Optimization models have often been useful in attempting to understand the adaptive significance of behavioral traits. Originally such models were applied to isolated aspects of behavior, such as foraging, mating, or parental behavior. In reality, organisms live in complex, ever-changing environments, and are simultaneously concerned with many behavioral choices and their consequences. This target article describes a dynamic modeling technique that can be used to analyze behavior in a unified way. The technique has been widely used in behavioral studies of (...) insects, fish, birds, mammals, and other organisms. The models use biologically meaningful parameters and variables, and lead to testable predictions. Limitations arise because nature's complexity always exceeds our modeling capacity. (shrink)

A B S T R A C T Detailed examination of audio recordings of business-to-business `field-sales' encounters are used to report one way in which salespeople elicit verbal expressions of affiliation from their prospective customers — by reciprocating second assessments which affiliate with, trade off and build on prospects' own assessments. This article outlines the prototypical features of these junctures of assessment-affiliation and describes how salespeople can mobilize such assessments to build extended sequences of `rapport' that take the form of (...) adjacent and mutual expressions of substantive verbal affiliation. Consideration is also given to explicating both the interactional basis of these sequences as well as the socially obligating influence such affiliation and rapport can have on sales outcomes. (shrink)

Human moral judgement may have evolved to maximize the individual's welfare given parochial culturally constructed moral systems. If so, then moral condemnation should be more severe when transgressions are recent and local, and should be sensitive to the pronouncements of authority figures (who are often arbiters of moral norms), as the fitness pay-offs of moral disapproval will primarily derive from the ramifications of condemning actions that occur within the immediate social arena. Correspondingly, moral transgressions should be viewed as less objectionable (...) if they occur in other places or times, or if local authorities deem them acceptable. These predictions contrast markedly with those derived from prevailing non-evolutionary perspectives on moral judgement. Both classes of theories predict purportedly species-typical patterns, yet to our knowledge, no study to date has investigated moral judgement across a diverse set of societies, including a range of small-scale communities that differ substantially from large highly urbanized nations. We tested these predictions in five small-scale societies and two large-scale societies, finding substantial evidence of moral parochialism and contextual contingency in adults' moral judgements. Results reveal an overarching pattern in which moral condemnation reflects a concern with immediate local considerations, a pattern consistent with a variety of evolutionary accounts of moral judgement. (shrink)

Incentivising has shown to improve participation in clinical trials. However, ethical concerns suggest that incentives may be coercive, obscure trial risks and encourage individuals to enrol in cli...

Most countries compile evidence from witnesses and victims manually, whereby the interviewer assimilates what the interviewee says during the course of an interview to produce an evidential statement. This exploratory research examined the quality of evidential statements generated in real world investigations. Transcribed witness/victim interviews were compared to the resultant written statements produced by the interviewing officer and signed as an accurate record by the interviewee. A coding protocol was devised to assess the consistency of information between what was said (...) by the interviewee in the verbal interview and what was reported in the written statement. Statements contained numerous errors including omissions, distortions, and the inclusion of information not mentioned in the verbal interview. This exploratory work highlights an important area for future research focus. (shrink)

It's surprising that contemporary moral philosophers have not thought more about food. The rapidly expanding industrialized landscape of modern western agribusiness raises moral concerns about large-scale livestock production, the increased usage of genetically modified crops, and the effects these now common practices may have on long-term environmental and human health. Here Pence argues that biotechnology is more helpful than harmful, on the ground that it will abate world hunger. Positioning himself as an "impartialbioethicist" he sets about the task of sorting (...) through the extremism he thinks drives all environ- mental movements' opposition to genetically modified (GM) crops. His argu- ment is simple: the claim that GM foods are unsafe is the product of alarmism, not sound reason. Discarding what environmentalists have called the Precau- tionary Principle, he argues that GM foods are safe because they have not been proven unsafe. And GM foods have been tested more than many food products now on the market. (shrink)

Lakatos, I. History of science and its rational reconstructions.--Clark, P. Atomism vs. thermodynamics.--Worrall, J. Thomas Young and the "rufutation" of Newtonian optics.--Musgrave, A. Why did oxygen supplant phlogiston?--Zahar, E. Why did Einstein's programme supersede Lorentz's?--Frické, M. The rejection of Avogadro's hypotheses.--Feyerabend, P. On the critique of scientific reason.

