Decades of psychological research have been aimed at modeling how people learn features and categories. The empirical validation of these theories is often based on artificial stimuli with simple representations. Recently, deep neural networks have reached or surpassed human accuracy on tasks such as identifying objects in natural images. These networks learn representations of real‐world stimuli that can potentially be leveraged to capture psychological representations. We find that state‐of‐the‐art object classification networks provide surprisingly accurate predictions of human similarity judgments for (...) natural images, but they fail to capture some of the structure represented by people. We show that a simple transformation that corrects these discrepancies can be obtained through convex optimization. We use the resulting representations to predict the difficulty of learning novel categories of natural images. Our results extend the scope of psychological experiments and computational modeling by enabling tractable use of large natural stimulus sets. (shrink)

Readers of fiction tend to have better abilities of empathy and theory of mind. We present a study designed to replicate this finding, rule out one possible explanation, and extend the assessment of social outcomes. In order to rule out the role of personality, we first identified Openness as the most consistent correlate. This trait was then statistically controlled for, along with two other important individual differences: the tendency to be drawn into stories and gender. Even after accounting for these (...) variables, fiction exposure still predicted performance on an empathy task. Extending these results, we also found that exposure to fiction was positively correlated with social support. Exposure to nonfiction, in contrast, was associated with loneliness, and negatively related to social support. (shrink)

What does everyone in the modern world need to know? Renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson's answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research. Humorous, surprising and informative, Dr. Peterson tells us why skateboarding boys and girls must be left alone, what terrible fate awaits those who criticize too easily, and why you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street. What does (...) the nervous system of the lowly lobster have to tell us about standing up straight (with our shoulders back) and about success in life? Why did ancient Egyptians worship the capacity to pay careful attention as the highest of gods? What dreadful paths do people tread when they become resentful, arrogant and vengeful? Dr. Peterson journeys broadly, discussing discipline, freedom, adventure and responsibility, distilling the world's wisdom into 12 practical and profound rules for life. [This book] shatters the modern commonplaces of science, faith and human nature, while transforming and ennobling the mind and spirit of its readers. (shrink)

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are increasingly widely used in psychology and neuroscience to predict how human minds and brains respond to visual images. Typically, CNNs represent these images using thousands of features that are learned through extensive training on image datasets. This raises a question: How many of these features are really needed to model human behavior? Here, we attempt to estimate the number of dimensions in CNN representations that are required to capture human psychological representations in two ways: (1) (...) directly, using human similarity judgments and (2) indirectly, in the context of categorization. In both cases, we find that low-dimensional projections of CNN representations are sufficient to predict human behavior. We show that these low-dimensional representations can be easily interpreted, providing further insight into how people represent visual information. A series of control studies indicate that these findings are not due to the size of the dataset we used and may be due to a high level of redundancy in the features appearing in CNN representations. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel puzzle about desire consisting of three independently plausible but jointly inconsistent propositions: all desires are dispositional states, we have privileged access to some of our desires, and we do not have privileged access to any dispositional state. Proponents of the view that all desires are dispositional states might think the most promising way out of this puzzle is to deny. I argue, however, that such attempts fail because the most plausible accounts of self-knowledge of desires (...) do not explain how we possess privileged access to dispositional desires. I conclude by offering what I take to be a more promising solution to the puzzle, one that involves the rejection of on the grounds that some desires possess phenomenology. (shrink)

We suggest that the hierarchical predictive processing account detailed by Clark can be usefully integrated with narrative psychology by situating personal narratives at the top of an individual's knowledge hierarchy. Narrative representations function as high-level generative models that direct our attention and structure our expectations about unfolding events. Implications for integrating scientific and humanistic views of human experience are discussed.

