My aim in this paper is to introduce a theory of affective labor as byproductive, a concept I develop through analysis of the phenomenology of various affective labor practices in dialog with feminist scholarship, both on gendered and racialized labor, and on affect and emotion. I motivate my theory in the context of literature on affective and emotional labor in philosophy and the social sciences, engaging the post-Marxist literature on affective and immaterial labor and emphasizing feminist critiques. I (...) argue that affective labor is not only the work of producing affects for others to consume or the reproductive work that rejuvenates and sustains labor power and social life, but also the work of metabolizing waste affects and affective byproducts. Thus, byproductive labor is a neologism I develop to bring into view an affective economy and indeed a political economy of affects to the side of the distinction between productive and reproductive labor in its paid and unpaid variants. I make three central c... (shrink)

The Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) provides that, all else equal, intentional deaths are harder to justify than merely foreseen deaths. The principle is meant to ground the distinction within humanitarian law between terror bombing and strategic bombing. However, according to the “closeness problem,” terror bombers are not necessarily intentional killers. Terror bombing strictly requires only that the civilians appear dead, goes the argument, such that—for a “sophisticated” terror bomber—the civilians’ deaths could be unintended side-effects of making them appear dead. (...) But if intentions could be calibrated so finely and strategically, the argument continues, then the DDE would very doubtfully be true. This essay replies to the closeness problem in three steps. First, agents often intend _causal processes_, with specific causal “ingredients,” as the proximate means of bringing about their specifically intended means or ends. Second, when an agent foresees a byproduct as resulting directly from their intended causal process, it is morally equivalent to a specifically intended outcome. The process’s causal relationship to the byproduct is constitutive of the process from the agent’s perspective. Third, a “sophisticated” terror bomber’s intended causal process involves blowing up the civilians, while a strategic bomber’s involves blowing up, say, a munitions factory. Thus, because the “sophisticated” terror bomber foresees their intended causal process as resulting directly in the civilians’ deaths, while the strategic bomber foresees their deaths as side-effects of their intended causal process occurring within an environment that happens to contain civilians, the DDE can distinguish between the bombers. (shrink)

According to Bayesian confirmation theory, evidence E (incrementally) confirms (or supports) a hypothesis H (roughly) just in case E and H are positively probabilistically correlated (under an appropriate probability function Pr). There are many logically equivalent ways of saying that E and H are correlated under Pr. Surprisingly, this leads to a plethora of non-equivalent quantitative measures of the degree to which E confirms H (under Pr). In fact, many non-equivalent Bayesian measures of the degree to which E confirms (...) (or supports) H have been proposed and defended in the literature on inductive logic. I provide a thorough historical survey of the various proposals, and a detailed discussion of the philosophical ramifications of the differences between them. I argue that the set of candidate measures can be narrowed drastically by just a few intuitive and simple desiderata. In the end, I provide some novel and compelling reasons to think that the correct measure of degree of evidential support (within a Bayesian framework) is the (log) likelihood ratio. The central analyses of this research have had some useful and interesting byproducts, including: (i ) a new Bayesian account of (confirmationally) independent evidence, which has applications to several important problems in con- firmation theory, including the problem of the (confirmational) value of evidential diversity, and (ii ) novel resolutions of several problems in Bayesian confirmation theory, motivated by the use of the (log) likelihood ratio measure, including a reply to the Popper-Miller critique of probabilistic induction, and a new analysis and resolution of the problem of irrelevant conjunction (a.k.a., the tacking problem). (shrink)

The literature on the evolution of religion has been divided by a fundamental debate between adaptation theories, which explain religious traits as products of selection for religion, and byproduct theories, which explain religious traits as products of selection for other, non-religious functions. Recently, however, a new position has emerged in this debate, as an influential new theory based on cultural selection claims to integrate adaptation theories with byproduct theories, yielding a single, unified account. I argue that the (...) proponents of this view do not say enough about how integration is actually supposed to work, from a logical point of view. Basic questions arise from the assumptions required for unifying these apparently conflicting approaches, which the authors of the account do not address. In response to these questions, I provide a model of the religious phenotype, the Goldberg Exaptation Model, which shows that adaptation and byproduct theories are consistent, and explains how they are positively related, over and above mere consistency. On this view, the religious phenotype is best understood on analogy with a Rube Goldberg device: it is assembled by selection for religion, but using parts designed by selection for other, non-religious functions. (shrink)