In this paper, we approach the idea of group cognition from the perspective of the “extended mind” thesis, as a special case of the more general claim that systems larger than the individual human, but containing that human, are capable of cognition (Clark, 2008; Clark & Chalmers, 1998). Instead of deliberating about “the mark of the cognitive” (Adams & Aizawa, 2008), our discussion of group cognition is tied to particular cognitive capacities. We review recent studies of group problem-solving and group (...) memory which reveal that specific cognitive capacities that are commonly ascribed to individuals are also aptly ascribed at the level of groups. These case studies show how dense interactions among people within a group lead to both similarity-inducing and differentiating dynamics that affect the group's ability to solve problems. This supports our claim that groups have organization-dependent cognitive capacities that go beyond the simple aggregation of the cognitive capacities of individuals. Group cognition is thus an emergent phenomenon in the sense of Wimsatt (1986). We further argue that anybody who rejects our strategy for showing that cognitive properties can be instantiated at multiple levels in the organizational hierarchy on a priori grounds is a “demergentist,” and thus incurs the burden of proof for explaining why cognitive properties are “stuck” at a certain level of organizational structure. Finally, we show that our analysis of group cognition escapes the “coupling-constitution” charge that has been leveled against the extended mind thesis (Adams & Aizawa, 2008). (shrink)

The proceedings of the Seventh Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference at the University of Nottinghamin April 1997. Contents: Material culture abd the question of social continuity in Roman Britain ( M. Grahame ); Motivation and ideologies of Romanization ( R. Haussler ); The Romanization of Italy: global accluaturation or cultural bricolage? ( N. Terrenato ); Social change and architectural diversity in Roman period Britain ( S. Clarke ); Reflections in the archaeological record of social developements of Lepcis Magna, Tripolitania ( (...) F. Condron ); Theoretical influences on two reports of Romano-British land division ( J. W. M. Peterson ); Phenoemological perspectives on roads in the landscape ( P. Rush ); The ancient monument in Romano-British ritual practices ( C. Forcey ); The sequence of ritual in cremation burials of the Roman period ( J. Pearce ); Burial and gender in alte and sub-Roman Britain ( D. Petts ); Brooches and identity in 1st century AD Britain ( S. Jundi and J. D. Hill ); A persional view of archaeology and equal opportunities' ( E. Scott ); Clavus annalis, defixiones and minski ( D. Dungworth ); Pottery and paradigms in the early western empire ( J. W. J. Hawthorne ). (shrink)

Immortality is a subject which has long been explored and imagined by science fiction writers. In his intriguing new study, Stephen R.L.Clark argues that the genre of science fiction writing allows investigation of philosophical questions about immortality without the constraints of academic philosophy. He reveals how fantasy accounts of issues such as resurrection, disembodied survival, reincarnation and devices or drugs for preserving life can be used as an important resource for philosophical inquiry and examines how a society of immortals might (...) function through a reading of the vampire myth. _How to Live Forever_ is a compelling study which introduces students and professional philosophers to the possibilities of using science fiction in their work. It includes extensive suggestions for further reading, both fictional and philosophical, and examines the work of such major science fiction authors as _Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Larry Niven, William Gibson_, and _Colin Wilson_. (shrink)

This paper explores the linkages between national identity and educational traditions, and the range and flexibility of the incarnations of tradition. It investigates in detail three versions of a specifically English tradition in education that have been generated at different times in England over the past century. These are Cyril Norwood's account of the English tradition in the 1920s, Fred Clarke's portrayal of education and social change in the 1940s, and the ideals of teachers' professional autonomy as they were (...) articulated in the postwar period. In each instance the 'tradition' developed as responses to contemporary challenges and threats, and asserted particular images of the past to justify a given approach to present and future changes. These representations of the national tradition have thereby established sets of values and principles drawn from idealised versions of the educational past that provided guidelines for reform, and the direction and guidelines of change. (shrink)

From the Disney 'Teacher of the Year' and New York Times bestselling author comes a road map to enrich students' learning experiences, revised and updated for today's teachers and parents. After publishing the New York Times bestseller The Essential 55 (over 1 million copies sold), award-winning teacher Ron Clark took his rules on the road and traveled to schools and districts in 50 states. He met amazing teachers, administrators, students, parents, and all kinds of people involved in bringing up great (...) kids. These are the eleven qualities he describes in The Excellent 11: Enthusiasm, Adventure, Creativity, Reflection, Balance, Compassion, Confidence, Humor, Common Sense, Appreciation, and Resilience. Ron has filled this book with hundreds of suggestions, stories, and wonderfully funny anecdotes. You'll be smiling as you read--and finding the inspiration to change lives, one student at a time"--Back cover. (shrink)

The epistemic position of an agent often depends on their position in a larger network of other agents who provide them with information. In general, agents are better off if they have diverse and independent sources. Sullivan et al. [19] developed a method for quantitatively characterizing the epistemic position of individuals in a network that takes into account both diversity and independence; and presented a proof-of-concept, closed-source implementation on a small graph derived from Twitter data [19]. This paper reports on (...) an open-source reimplementation of their algorithm in Python, optimized to be usable on much larger networks. In addition to the algorithm and package, we also show the ability to scale up our package to large synthetic social network graph profiling, and finally demonstrate its utility in analyzing real-world empirical evidence of ‘echo chambers’ on online social media, as well as evidence of interdisciplinary diversity in an academic communications network. (shrink)

This volume provides a guide to the discussion among biologists and philosophersabout the role of concepts such as function and design in an evolutionary understanding oflife.

