language book symposium, I respond to comments and criticisms by Zoe Drayson, Edouard Machery, and Eric Schwitzgebel, and conclude that the Literalist position is still the best interpretation of these uses.
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  28. Chimpanzee normativity: evidence and objections.Simon Fitzpatrick - 2020 - Biology and Philosophy 35 (4):1-28.
    This paper considers the question of whether chimpanzees possess at least a primitive sense of normativity: i.e., some ability to internalize and enforce social norms—rules governing appropriate and inappropriate behaviour—within their social groups, and to make evaluations of others’ behaviour in light of such norms. A number of scientists and philosophers have argued that such a sense of normativity does exist in chimpanzees and in several other non-human primate and mammalian species. However, the dominant view in the scientific and philosophical (...)
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  29. Can resources save rationality? ‘Anti-Bayesian’ updating in cognition and perception.Eric Mandelbaum, Isabel Won, Steven Gross & Chaz Firestone - 2020 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 143:e16.
    Resource rationality may explain suboptimal patterns of reasoning; but what of “anti-Bayesian” effects where the mind updates in a direction opposite the one it should? We present two phenomena — belief polarization and the size-weight illusion — that are not obviously explained by performance- or resource-based constraints, nor by the authors’ brief discussion of reference repulsion. Can resource rationality accommodate them?
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  30. How to count biological minds: symbiosis, the free energy principle, and reciprocal multiscale integration.Matthew Sims - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2157-2179.
    The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the philosophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multi-cellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a functionally integrated cognizing unit. Somewhere along the way, did (...)
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  31. Comentários sobre Biologia, Psicologia e Política da Religião.Michael Starks - 2020 - las Vegas, NV USA: Reality Press.
    Na minha opinião, um comportamentoque eu é uma expressão de nossa psicologia evoluiu e tão intimamente relacionada à religião, moralidade e ética, se alguém sabe olhar para eles. -/- Muitos vão achar estranho que ele passe pouco tempo discutindo os temas comuns à maioria das discussões religiosas, mas na minha opinião é essencial primeiro entender as generalidades do comportamento e isso requer uma boa compreensão da biologia e psicologia que são principalmente notáveis por sua ausência em trabalhos sobre religião, política, (...)
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  32. Demography and cultural complexity.Kim Sterelny - 2020 - Synthese 198 (9):8557-8580.
    This paper begins by calling attention to a puzzling feature of our deep past: an apparent mis-match between morphological evolution in our lineage, including the expansion of our brain and neocortex, and changes in material culture. Three ideas might explain this mis-match. The apparent mis-match is an illusion: change in material culture is indeed driven by biological evolution, but of a kind difficult to identify in the fossil record; the mismatch is caused by the fact that material culture is sensitive (...)
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  33. Learning from the Past: Epistemic Generativity and the Function of Episodic Memory.A. Boyle - 2019 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (5-6):242-251.
    I argue that the function of episodic memory is to store information about the past, against the orthodox view that it is to support imagining the future. I show that episodic memory is epistemically generative, allowing organisms to learn from past events retroactively. This confers adaptive benefits in three domains: reasoning about the world, skill, and social interaction. Given the role of evolutionary perspectives in comparative research, this argument necessitates a radical shift in the study of episodic memory in nonhumans.
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  34. Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking by Cecilia Heyes. [REVIEW]Carl Brusse - 2019 - The Quarterly Review of Biology 94 (2):231-231.
    With this volume, the author stakes out a bold, authoritative position in the multidisciplinary literature on cultural evolution and human uniqueness.
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  35. Looking for Middle Ground in Cultural Attraction Theory.Andrew Buskell - 2019 - Evolutionary Anthropology 28 (1):14-17.
    In their article, Thom Scott‐Phillips, Stefaan Blancke, and Christophe Heintz do a commendable job summarizing the position and misunderstandings of “cultural attraction theory” (CAT). However, they do not address a longstanding problem for the CAT framework; that while it has an encompassing theory and some well‐worked out case studies, it lacks tools for generating models or empirical hypotheses of intermediate generality. I suggest that what the authors diagnose as misunderstandings are instead superficial interpretive errors, resulting from researchers who have attempted (...)