The ongoing incidence of schizophrenia is considered a paradox, as the disorder has genetic basis yet confers survival handicaps. Researchers have not reached consensus regarding theories explaining this contradiction. Major evolutionary theories hypothesize that schizophrenia is: a byproduct of other evolutionary processes, linked to survival advantages that counteract disadvantages, associated with processes such as shamanism conferring advantages to groups, a consequence of modern environments, a result of random processes, such as mutations. A null hypothesis argues that philosophical or methodological (...) problems render evolutionary paradigms inappropriate. These arguments are reviewed in light of an experience-centered approach, which regards experiential accounts as data. A ritual healing theory, derived from this orientation, has bearing on evolutionary theories pertaining to schizophrenia. This theory explains the nature of shamanism, which has features coinciding with schizophrenia. The ritual healing theory is supported by folklore, medical, and anthropological evidence, is amenable to empirical evaluation, and has clinical applications. (shrink)

We apply the method of asymmetric interpretation to the basic fragment of bounded arithmetic, endowed with a weak collection schema, and to a system of “feasible analysis”, introduced by Ferreira and based on weak König's lemma, recursive comprehension and NP-notation induction. As a byproduct, we obtain two conservation results.

This book departs from much of the scholarship on Kant by demonstrating the centrality of imagination to Kant's philosophy as a whole. In Kant's works, human experience is simultaneously passive and active, thought and sensed, free and unfree: these dualisms are often thought of as unfortunate byproducts of his system. Gibbons, however, shows that imagination performs a vital function in "bridging gaps" between the different elements of cognition and experience. Thus, the role imagination plays in Kant's works expresses his fundamental (...) insight into the complexity of cognition for finite rational beings such as ourselves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage TheoryJasbir K. Puar“Grids happen” writes Brian Massumi, at a moment in Parables for the Virtual where one is tempted to be swept away by the endless affirmative becomings of movement, flux, and potential, as opposed to being pinned down by the retroactive positioning of identity (2002, 8). For the most part, Massumi has been less interested in how (...) grids happen than in asking how they can un-happen, or not happen. What the tension between the two purportedly opposing forces signals, at this junction of scholarly criticism, might be thought of as a dialogue between theories that deploy the subject as a primary analytic frame, and those that highlight the forces that make subject formation tenuous, if not impossible or even undesirable. I have seen this tension manifest acutely in my own work on intersectionality and assemblage theory. On the one hand I have been a staunch advocate of what is now commonly known as an intersectional approach: analyses that foreground the mutually co-constitutive forces of race, class, sex, gender, and nation. Numerous feminist thinkers consider intersectionality the dominant paradigm through which feminist theory has analyzed difference; Leslie McCall argues that intersectionality might be considered “the most important theoretical contribution that women’s studies, in conjunction with other fields, has made so far” (McCall 2005, 1771). Intersectional analysis is now a prevalent approach in queer theory.1 At the same time, encountering a poststructuralist fatigue with the now-predictable yet still [End Page 49] necessary demands for subject recognition, I also argued in my book, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, that intersectionality as an intellectual rubric and a tool for political intervention must be supplemented—if not complicated and reconceptualized—by a notion of assemblage. Following Massumi on the “retrospective ordering” of identities such as “gender, race, and sexual orientation” which “back-form their reality,” in Terrorist Assemblages I write, “[I]ntersectional identities and assemblages must remain as interlocutors in tension... intersectional identities are the byproducts of attempts to still and quell the perpetual motion of assemblages, to capture and reduce them, to harness their threatening mobility” (Puar 2007, 213). Subject positioning on a grid is never self-coinciding; positioning does not precede movement but rather it is induced by it; epistemological correctives cannot apprehend ontological becomings; the complexity of process is continually mistaken for a resultant product.2Since the publication of Terrorist Assemblages, in response to anxieties about my apparent prescription to leave intersectionality behind (as if one could), I have often been asked to elaborate on the political usages of assemblages and assemblage theory. A prominent concept in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, assemblage seems to inspire doubt about its political “ applicability,” while intersectionality seems to hold fast as a successful tool for political and scholarly transformation. Part of the assumption at work in these queries is that representation, and its recognized subjects, is the dominant, primary, or most efficacious platform of political intervention, while a Deleuzian nonrepresentational, non-subject-oriented politics is deemed impossible. Perhaps these queries also reveal concerns about how they might be somehow incompatible or even oppositional, despite the fact that intersectionality and assemblage are not analogous in terms of content, utility, or deployment. As analytics, they may not be reconcilable. Yet they need not be oppositional but rather, I argue, frictional.In what follows, I offer some preliminary thoughts on the limits and possibilities of intersectionality and assemblage and what might be gained by thinking them through and with each other. What are the strengths of each in the realms of theory, political organizing, legal structures, and method? Through highlighting the convivial crossings of these two differentiated but not oppositional genealogies, I offer some thoughts on epistemological correctives in feminist knowledge production—which has been driven, sometimes single-mindedly, by the mandate of intersectional analysis—to see what kinds of futures are possible for feminist theorizing. I reread the formative concept that fueled the metaphoric invocation of intersectionality, specifically Kimberlé Crenshaw’s use of the traffic intersection, to show where intersectionality, as that which retroactively forms the grid and... (shrink)