In his précis of a recent book, Richard Joyce writes, “My contention…is that…any epistemological benefit-of-the-doubt that might have been extended to moral beliefs…will be neutralized by the availability of an empirically confirmed moral genealogy that nowhere…presupposes their truth.” Such reasoning – falling under the heading “Genealogical Debunking Arguments” – is now commonplace. But how might “the availability of an empirically confirmed moral genealogy that nowhere… presupposes” the truth of our moral beliefs “neutralize” whatever “epistemological benefit-of-the-doubt that might have been extended (...) to” them? In this article, I argue that there appears to be no satisfactory answer to this question. The problem is quite general, applying to all arguments with the structure of Genealogical Debunking Arguments aimed at realism about a domain meeting two conditions. The Benacerraf-Field Challenge for mathematical realism affords an important special case. (shrink)

Pragmatism is America's best-known native philosophy. It espouses a practical set of beliefs and principles that focus on the improvement of our lives. Yet the split between classical and contemporary pragmatists has divided the tradition against itself. Classical pragmatists, such as John Dewey and William James, believed we should heed the lessons of experience. Neopragmatists, including Richard Rorty, Hilary Putnam, and Jürgen Habermas, argue instead from the perspective of a linguistic turn, which makes little use of the idea of experience. (...) Can these two camps be reconciled in a way that revitalizes a critical tradition? -/- Colin Koopman proposes a recovery of pragmatism by way of "transitionalist" themes of temporality and historicity which flourish in the work of the early pragmatists and continue in contemporary neopragmatist thought. "Life is in the transitions," James once wrote, and, in following this assertion, Koopman reveals the continuities uniting both phases of pragmatism. Koopman's framework also draws from other contemporary theorists, including Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Bernard Williams, and Stanley Cavell. By reflecting these voices through the prism of transitionalism, a new understanding of knowledge, ethics, politics, and critique takes root. Koopman concludes with a call for integrating Dewey and Foucault into a model of inquiry he calls genealogical pragmatism, a mutually informative critique that further joins the analytic and continental schools. (shrink)

This advanced introductory text offers a synoptic view of philosophical inquiry, discussing such topics as consciousness, the self, meaning, free will, the a ..

McGinn's latest brings together moral philosophy and literary analysis in a way that illuminates both. Setting out to enrich the domain of moral reflection by showing the value of literary texts as sources of moral illumination, McGinn starts by setting out an uncompromisingly realist ethical theory, arguing that morality is an area of objective truth and genuine knowledge. He goes on to address such subjects as the nature of goodness, evil character, and the meaning of monstrosity in the context of (...) an aesthetic theory of virtue, which maintains that goodness of character is the same thing as beauty of soul. Looking at such literary works as Billy Budd, Lolita, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Frankenstein, as well as examples from film and painting, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction is an original and compelling book by a leading philosopher who is also a critic and novelist. (shrink)

The long eighteenth century is a crucial period in the history of ethics, when our moral relations to God, ourselves and others were minutely examined and our duties, rights and virtues systematically and powerfully presented. Colin Heydt charts the history of practical morality - what we ought to do and to be - from the 1670s, when practical ethics arising from Protestant natural law gained an institutional foothold in England, to early British responses to the French Revolution around 1790. (...) He examines the conventional philosophical positions concerning the content of morality, and utilizes those conventions to reinterpret the work of key figures including Locke, Hume, and Smith. Situating these positions in their thematic and historical contexts, he shows how studying them challenges our assumptions about the originality, intended audience, and aims of philosophical argument during this period. His rich and readable book will appeal to a range of scholars and students. (shrink)