A long-standing debate in group ontology and group epistemology concerns whether some groups possess mental states and/or epistemic states such as knowledge that do not reduce to the mental states and/or epistemic states of the individuals who comprise such groups (and are also states not possessed by any of the members). Call those who think there are such states inflationists. There has recently been a defense in the literature of a specific type of inflationary knowledge—viz., knowledge of facts about group (...) minds or group self-knowledge (GS-K). In this paper I address whether some groups do possess such knowledge. I argue that we have good reason to think they do not. I do so by exploring the most explicit defense of such knowledge in the literature—Lukas Schwengerer’s (2022) defense—as well as other ways of defending this thesis and arguing that such ways are problematic. In the latter part of the paper, I explain why the two most popular inflationary approaches to group knowledge simpliciter are incompatible with there being GS-K. In doing so I work to show why even inflationists should reject the view that there is inflationary group self-knowledge. (shrink)

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, cities and states adopted social distancing, social isolation, or quarantine measurements to slow the transmission of the disease. Negative mental health outcomes including depression and anxiety have been associated with social distancing or social isolation. The purpose of the present study was to examine changes in psychological health and physical activity over an 8 week period under social distancing policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.Methods: Ninety individuals participated in this study. Qualifying participants answered questions using an (...) online survey regarding their loneliness, depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, mood state, and physical activity over four time points each lasting two weeks.Results: Symptoms of depression and state anxiety were increased in the population when compared to nationwide statistics from before the COVID-19 pandemic. Time point 2, ~1 month into social isolation, showed the most significant effects on mental health. During this time point, 100% of the participants showed symptoms of depression. There were no significant changes in physical activity over the 8 weeks. Loneliness, depressive symptoms, fatigue, and mood state were negatively associated with participation in physical activity. Vigor and state anxiety were associated with participation in physical activity.Conclusion: Social isolation and social distancing practices have had a negative effect on depression, anxiety, and mood over time. It appeared that depressive symptoms and total mood disturbance was elevated during time point two. Depressive symptoms were much higher than average compared to previous epidemiological data. Physical activity amount did not change over time but was associated with poor mental health. (shrink)

The explanatory value of niche construction can be strengthened by firm footing in semiotic theory. Anthropologists have a unique perspective on the integration of such diverse approaches to human action and evolutionary processes. Here, we seek to open a dialogue between anthropology and biosemiotics. The overarching aim of this paper is to demonstrate that niche construction, including the underlying mechanism of reciprocal causation, is a semiotic process relating to biological development as well as cognitive development and cultural change. In making (...) this argument we emphasize the semiotic mechanisms underlying the niche concept. We argue that the “niche” in ecology and evolutionary biology can be consistent with the Umwelt of Jakob von Uexkull. Following John Deely we therefore suggest that investigations into the organism—environment interface constituting niche construction should emphasize the semiotic basis of experience. Peircean signs are pervasive and allow for flexible interpretations of phenomena in relation to the perceptual and cognitive capacities of the behaving organism, which is particularly pertinent for understanding the relation of proximate/ultimate selective forces as co-productive. Additionally, theoretical work by Kinji Imanishi on the evolution of daily life and Gregory Bateson’s relational view of evolution both support the linkage between proximate and ultimate evolutionary processes of causation necessitated by the niche construction perspective. We will then apply this theoretical framework to two specific examples: 1) hominin evolution, including uniquely human cultural behaviors with niche constructive implications; and 2) the multispecies and anthropocentric niche of human-dog coevolution from which complex cognitive capacities and semiotic relationships emerged. The intended outcome of this paper is the establishment of concrete semiotic mechanisms and theory underlying niche constructive behavior which can then be applied to a broad spectrum of organisms to contextualize the reciprocal relation between proximate and ultimate drivers of behavior. (shrink)

This paper develops a novel defense of the non-sensory phenomenology of desires, and more broadly, of attitudes. I argue that the way to defend this type of phenomenology is to: offer a defense of the view that attitudes are states that realize the causal role of attitude types and argue that what realizes the causal role of attitudes are, in certain cases, states that possess non-sensory phenomenology. I carry out this approach with respect to desires by developing the view that (...) desires play the causal role of motivating action, and in some cases, the states that play this role are states that possess the non-sensory phenomenology of attraction. I proceed to argue that if this way of defending the non-sensory phenomenology of desires, and more broadly, of attitudes, is unsuccessful, we should be eliminativists about this type of phenomenology. (shrink)