Kolmogorov's account in his [1933] of an absolute probability space presupposes given a Boolean algebra, and so does Rényi's account in his [1955] and [1964] of a relative probability space. Anxious to prove probability theory ‘autonomous’. Popper supplied in his [1955] and [1957] accounts of probability spaces of which Boolean algebras are not and [1957] accounts of probability spaces of which fields are not prerequisites but byproducts instead.1 I review the accounts in question, showing how Popper's issue from and (...) how they differ from Kolmogorov's and Rényi's, and I examine on closing Popper's notion of ‘autonomous independence’. So as not to interrupt the exposition, I allow myself in the main text but a few proofs, relegating others to the Appendix and indicating as I go along where in the literature the rest can be found. (shrink)

This book departs from much of the scholarship on Kant by demonstrating the centrality of imagination to Kant's philosophy as a whole. In Kant's works, human experience is simultaneously passive and active, thought and sensed, free and unfree: these dualisms are often thought of as unfortunate byproducts of his system. Gibbons, however, shows that imagination performs a vital function in "bridging gaps" between the different elements of cognition and experience. Thus, the role imagination plays in Kant's works expresses his fundamental (...) insight into the complexity of cognition for finite rational beings such as ourselves. (shrink)

In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970s but a positive literature began (...) to grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as "replicators" which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be "vehicles" of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units. The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to "organs" of group-level "organisms." Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals. (shrink)

Savage et al. and Mehr et al. provide well-substantiated arguments that the evolution of musicality was shaped by adaptive functions of social bonding and credible signalling. However, they are too quick to dismiss byproduct explanations of music evolution, and to present their theories as complete unitary accounts of the phenomenon.

In his review of Bernard Williams' Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Hart eloquently formulated an apprehension that still haunts much of contemporary jurisprudence: if the moral 'I must' has to be 'seen as coming not from outside, but from what is most deeply inside us? the fear is that this will not be enough'. I argue that this fear is the byproduct of the dualist outlook within which Hart—and a significant part of contemporary legal theory—is confined: because (...) of his bald naturalist premise, Hart could not conceive of moral objectivity except in terms presupposing an order of Reason resolutely distinct from the 'natural' world. This paper seeks to debunk this dualist outlook by engaging with the kind of 'non-bald' naturalism advocated in different ways by both McDowell and Blackburn. In considering contemporary efforts to draw a middle way between ethical scepticism and metaphysical rationalism, the paper draws on the pragmatic elements emerging from the confrontation between Habermas and Rawls. (shrink)