It is widely agreed that the intelligibility of modal metaphysics has been vindicated. Quine's arguments to the contrary supposedly confused analyticity with metaphysical necessity, and rigid with non-rigid designators.2 But even if modal metaphysics is intelligible, it could be misconceived. It could be that metaphysical necessity is not absolute necessity – the strictest real notion of necessity – and that no proposition of traditional metaphysical interest is necessary in every real sense. If there were nothing otherwise “uniquely metaphysically significant” about (...) metaphysical necessity, then paradigmatic metaphysical necessities would be necessary in one sense of “necessary”, not necessary in another, and that would be it. The question of whether they were necessary simpliciter would be like the question of whether the Parallel Postulate is true simpliciter – understood as a pure mathematical conjecture, rather than as a hypothesis about physical spacetime. In a sense, the latter question has no objective answer. In this article, I argue that paradigmatic questions of modal metaphysics are like the Parallel Postulate question. I then discuss the deflationary ramifications of this argument. I conclude with an alternative conception of the space of possibility. According to this conception, there is no objective boundary between possibility and impossibility. Along the way, I sketch an analogy between modal metaphysics and set theory. (shrink)

This paper examines three views of what an omission or an instance of refraining is. The view advanced is that in many cases, an omission is simply an absence of an action of some type. However, generally one’s not doing a certain thing counts as an omission only if there is some norm, standard, or ideal that calls for one’s doing that thing.

In the past two decades, much work on Kant has aimed to delimit and evaluate the bedrock assumptions of Kant's mature Critical philosophy. This volume brings together leading Kant scholars to address this issue in conversation with each other, articulating and interrogating Kant's critical assumptions.

Many weaknesses of game theory are cured by new models that embody simple cognitive principles, while maintaining the formalism and generality that makes game theory useful. Social preference models can generate team reasoning by combining reciprocation and correlated equilibrium. Models of limited iterated thinking explain data better than equilibrium models do; and they self-repair problems of implausibility and multiplicity of equilibria.

Plato’s Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman exhibit several related dialectical methods relevant to Platonic education: maieutic in Theaetetus, bifurcatory division in Sophist and Statesman, and non-bifurcatory division in Statesman, related to the ‘god-given’ method in Philebus. I consider the nature of each method through the letter or element paradigm, used to reflect on each method. At issue are the element’s appearances in given contexts, its fitness for communing with other elements like it in kind, and its own nature defined through its (...) relations to others. These represent stages of inquiry for the Platonic student inquiring into the sources of knowledge. (shrink)

The distinction between perception and cognition frames countless debates in philosophy and cognitive science. But what, if anything, does this distinction actually amount to? In this introductory article, we summarize recent work on this question. We first briefly consider the possibility that a perception-cognition border should be eliminated from our scientific ontology, and then introduce and critically examine five positive approaches to marking a perception–cognition border, framed in terms of phenomenology, revisability, modularity, format, and stimulus-dependence.

The Oxford-educated philosopher serves up his trenchant survey of his academic discipline, offering his commentary on Descartes, Anselm Bertrand Russell, Sartre ...

Henry More argues that materialism cannot account for cases where a single subject or perceiver has multiple perceptions simultaneously. Since we clearly do have multiple perceptions at the same time--for example, when we see, hear, and smell simultaneously--More concludes that we are not wholly material. In response to More's argument, Margaret Cavendish adopts a two-fold strategy. First, she argues that there is no general obstacle to mental unification in her version of materialism. Second, Cavendish appeals to the mind or rational (...) matter--terms she often uses interchangeably—to explain the integration of sensory input from multiple senses. When the mind integrates perceptions across modalities, the different parts of rational matter share their knowledge so that they all come to perceive alike. When rational parts successfully communicate their knowledge, each part knows what all the others know. They pool their knowledge; they perceive alike. Thus, when someone hears, sees, and tastes, each part of her mind hears, sees, and tastes alike, in parallel and in unison. The Cavendishian mind, in short, approximates simplicity by achieving uniformity or homogeneity of perceptions across its parts. (shrink)

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to (...) conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible. (shrink)

According to Jago (2014a), logical omniscience is really part of a deeper paradox. Jago develops an epistemic logic with principles of indeterminate closure to solve this paradox, but his official semantics is difficult to navigate, it is motivated in part by substantive metaphysics, and the logic is not axiomatized. In this paper, I simplify this epistemic logic by adapting the hyperintensional semantic framework of Sedlár (2021). My first goal is metaphysical neutrality. The solution to the epistemic paradox should not require (...) appeal to a metaphysics of truth-makers, situations, or impossible worlds, by contrast with Jago’s official semantics. My second goal is to elaborate on the proof theory. I show how to axiomatize a family of logics with principles of indeterminate epistemic closure. (shrink)

This is an amended version of material that first appeared in A. Clark, Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science, and Parallel Distributed Processing (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989), Ch. 1, 2, and 6. It appears in German translation in Metzinger,T (Ed) DAS LEIB-SEELE-PROBLEM IN DER ZWEITEN HELFTE DES 20 JAHRHUNDERTS (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1999).