Recent studies :98–144, 2002; Weismann, J Bus Ethics 88:615–66, 2009) revealed that in the first 28 years of its existence, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was not enforced by the federal government. The Weismann study further concluded that the FCPA, designed by Congress as a self-regulatory model of corporate governance, failed to achieve the regulatory goal of deterring global bribery by U.S. companies. The current article addresses the reasons that the FCPA remains an ineffective measure to control bribery as a (...) global market entry strategy despite the highly publicized 2006 Department of Justice initiative to increase prosecutions and tighten enforcement efforts. The failure arises out of both the increased use of informal dispositions of case prosecutions,, which has made “getting caught” merely an increased “cost of doing business” and the failure to close the regulatory gaps in the statute that permit violators to slip through the enforcement net. The article updates and compiles the case prosecution data for every reported case prosecuted between 1977 and 2011. That data are then compared to the results of a 2010 integrity risk survey performed by Deloitte Financial Advisory Services and Forbes which reveal a widely held global business perception that compliance and integrity risks appear to be rising sharply and that the FCPA is ineffective in deterring bribery and corruption in foreign markets. The article aims to serve as a predictive tool for policy makers and business professionals in assessing risk in the global markets, particularly as commerce intensifies in the BRIC countries, notable for bribery and corruption. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Kant’s main concern in his famous essay on enlightenment is the relation between enlightenment and the political order. His account of this relation turns on the idea of the freedom of public reason. This paper develops a new interpretation of Kant’s concept of public reason. First, it argues that Kant conceives of public reasoning as a matter of speaking in one’s own name to the commonwealth of the public. Second, it draws on Kant’s republican conception of freedom in order to (...) develop an account of the grounds of the freedom of public reason. It argues that the state’s duty with respect to public reason is an aspect of its duty to protect the independence of citizens. Contrary to what is commonly thought, this duty is not an obligation to refrain from interfering in the sphere of public reason. The state may have a positive, though limited, role to play in enlightenment. (shrink)

This paper develops a Lockean account of literary property. Seana Shiffrin has recently argued, on the basis of an egalitarian interpretation of Locke's theory of property, that the Lockean view does not justify property rights in intellectual works. I argue that Shiffrin fails to take an important strand of Locke's view into account, namely, the view that makers have rights to what they have made. If this aspect of Locke's view is given its proper place, a plausible Lockean account of (...) property in literary works can be developed. This account of literary property places us in a better position to appreciate both the strengths and weaknesses of the Lockean theory of intellectual property. (shrink)

A recent article in this Journal argued that insider trading is an unethical practice leading to an inefficiently functioning market. The debate on this topic has primarily pitted ethical defenses of prohibition against economic arguments extolling its allowance. In addition to being incomplete, this approach ignores other unwanted economic effects of prohibition itself and unethical implications of its existence. This article shows that Adam Smith's free market concept, when properly interpreted, provides all the incentive structure necessary for an efficient and (...) ethical marketplace even when insider trading is permitted. (shrink)

Globally, there is a lack of adherence to the WHO definition of live birth. This is leading to untenable ethical inconsistencies due to significant variation in which infants are being acknowledged and registered as alive. If an infant is not registered as alive, there can be no acknowledgement of their rights as a child, and there are subsequent implications for worldwide child health resources and funding. Being alive should not be a quality that is geographically determined. This paper explores the (...) differing definitions that are used regarding live birth and the ethical and practical implications for infants, their families and child health worldwide. (shrink)

The promises of precision medicine are often heralded in the medical and lay literature, but routine integration of genomics in clinical practice is still limited. While the “last mile” infrastructure to bring genomics to the bedside has been demonstrated in some healthcare settings, a number of challenges remain — both in the receptivity of today's health system and in its technical and educational readiness to respond to this evolution in care. To improve the impact of genomics on health and disease (...) management, we will need to integrate both new knowledge and new care processes into existing workflows. This change will be onerous and time-consuming, but hopefully valuable to the provision of high quality, economically feasible care worldwide. (shrink)

A republican theory of social justice specifies how republican freedom should be distributed. The goal of this paper is to assess the plausibility of two recently proposed principles of republican social justice: an aggregative maximizing principle defended by Philip Pettit in Republicanism and a sufficiency principle of republican social justice offered by Pettit in On the People’s Terms. The maximizing principle must be rejected because it permits under-protecting vulnerable members of society in favor of increasing the freedom of the powerful. (...) The sufficiency principle avoids the most basic objection to the maximizing principle, but it is at best an incomplete theory of social justice. Social justice requires principle(s) for determining the justice of distributions above the sufficiency threshold and republican theory does not determine which principle(s) should govern distributions above the threshold. Republicans must decide whether they will incorporate an independent commitment to equality within their theory of social justice. (shrink)

