A number of theories about the origins of musicality have incorporated biological and social perspectives. Darwin argued that musicality evolved by sexual selection, functioning as a courtship display in reproductive partner choice. Darwin did not regard musicality as a sexually dimorphic trait, paralleling evidence that both sexes produce and enjoy music. A novel research strand examines the effect of musicality on sexual attraction by acknowledging the importance of facial attractiveness. We previously demonstrated that music varying in emotional content increases the (...) perceived attractiveness and dating desirability of opposite-sex faces only in females, compared to a silent control condition. Here, we built upon this approach by presenting the person depicted (target) as the performer of the music (prime), thus establishing a direct link. We hypothesized that musical priming would increase sexual attraction, with high-arousing music inducing the largest effect. Musical primes (25 s, piano solo music) varied in arousal and pleasantness, and targets were photos of other-sex faces of average attractiveness and with neutral expressions (2 s). Participants were 35 females and 23 males (heterosexual psychology students, single, and no hormonal contraception use) matched for musical background, mood, and liking for the music used in the experiment. After musical priming, females’ ratings of attractiveness and dating desirability increased significantly. In males, only dating desirability was significantly increased by musical priming. No specific effects of music-induced pleasantness and arousal were observed. Our results, together with other recent empirical evidence, corroborate the sexual selection hypothesis for the evolution of human musicality. (shrink)

Through a comparative case analysis regarding the Chinese language, it is discussed how the structure and functions of a natural language would bear upon the ways in which some philosophical problems are posed and some ontological insights shaped. Disagreeing with Chad Hansen's mass-noun hypothesis, a collective-noun hypothesis is argued for: (1) the denotational semantics and relevant grammatical features of Chinese nouns are like those of collective nouns; (2) their implicit ontology is a mereological ontology of collection-of-individuals with both (...) part-whole and member-class structure; and (3) encouraged and shaped by the folk semantics of Chinese nouns, classical Chinese theorists of language take this kind of mereological nominalism for granted. (shrink)

I argue against a priori objections to the view that causation may be reducible to some micro-structural process in principle discoverable by physics. I distinguish explanation from causation, and argue that the main objections to such a reduction stem from conflating these two notions. Explanation is the collection of pragmatically relevant, possibly counterfactual information about causation; and causation is to be identified in a necessary a posteriori way with whatever physical processes underwrite our explanatory claims.

The purpose of this paper is to present some results which suggest that the Singular Cardinals Hypothesis follows from the Proper Forcing Axiom. What will be proved is that a form of simultaneous reflection follows from the Set Mapping Reflection Principle, a consequence of PFA. While the results fall short of showing that MRP implies SCH, it will be shown that MRP implies that if SCH fails first at κ then every stationary subset of reflects. It will also be (...) demonstrated that MRP always fails in a generic extension by Prikry forcing. (shrink)

The Hygiene Hypothesis has been recognized as an important cornerstone to explain the sudden increase in the prevalence of asthma and allergic diseases in modernized culture. The recent epidemic of allergic diseases is in contrast with the gradual implementation of Homo sapiens sapiens to the present-day forms of civilization. This civilization forms a gradual process with cumulative effects on the human immune system, which co-developed with parasitic and commensal Helminths. The clinical manifestation of this epidemic, however, became only visible (...) in the second half of the twentieth century. In order to explain these clinical effects in terms of the underlying IgE-mediated reactions to innocuous environmental antigens, the low biodiversity of antigens in the domestic environment plays a pivotal role. The skewing of antigen exposure as a cumulative effect of reducing biodiversity in the immediate human environment as well as in changing food habits, provides a sufficient and parsimonious explanation for the rise in allergic diseases in a highly developed and helminth-free modernized culture. Socio-economic tendencies that incline towards a further reduction of environmental biodiversity may provide serious concern for future health. This article explains that the “Hygiene Hypothesis”, the “Old Friends Hypothesis”, and the “Skewed Antigen Exposure Hypothesis” are required to more fully explain the rise of allergy in modern societies. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary epistemology. Contextualists claim that ‘know’ is a context-sensitive verb associated with different evidential standards in different contexts. Contextualists motivate their view based on a set of behavioural claims. In this paper, I show that several of these behavioural claims are false. I also show that contextualist test cases suffer from a critical confound, which derives from people's tendency to defer to speakers’ statements about their own mental states. My (...) evidence consists in results from several behavioural experiments. I conclude that contextualism is an idle hypothesis and I propose some general methodological lessons. (shrink)

The past hypothesis is that the entropy of the universe was very low in the distant past. It is put forward to explain the entropic arrow of time but it has been suggested. The emperor’s new mind. London:Vintage Books; Penrose, R.. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 571, 249–264; Price, H.. In S. F. Savitt, Times’s arrows today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Price, H.. Time’s arrow and Archimedes’ point. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Price, H.. In C. Hitchcock, (...) Contemporary debates in philosophy of science. Oxford: Blackwell]) that it is itself in need of explanation. It has also been suggested that cosmic inflation could provide the explanation, but Price raises a serious objection to this suggestion, which has otherwise received very little attention in the philosophical literature. Price points out that the standard inflationary explanation involves a double standard: although the evolution of the universe described by the inflationary model seems natural from the standard temporal perspective it looks highly unnatural from the reversed temporal perspective. The main purpose of this paper is to propose a novel form of the inflationary explanation that avoids this objection. It is argued that the inflationary model would not involve a double standard if we construct the model with a global “boundary” condition instead of a conventional boundary condition: if we assume that the universe is as generic as possible overall, rather than as generic as possible at some given point as is assumed in the standard inflationary model. This novel form of the inflationary explanation is then compared with Price’s 1996 preferred explanation, a version of the so-called “Weyl hypothesis”. (shrink)