Three puzzles about self-deception make this mental phenomenon an intriguing explanatory target. The first relates to how to define it without paradox; the second is about how to make sense of self-deception in light of the interpretive view of the mental that has become widespread in philosophy; and the third concerns why it exists at all. In this paper I address the first and third puzzles. First, I define self-deception. Second, I criticize Robert Trivers' attempt to use adaptionist evolutionary psychology (...) to solve the third puzzle (existence). Third, I sketch a theory to replace that of Trivers. Self-deception is not an adaptation, but a spandrel in the sense that Gould and Lewontin give the term: a byproduct of other features of human (cognitive) architecture. Self-deception is so undeniable a fact of human life that if anyone tried to deny its existence, the proper response would be to accuse this person of it. (Allen Wood, 1988). (shrink)

Illusionists about consciousness boldly argue that phenomenal consciousness does not fundamentally exist — it only seems to exist. For them, the impression of having a private inner life of conscious qualia is nothing more than a cognitive error, a conjuring trick put on by a purely physical brain. Some phenomenal realists have accused illusionism of being a byproduct of modern Western scientism and overzealous naturalism. However, Jay Garfield has endorsed illusionism by explicitly drawing support from the classical Yogācāra Buddhist (...) philosopher Vasubandhu. In this paper, I assess the degree to which Garfield’s illusionist interpretation accurately captures the views of Vasubandhu and his commentator Sthiramati in their extant Sanskrit works. As it turns out, Vasubandhu and Sthiramati converge with contemporary illusionists in taking an unconscious causal basis of cognitive/linguistic processes to be responsible for generating the illusion of representational states with apparently phenomenal contents. Within their constitutive understanding of the mind as the “imagination of what is non-existent” (abhūtaparikalpa), I raise possible candidates for what might seem to be real instances of phenomenality — mental appearances (pratibhāsa), affective sensory experience (vedanā), and “intrinsic luminosity” (prakṛtiprabhāsvara) — and consider possible responses on behalf of an illusionist interpreter. I conclude that Vasubandhu and Sthiramati really do appear to be strong illusionists about phenomenal consciousness, particularly if phenomenal states are assumed to be essentially representational. (shrink)

Marxists tend to write not only with conviction, but with passion, flowing from an active commitment to the emancipation of mankind. In the hands of a dogmatist, such conviction and passion can serve to forge new chains. In the hands of a creative thinker, they can give wings to the freedom struggle. Mészáros' book is a "winger"--one of the most far-ranging books on the subject of Marx's theory of alienation since Lukács' seminal Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein and his chapter on (...) alienation in Der junge Hegel. This is not at all surprising since Mészáros is a former student of, and assistant to, Lukács and freely acknowledges his intellectual indebtedness to his old teacher. The present work concentrates on a close examination of the various aspects of alienation as Marx dealt with them in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844. Mészáros makes clear, however, that the framework of interpretation and evaluation of the Paris Manuscripts is the totality of Marx's works. Within this context, the Manuscripts are presented as Marx's first great "synthesis in statu nascendi," in which he discovered the dialectic of alienated labor as the motive force in history, driving toward its own self-Aufhebung. Mészáros cites chapter and verse on the continuity of this original synthesis in the later works of Marx. Not only did Marx not abandon the concept of alienation after 1845, nor its centrality, but he did not, as has been often alleged, abandon the terms Entfremdung or Entäusserung either. Mészáros' justification for advancing the Marxian concept of alienation today is the bold assertion that the transcendence of labor's self-alienation is on the order of the day; it is the essential ingredient in rescuing mankind from self-destruction, and not a remote concept for the intellectual gratification of isolated intellectuals. Modern usage of the term 'alienation' has proliferated to the extent that it is used to apply to just about any and every manifestation of out-of-jointness between the individual and society, or between one individual and another. There is here a curious confirmation of Marx's thesis. His point was that capitalism inevitably extends alienation more and more pervasively into more and more aspects of life as it extends itself. Alienation is not a byproduct of capitalism; it is integral to the process of capitalism itself. From this, it is easy to derive the "necessity" of its transcendence. In addition to dealing with the origins and structure of Marx's theory of alienation, the author devotes separate chapters to the Economic Aspects, Political Aspects, Ontological and Moral Aspects, and the Aesthetic Aspects. The latter two chapters, in particular, display the influence of Lukács and the originality of Mészáros' points of departure. The last three chapters of the book take up The Controversy about Marx, The Individual and Society, and the Crisis of Education. Mészáros is sometimes unclear and stylistically ponderous, and he occasionally stretches Marx too much and too far, or gets pedantically over-involved in detail, but these are small flaws in a work which throws much light with rigorous scholarship on such an important subject in such a manifold of interrelated aspects.--H. B. (shrink)