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  36. Cultural evolutionary psychology is still evolutionary psychology.Marco Fenici & Duilio Garofoli - 2019 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 42:e176.
    The cognitive gadgets theory proposes to reform evolutionary psychology by replacing the standard nativist and internalist approach to modularity with a cultural constructivist one. However, the resulting “cultural evolutionary psychology” still maintains some controversial aspects of the original neo-Darwinian paradigm. These assumptions are unnecessary to the cognitive gadgets theory and can be eliminated without significant conceptual loss.
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  37. Systemic functional adaptedness and domain-general cognition: broadening the scope of evolutionary psychology.Michael Lundie - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (1):8.
    Evolutionary psychology tends to be associated with a massively modular cognitive architecture. On this framework of human cognition, an assembly of specialized information processors called modules developed under selection pressures encountered throughout the phylogenic history of hominids. The coordinated activity of domain-specific modules carries out all the processes of belief fixation, abstract reasoning, and other facets of central cognition. Against the massive modularity thesis, I defend an account of systemic functional adaptedness, according to which non-modular systems emerged because of adaptive (...)
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  38. The complementarity of mindshaping and mindreading.Uwe Peters - 2019 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 18 (3):533-549.
    Why do we engage in folk psychology, that is, why do we think about and ascribe propositional attitudes such as beliefs, desires, intentions etc. to people? On the standard view, folk psychology is primarily for mindreading, for detecting mental states and explaining and/or predicting people’s behaviour in terms of them. In contrast, McGeer (1996, 2007, 2015), and Zawidzki (2008, 2013) maintain that folk psychology is not primarily for mindreading but for mindshaping, that is, for moulding people’s behavior and minds (e.g., (...)
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  39. Payback without bookkeeping: The origins of revenge and retaliation.Isaac Wiegman - 2019 - Philosophical Psychology 32 (7):1100-1128.
    ABSTRACTCurrent evolutionary models of revenge focus on its complex deterrent functions. Nevertheless, there are some retaliatory behaviors in nonhuman animals that do not appear to have a deterren...
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  40. The Logical Problem and the Theoretician's Dilemma.Hayley Clatterbuck - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (2):322-350.
    The theory-theory of human uniqueness posits that the capacity to theorize, in a way strongly analogous to theorizing in scientific practice, was a key innovation in the hominid lineage and was responsible for many of our unique cognitive traits. One of the central arguments that its proponents have used to support the claim that animals are not theorists, the logical problem, bears strong similarities to Hempel's theoretician's dilemma, which purports to show that theories are unnecessary. This similarity threatens to undermine (...)
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  41. Armin Schulz, Efficient Cognition. [REVIEW]Zoe Drayson - 2018 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:online.
  42. Cognitive Integration How Culture Transforms Us and Extends Our Cognitive Capabilities.Richard Menary - 2018 - In Shaun Gallagher, Albert Newen & Leon De Bruin (eds.), Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford: Oford University press. pp. 187-215.
    Cognitive integration is a contribution to the embodied, embedded, and extended cognition movement in philosophy and cognitive science and the extended synthesis movement in evolutionary biology— particularly cultural evolution and niche construction. It is a framework for understanding and studying cognition and the mind that draws on several sources: empirical research in embodied cognition, arguments for extended cognition, distributed cognition, niche construction and cultural inheritance, developmental psychology, social learning, and cognitive neuroscience. Its uniqueness rests in its ability to account for (...)
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  43. Evolution of religious capacity in the genus homo: Trait complexity in action through compassion.Margaret Boone Rappaport & Christopher Corbally - 2018 - Zygon 53 (1):198-239.
    In this third and last article on the evolution of religious capacity, the authors focus on compassion, one of religious expression's common companions. They explore the various meanings of compassion, using Biblical and early related documents, and derive general cognitive components before an evolutionary analysis of compassion using their model. Then, in taking on neural reuse theory, they adapt a model from linguistics theory to understand how neural reuse could have operated to fix religious capacity in the human genome. They (...)