Gerd Gigerenzer's views on probabilistic reasoning in humans have come under close scrutiny. Very little attention, however, has been paid to his evolutionary component of his argument. According to Gigerenzer, reasoning about probabilities as frequencies is so common today because it was favored by natural selection in the past. This paper presents a critical examination of this argument. It will show first, that, _pace_ Gigerenzer, there are some reasons to believe that using the frequency format was not more adaptive than (...) using the standard (percentage) format and, second, that Gigerenzer's evolutionary argument and his other arguments such as his historical description of the notion of probability are in tension with each other. (shrink)

In medical research, hypothesis tests are used to determine if a novel treatment is efficacious in comparison to a control treatment. Traditionally two-sided tests are recommended and one-sided tests are not. In this review the arguments for two- and one-sided tests are presented. It is argued that in many applications one-sided tests are appropriate and that two-sided tests may expose research subjects to unnecessary risk, and are therefore unethical.

We consider the problem of producing an impure public good in various jurisdictions formed through the strategic decisions of agents. Our environment inherits two well-known problems: Under individual decisions, there is a tension between stability and efficiency; Under coalitional decisions, stable jurisdiction structures may fail to exist. The solution, we propose is the use of membership property rights: When a move among jurisdictions is subject to the approval of the agents whom it affects, coalitionally stable jurisdiction structures coincide with those (...) which are efficient. (shrink)

If the NHSTP procedure is essential for controlling for chance, why is there little, if any, discussion of the nature of chance by Chow and other advocates of the procedure. Also, many criticisms that Chow takes to be aimed against the NHSTP procedure are actually directed against the kind of theory that is tested by the procedure.

There are scenarios in which letting one’s own views on the question whether p direct one’s inquiry into that question brings about individual and collective epistemic benefits. However, these scenarios are also such that one’s evidence doesn’t support believing one’s own views. So, how to vindicate the epistemic benefits of directing one’s inquiry in such an asymmetric way, without asking one to hold a seemingly irrational doxastic attitude? To answer this question, the paper understands asymmetric inquiry direction in terms of (...) having one’s inquiry be guided by a doxastic attitude, which I call hypothesis, that’s governed by the following norm: One’s hypothesis that p is rational just in case it is a manifestation of the best feasible way to form a doxastic attitude regarding p that promotes the best feasible ways to advance towards settling the question of p’s (or of any other suitably related proposition’s) truth-value. (shrink)

"Adam Wiegner's work belongs to Polish analytical philosophy, but it falls outside of its main current, the Lvov-Warsaw School, which was influenced by Hume's ideas. Wiegner, influenced by neo-Kantianism, developed a non-Humean conception of "holistic empiricism," which anticipates some of the ideas of K. R. Popper and W. V. O. Quine. Some of his ideas remain original to this day. His main research interests included epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science especially philosophy of psychology, analytical history of philosophy, and (...) interpretation of traditional logic in terms of mathematical logic."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to the Language of Though Hypothesis (LOTH) accessible to general audiences. LOTH is an empirical thesis about thought and thinking. For their explication, it postulates a physically realized system of representations that have a combinatorial syntax (and semantics) such that operations on representations are causally sensitive only to the syntactic properties of representations. According to LOTH, thought is, roughly, the tokening of a representation that has a syntactic (constituent) structure with an appropriate semantics. Thinking thus consists (...) in syntactic operations defined over representations. Most of the arguments for LOTH derive their strength from their ability to explain certain empirical phenomena like productivity, systematicity of thought and thinking. (shrink)

If the Past Hypothesis underlies the arrows of time, what is the status of the Past Hypothesis? In this paper, I examine the role of the Past Hypothesis in the Boltzmannian account and defend the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law of nature. Such a view is known to be compatible with Humeanism about laws, but as I argue it is also supported by a minimal non-Humean "governing'' view. Some worries arise from (...) the non-dynamical and time-dependent character of the Past Hypothesis as a boundary condition, the intrinsic vagueness in its specification, and the nature of the initial probability distribution. I show that these worries do not have much force, and in any case they become less relevant in a new quantum framework for analyzing time's arrows---the Wentaculus. Hence, the view that the Past Hypothesis is a candidate fundamental law should be more widely accepted than it is now. (shrink)

It is generally accepted among philosophers of science that hypothesis testing is a key methodological feature of science. As far as philosophical theories of confirmation are con...

According to one theory, the brain is a sophisticated hypothesis tester: perception is Bayesian unconscious inference where the brain actively uses predictions to test, and then refine, models about what the causes of its sensory input might be. The brain’s task is simply continually to minimise prediction error. This theory, which is getting increasingly popular, holds great explanatory promise for a number of central areas of research at the intersection of philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. I show how the theory (...) can help us understand striking phenomena at three cognitive levels: vision, sensory integration, and belief. First, I illustrate central aspects of the theory by showing how it provides a nice explanation of why binocular rivalry occurs. Then I suggest how the theory may explain the role of the unified sense of self in rubber hand and full body illusions driven by visuotactile conflict. Finally, I show how it provides an approach to delusion formation that is consistent with one-deficit accounts of monothematic delusions. (shrink)