Three puzzles about self-deception make this mental phenomenon an intriguing explanatory target. The first relates to how to define it without paradox; the second is about how to make sense of self-deception in light of the interpretive view of the mental that has become widespread in philosophy; and the third concerns why it exists at all. In this paper I address the first and third puzzles. First, I define self-deception. Second, I criticize Robert Trivers’ attempt to use adaptionist evolutionary psychology (...) to solve the third puzzle (existence). Third, I sketch a theory to replace that of Trivers. Self-deception is not an adaptation, but a spandrel in the sense that Gould and Lewontin give the term: a byproduct of other features of human (cognitive) architecture.Self-deception is so undeniable a fact of human life that if anyone tried to deny its existence, the proper response would be to accuse this person of it. (Allen Wood, Citation 1988 ). (shrink)

We compare and contrast the 60 commentaries by 109 authors on the pair of target articles by Mehr et al. and ourselves. The commentators largely reject Mehr et al.'s fundamental definition of music and their attempts to refute (1) our social bonding hypothesis, (2) byproduct hypotheses, and (3) sexual selection hypotheses for the evolution of musicality. Instead, the commentators generally support our more inclusive proposal that social bonding and credible signaling mechanisms complement one another in explaining cooperation within and (...) competition between groups in a coevolutionary framework (albeit with some confusion regarding terminologies such as “byproduct” and “exaptation”). We discuss the proposed criticisms and extensions, with a focus on moving beyond adaptation/byproduct dichotomies and toward testing of cross-species, cross-cultural, and other empirical predictions. (shrink)

In [6] Albert Visser shows that ILP completely axiomatizes all schemata about provability and relative interpretability that are provable in finitely axiomatized theories. In this paper we introduce a system called $\text{ILP}^{\omega}$ that completely axiomatizes the arithmetically valid principles of provability in and interpretability over such theories. To prove the arithmetical completeness of $\text{ILP}^{\omega}$ we use a suitable kind of tail models; as a byproduct we obtain a somewhat modified proof of Visser's completeness result.

In [6] Albert Visser shows that ILP completely axiomatizes all schemata about provability and relative interpretability that are provable in finitely axiomatized theories. In this paper we introduce a system called ILP that completely axiomatizes the arithmetically valid principles of provability in and interpretability over such theories. To prove the arithmetical completeness of ILP we use a suitable kind of tail models; as a byproduct we obtain a somewhat modified proof of Visser's completeness result.

In his Theory of moral Sentiments , Adam Smith does not deal only with interpersonal moral issues. He also addresses some economic and political consequences that tie with his analysis of ‘sympathy’. Interestingly, these socially relevant outcomes do not feature as products of sympathy proper, but rather as byproducts of certain ‘irregularities’ or biases which affect the way sympathy actually works. The stability of a political society through a system of ‘ranks’ which are spontaneously granted a share of authority (...) thus gets projected beyond the reach of a rational approach, e.g. of a contractarian character. Although the idea of a spontaneous order certainly attracts Adam Smith here as elsewhere, his approach of the economic and political sphere in TMS is nevertheless tinged with a tone of moral criticism which must be taken seriously. (shrink)