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  44. The unity of moral attitudes: recipe semantics and credal exaptation.Derek Shiller - 2018 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 48 (3-4):425-446.
    This paper offers a noncognitivist characterization of moral attitudes, according to which moral attitudes count as such because of their inclusion of moral concepts. Moral concepts are distinguished by their contribution to the functional roles of some of the attitudes in which they can occur. They have no particular functional role in other attitudes, and should instead be viewed as evolutionary spandrels. In order to make the counter-intuitive implications of the view more palatable, the paper ends with an account of (...)
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  45. Primate social cognition and the core human knowledge concept.John Turri - 2018 - In Masaharu Mizumoto, Stephen Stich & Eric McCready (eds.), Epistemology for the rest of the world: linguistic and cultural diversity and epistemology. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 279-290.
    I review recent work from armchair and cross-cultural epistemology on whether humans possess a knowledge concept as part of a universal “folk epistemology.” The work from armchair epistemology fails because it mischaracterizes ordinary knowledge judgments. The work from cross-cultural epistemology provides some defeasible evidence for a universal folk epistemology. I argue that recent findings from comparative psychology establish that humans possess a species-typical knowledge concept. More specifically, recent work shows that knowledge attributions are a central part of primate social cognition, (...)
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  46. Domains of generality.Andrew Buskell & Marta Halina - 2017 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 40.
    We argue that general intelligence, as presented in the target article, generates multiple distinct and non-equivalent characterisations. Clarifying this central concept is necessary for assessing Burkart et al.’s proposal that the cultural intelligence hypothesis is the best explanation for the evolution of general intelligence. We assess this claim by considering two characterisations of general intelligence presented in the article.
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  47. Bayesian cognitive science, predictive brains, and the nativism debate.Matteo Colombo - 2017 - Synthese:1-22.
    The rise of Bayesianism in cognitive science promises to shape the debate between nativists and empiricists into more productive forms—or so have claimed several philosophers and cognitive scientists. The present paper explicates this claim, distinguishing different ways of understanding it. After clarifying what is at stake in the controversy between nativists and empiricists, and what is involved in current Bayesian cognitive science, the paper argues that Bayesianism offers not a vindication of either nativism or empiricism, but one way to talk (...)
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  48. Animal morality: What is the debate about?Simon Fitzpatrick - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (6):1151-1183.
    Empirical studies of the social lives of non-human primates, cetaceans, and other social animals have prompted scientists and philosophers to debate the question of whether morality and moral cognition exists in non-human animals. Some researchers have argued that morality does exist in several animal species, others that these species may possess various evolutionary building blocks or precursors to morality, but not quite the genuine article, while some have argued that nothing remotely resembling morality can be found in any non-human species. (...)
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  49. Information, Constraint and Meaning from Pre-biotic World to a possible Post-human one. An Evolutionary Approach (MDPI Proceedings).Christophe Menant - 2017 - Mdpi Proceeedings 1 (3).
    The presentation proposes to complement an existing development on meaning generation for animals, humans and artificial agents by looking at what could have existed at pre-biotic times and what could be a post-human meaning generation. The core of the approach is based on an existing model for meaning generation: the Meaning Generator System (MGS). The MGS is part of an agent submitted to an internal constraint. The MGS generates a meaning when it receives information that has a connection with the (...)
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  50. Is behavioural flexibility evidence of cognitive complexity? How evolution can inform comparative cognition.Irina Mikhalevich, Russell Powell & Corina Logan - 2017 - Interface Focus 7.
    Behavioural flexibility is often treated as the gold standard of evidence for more sophisticated or complex forms of animal cognition, such as planning, metacognition and mindreading. However, the evidential link between behavioural flexibility and complex cognition has not been explicitly or systematically defended. Such a defence is particularly pressing because observed flexible behaviours can frequently be explained by putatively simpler cognitive mechanisms. This leaves complex cognition hypotheses open to ‘deflationary’ challenges that are accorded greater evidential weight precisely because they offer (...)
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1 — 50 / 194