The scope and audacity of Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s contributions to Sanskrit grammar has made him one of early-modern India’s most influential, if not controversial, intellectuals. Yet for as consequential as Bhaṭṭoji’s has been for histories of early-modern scholasticism, his extensive corpus of non-grammatical writings has attracted relatively little scholarly attention. This paper examines Bhaṭṭoji’s work on Vedānta, the Tattvakaustubha, in order to gage how issues of language became an increasingly important site of inter-religious critique among early-modern Vedāntins. In the Tattvakaustubha, Bhaṭṭoji (...) reproaches Madhvācārya, the founder of the eponymous Mādhva or Dvaita Vedānta system, for his use of ungrammatical words. In extending his accusations of grammatical negligence to include Madhva’s early commentator Jayatīrtha, Bhaṭṭoji sought to undermine Mādhva claims to authoritative scriptural exegesis. Bhaṭṭoji’s provocation impelled later Mādhva scholars like Rāghavendratīrtha to bring a sharper set of grammatical tools to core commentarial works. Where others have pointed to Vyāsatīrtha as a turning point for Mādhva scholastic discourse in the areas of Pūrva Mīmāṃsā and Navya Nyāya, this paper suggests that it was the post-Bhaṭṭoji scholar Rāghavendratīrtha who brought a hitherto unrivaled grammatical expertise to Mādhva writings. That both Mādhva and Advaita Vedāntins wielded grammatical legitimacy as a cudgel against the other raises important socio-historical questions about the relationship between text-criticism, conceptions of scholastic legitimacy, and inter-religious contestation in early-modern South Asia. (shrink)

As mariculture—the cultivation of aquatic organisms in marine environment—intensifies to meet the demands of sustainable blue growth and national policies, novel ethical challenges will arise. In the context of ethics, primary concerns over aquaculture and mariculture tend to stay within differing value-based perspectives focused on benefits to human and non-human subjects, specifically animal welfare and animal rights. Nonetheless, the burgeoning field of feminist blue humanities provides ethical considerations that extend beyond animal subjects (including humans), often because of its concerns with (...) new materialist, posthumanist, and other relations-based theories. This article examines feminist blue humanities and the contributions it may bring to understanding contemporary and future ethical challenges posed by mariculture and its intensification, especially the cultivation of low-trophic organisms. By offering an overview of feminist blue humanities, this article explores some of its particularities by drawing out three major ethical concerns facing contemporary mariculture, specifically material reconfigurations, radical alteration of the lives of low-trophic species through industrialization and increases in maricultural waste products. (shrink)

With tumultuous changes occurring in the former Soviet Union, a unique opportunity exists to examine the implications of unethical behavior in what is,de facto, a totally unregulated market. Recent legalization of commodity trading in Moscow carried with it no legal structure to ensure swift compliance with contract terms. This paper demonstrates that in the absence of legal remedies, a free marketplace appropriately punishes unethical conduct.

The view of Aristotle and Brentano that ‘true’ applies straightforwardly to statements (judgments, beliefs, propositions) and derivatively to other things makes for awkward and unintuitive definitions in the cases of derived truth. This is corrected by construing ‘true’ as applying analogically to statements and other things. Under this view, six senses of ‘true’ are distinguished. Following the logic of analogy, these senses are partly the same and partly different. These six senses also exhibit an analogy of proportionality. This yields three (...) groups, paired as follows: moral truth is to sentenial truth as productive truth is to ontological truth as cultural truth is to lawful truth.But behind every analogical prediction is a derivative predication. This implies that there is a primary referent of ‘true’ behind moral, productive and cultural truth on the one hand and sentential, ontological and lawful truth on the other. In the case of the former three, it is evidently the human mind. In the case of the latter three, a reasonable hypothesis, shared by Aquinas, is that it is God’s mind. (shrink)

Dreams represent threat, but appear to do so metaphorically more often than realistically. The metaphoric representation of threat allows it to be conceptualized in a manner that is constant across situations (as what is common to all threats begins to be understood and portrayed). This also means that response to threat can come to be represented in some way that works across situations. Conscious access to dream imagery, and subsequent social communication of that imagery, can facilitate this generalized adaptive process, (...) by allowing the communicative dreamer access to the problem solving resources of the community. [Revonsuo; Solms]. (shrink)