Marxists tend to write not only with conviction, but with passion, flowing from an active commitment to the emancipation of mankind. In the hands of a dogmatist, such conviction and passion can serve to forge new chains. In the hands of a creative thinker, they can give wings to the freedom struggle. Mészáros' book is a "winger"--one of the most far-ranging books on the subject of Marx's theory of alienation since Lukács' seminal Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein and his chapter on (...) alienation in Der junge Hegel. This is not at all surprising since Mészáros is a former student of, and assistant to, Lukács and freely acknowledges his intellectual indebtedness to his old teacher. The present work concentrates on a close examination of the various aspects of alienation as Marx dealt with them in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844. Mészáros makes clear, however, that the framework of interpretation and evaluation of the Paris Manuscripts is the totality of Marx's works. Within this context, the Manuscripts are presented as Marx's first great "synthesis in statu nascendi," in which he discovered the dialectic of alienated labor as the motive force in history, driving toward its own self-Aufhebung. Mészáros cites chapter and verse on the continuity of this original synthesis in the later works of Marx. Not only did Marx not abandon the concept of alienation after 1845, nor its centrality, but he did not, as has been often alleged, abandon the terms Entfremdung or Entäusserung either. Mészáros' justification for advancing the Marxian concept of alienation today is the bold assertion that the transcendence of labor's self-alienation is on the order of the day; it is the essential ingredient in rescuing mankind from self-destruction, and not a remote concept for the intellectual gratification of isolated intellectuals. Modern usage of the term 'alienation' has proliferated to the extent that it is used to apply to just about any and every manifestation of out-of-jointness between the individual and society, or between one individual and another. There is here a curious confirmation of Marx's thesis. His point was that capitalism inevitably extends alienation more and more pervasively into more and more aspects of life as it extends itself. Alienation is not a byproduct of capitalism; it is integral to the process of capitalism itself. From this, it is easy to derive the "necessity" of its transcendence. In addition to dealing with the origins and structure of Marx's theory of alienation, the author devotes separate chapters to the Economic Aspects, Political Aspects, Ontological and Moral Aspects, and the Aesthetic Aspects. The latter two chapters, in particular, display the influence of Lukács and the originality of Mészáros' points of departure. The last three chapters of the book take up The Controversy about Marx, The Individual and Society, and the Crisis of Education. Mészáros is sometimes unclear and stylistically ponderous, and he occasionally stretches Marx too much and too far, or gets pedantically over-involved in detail, but these are small flaws in a work which throws much light with rigorous scholarship on such an important subject in such a manifold of interrelated aspects.--H. B. (shrink)

This article examines overpopulation as a basis for historical interpretation. Drawing on the ideas of T.R. Malthus, Elizabeth Kolbert, John Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, and Edward O. Wilson, I make the case that the only concept of ‘progress’ that accurately describes the human enterprise is the uncontrolled growth of population. I explain why a Malthusian/Gaia interpretation is not a historicist or eschatological narrative, like Hegelian idealism, Marxism, fundamentalist religion, or ‘end of history’ neoliberalism. My article also includes a discussion of the (...) ideas and prescriptions of contemporary commentators like physicist, Adam Frank, and the philosophers, John Gray, and Roy Scranton. What makes my article distinctive is bringing together ideas of population theory through a lens of sociobiology and post-humanist philosophy. Through this interpretive synthesis, I form a basis for recasting history as the record of the growing imbalance of our species in light of the unprecedented crises of the environment that are its byproduct. I conclude with the idea that regardless of whether the world is dying or simply going through a fundamental chaotic transformation, the role of the critical-rational historian remains the same: to tell the truth as best as she or he can know it. (shrink)

Since Jackendoff has shown that language facilitates abstract and complex thought by making possible subtle manipulations of the focus of attention, and since the kind of attention relevant here is attention to aspects of intentional objects in conscious awareness, it follows that the abstract and complex thinking that language facilitates owes much to the working of a conscious process. This, however, conflicts with Jackendoff's view of consciousness as something which does not play a direct part in thinking, but is only (...) a byproduct of a non-conscious computational process in the brain which does the real thinking. I argue that, since Jackendoff s phenomenology of language shows that attention plays such an important part in thinking, yet language can help us attend only to what we are conscious of consciousness does play an important part in thinking. Moreover, consciousness cannot be merely an epiphenomenal byproduct separable in principle from underlying physical mechanisms, because this would imply that consciousness itself is not physical, which would lead to dualism. But if consciousness is inseparable from its physiological substratum, then it also causes whatever effects the physiological substratum causes. (shrink)

Since Jackendoff has shown that language facilitates abstract and complex thought by making possible subtle manipulations of the focus of attention, and since the kind of attention relevant here is attention to aspects of intentional objects in conscious awareness, it follows that the abstract and complex thinking that language facilitates owes much to the working of a conscious process. This, however, conflicts with Jackendoff's view of consciousness as something which does not play a direct part in thinking, but is only (...) a byproduct of a non-conscious computational process in the brain which does the real thinking. I argue that, since Jackendoff s phenomenology of language shows that attention plays such an important part in thinking, yet language can help us attend only to what we are conscious of consciousness does play an important part in thinking. Moreover, consciousness cannot be merely an epiphenomenal byproduct separable in principle from underlying physical mechanisms, because this would imply that consciousness itself is not physical, which would lead to dualism. But if consciousness is inseparable from its physiological substratum, then it also causes whatever effects the physiological substratum causes. (shrink)

Since Jackendoff has shown that language facilitates abstract and complex thought by making possible subtle manipulations of the focus of attention, and since the kind of attention relevant here is attention to aspects of intentional objects in conscious awareness, it follows that the abstract and complex thinking that language facilitates owes much to the working of a conscious process. This, however, conflicts with Jackendoff's view of consciousness as something which does not play a direct part in thinking, but is only (...) a byproduct of a non-conscious computational process in the brain which does the real thinking. I argue that, since Jackendoff s phenomenology of language shows that attention plays such an important part in thinking, yet language can help us attend only to what we are conscious of consciousness does play an important part in thinking. Moreover, consciousness cannot be merely an epiphenomenal byproduct separable in principle from underlying physical mechanisms, because this would imply that consciousness itself is not physical, which would lead to dualism. But if consciousness is inseparable from its physiological substratum, then it also causes whatever effects the physiological substratum causes. (shrink)

This book departs from much of the scholarship on Kant by demonstrating the centrality of imagination to Kant's philosophy as a whole. In Kant's works, human experience is simultaneously passive and active, thought and sensed, free and unfree: these dualisms are ofen thought of as unfortunate byproducts of his system. Gibbons, however, shows that imagination performs a vital function in 'bridging gaps' between the different elements of cognition and experience. Thus, the role imagination plays in Kant's works expresses his fundamental (...) insight into the complexity of cognition for finite rational beings such as ourselves. Gibbons begins with an interpretation of synthesis which shows it to be a broader activity than most accounts suggest. Examining the first Critique, she presents a reading of the Transcendental Deduction and the chapter on Schematism that spells out the extraconceptual activities of imagination essential to cognition. This account of imagination is built upon in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant elaborates its role in characterizing the subjective conditions of judgement. Throughout, the cooperation of imagination and reason is highlighted; Gibbons shows that on Kant's account, human beings pursue reason's ideal ends through the provisional and continuing attempt to articulate them. This attempt involves an appeal to a shared social and historical imagination - thus, a full characterization of the subjective conditions of judgement must include the role of imagination. (shrink)

Few outstanding questions in the human behavioral sciences are timelier or more urgently debated than the evolutionary source of religious behaviors and beliefs. Byproduct theorists locate the origins of religion in evolved cognitive defaults and transmission biases. Others have argued that cultural evolutionary processes integrated non-adaptive cognitive byproducts into coherent networks of supernatural beliefs and ritual that encouraged in-group cooperativeness, while adaptationist models assert that the cognitive and behavioral foundations of religion have been selected for at more basic levels. (...) Here, we survey these differing approaches, noting their respective strengths and weaknesses. We then advance a novel model that centers on the ability of language to generate alternative worlds independent of immediate empirical facts, and thus highlight the similarities between religious belief and the modes of cognition that underlie institutions in general. The institutional cognition model of religion accounts for some of the shortcomings of extant approaches and draws attention to the human ability to create non-empirical worlds; that is, worlds that are imaginary. Both religious beliefs and institutional facts—such as jurisdictional borders—are non-empirical assertions, yet they are socially accepted as truths and reified through ritual and behavior. One type of non-empirical, linguistically generated belief—supernatural agent belief—is particularly effective for stabilizing systems of arbitrary norms by rooting them in deontic rather than utilitarian reasoning. The evolutionary roots and continued persistence of religion are thus functions of the capacity for humans to generate cognitive alternatives to empirical reality, and the need to stably coordinate those alternative conceptions. (shrink)

The cognitive science of religion (CSR) was born from dissatisfaction with traditional interpretative accounts of religious symbolism and with the doctrine of the primacy of texts. The theories, methods, and findings of the cognitive sciences provide means for escaping the interpretative circling the former entails and for addressing the myriad nontextual religious phenomena for which the latter is ill‐suited. Whatever else each affirms, all of the pioneering theorists in CSR agree that religions involve cultural arrangements that engage ordinary cognitive systems, (...) which are in place on the basis of considerations having nothing to do with religion or with one another, and are exercised in religious contexts as a byproduct of their normal functioning. Religions engage evolved, domain‐specific cognitive systems for handling problems fundamental to human survival that operate readily, unreflectively, and mostly below the level of consciousness. This information‐processing includes automatically and effortlessly pursuing any of a vast complement of default inferences appropriate to materials from the many domains in question. Such unconscious inferences about intuitive ontology figure centrally in religious representations, which typically involve but a single violation of the concomitant assumptions, rendering those representations minimally counterintuitive (MCI). MCI representations approximate a cognitive optimum, since they are attention‐grabbing, memorable, and inferentially rich. Subsequent theorists have variously argued on the basis of either natural or cultural selection at either the genetic, individual, or group level that some aspects of religious cognition are adaptive, if not outright adaptations. Their principal candidates for adaptive cognitive dispositions and cultural arrangements are ones that enable cooperation in large groups. Cultural group selectionists maintain that, in addition to the content biases that the byproduct view stresses, religions also exploit context biases resulting in characteristic features of honest signals and credibility‐enhancing displays (CREDs), which, in turn, foster cooperation and commitment to (only some) superhuman agents. Big Gods appear to be especially well suited to enhancing cooperation in big groups. CSR has inspired considerable noteworthy experimental research, which, over the past 15 years, has increasingly reflected the three principal influences in cognitive science generally during that time, viz., evolutionary considerations, an interest in experience, and the new brain‐imaging technologies. (shrink)

What are the epistemological implications of the cognitive science of religion (CSR)? The lion’s share of discussion fixates on whether CSR undermines (or debunks or explains away) theistic belief. But could the field offer positive support for theism? If so, how? That is our question. Our answer takes the form of an evidential argument for theism from standard models and research in the field. According to CSR, we are naturally disposed to believe in supernatural agents and these beliefs are constrained (...) in certain ways. The three main theories of this supernatural disposition are byproduct theories, adaptationist theories, and hybrid theories. We argue that our supernatural disposition—as understood by any of the main theories—is more surprising and improbable given naturalism than theism and thus serves as evidence for theism over naturalism. (shrink)

"An important contribution to contemporary jurisprudential debate and to legal thought more generally, Just Interpretations is far ahead of currently available work."--Peter Goodrich, author of Oedipus Lex "I was struck repeatedly by the clarity of expression throughout the book. Rosenfeld's description and criticism of the recent work of leading thinkers distinguishes his work within the legal theory genre. Furthermore, his own theory is quite original and provocative."--Aviam Soifer, author of Law and the Company We Keep.

The ‘byproduct account’ of female orgasm, a subject of renewed debate since Lloyd (The case of the female orgasm, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2005), is universally attributed to Symons (The evolution of human sexuality, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1979). While this is correct to the extent that he linked it to the adaptive value of male orgasm, I argue that the attribution of the theory as we understand it to Symons is based on a serious and hitherto unrecognised (...) misinterpretation. Symons had a different explanation of why women can orgasm, and beneath this explanation lies an obscure line of argument, including a particularly obscure use of the word ‘homologous’. (shrink)