It is commonly held that the idea of natural rights originated with the ancient Greeks, and was given full form by more modern philosophers such as John Locke, who believed that natural rights were apprehensible primarily to reason. The problem with this broad position is three-fold: first, it is predicated on the presumption that the idea of rights is modern, biologically speaking ; second, it makes it appear that reason and rights are integrally, even causally, linked; finally, it legitimizes debate (...) about just what rights might be, even in their most fundamental essence. In consequence, the most cherished presumptions of the West remain castles in the air, historically and philosophically speaking. This perceived weakness of foundation makes societies grounded on conceptions of natural right vulnerable to criticism and attack in the most dangerous of manners. Most of the bloodiest battles and moral catastrophes of the twentieth century were a consequence of disagreement between groups of people who had different rationally-derived notions of what exactly constituted an inalienable right . If natural rights are anything at all, therefore, they better be something more than mere rational constructions. The adoption of a much broader evolutionary/historical perspective with regards to the development of human individuality and society allows for the generation of a deep solution to this problem—one dependent on a transformation of ontology, much as moral vision. Such a solution grounds the concept of sovereignty and natural right back into the increasingly implicit and profoundly religious soil from which it originally emerged, and provides a rock-solid foundation for explicit Western claims for the innate dignity of man. (shrink)

Individuals operating within the scientific paradigm presume that the world is made of matter. Although the perspective engendered by this presupposition is very powerful, it excludes value and subjective experience from its fundamental ontology. In addition, it provides very little guidance with regards to the fundamentals of ethical action. Individuals within the religious paradigm, by contrast, presume that the world is made out of what matters. From such a perspective, the phenomenon of meaning is the primary reality. This meaning is (...) revealed both subjectively and objectively, and serves—under the appropriate conditions—as an unerring guide to ethical action.The ancient stories of Genesis cannot be properly understood without viewing them from within the religious paradigm. Genesis describes the primary categories of the world of meaning, as well as the eternal interactions of those categories. Order arises out of Chaos, through the creative intermediation of Logos, and man is manifested, in turn. Man, a constrained Logos, exists within a bounded state of being, Eden. Eden is a place where order and chaos, nature and culture, find their optimal state of balance. Because Eden is a walled garden, however—a bounded state of being—something is inevitably excluded. Unfortunately, what is excluded does not simply cease to exist. Every bounded paradise thus contains something forbidden and unknown. Man's curiosity inevitably drives him to investigate what has been excluded. The knowledge thus generated perpetually destroys the presuppositions and boundaries that allow his temporary Edens to exist. Thus, man is eternally fallen. The existential pain generated by this endlessly fallen state can undermine man's belief in the moral justifi0ability of being—and may turn him, like Cain, against brother and God. (shrink)

Modeling cognition by structural analysis of representation leads to systematic difficulties which are not resolvable. We analyse the merits and limits of a representation-based methodology to modeling cognition by treating Jackendoff's Consciousness and the Computational Mind as a good case study. We note the effects this choice of methodology has on the view of consciousness he proposes, as well as a more detailed consideration of the computational mind. The fundamental difficulty we identify is the conflict between the desire for modular (...) processors which map directly onto representations and the need for dynamically interacting control. Our analysis of this approach to modeling cognition is primarily directed at separating merits from problems and inconsistencies by a critique internal to this approach; we also step outside the framework to note the issues it ignores. (shrink)

Aquinas provides an in-depth analysis of basic philosophical concepts in the thought of Aquinas. These concepts include: being, essence, existence, form, matter, truth, goodness, freedom and necessity, knowledge, willing and choosing, and right action. These ideas are approached from an analytical point of view but the analysis is not exceedingly technical, which allows beginners to follow the discussion. Many other works consider only one aspect of Aquinas's thought such as his treatment of persons, his arguments for God's existence, or his (...) theory of truth but Peterson's Aquinas combines readability with both depth and close analysis to give a comprehensive overview of Aquinas's work without sacrificing either accuracy or depth. - From the publisher. (shrink)

The concept of “auditor independence”—that the provider of assurance on financial information should be free of conflicting interests—is deeply embedded in the world’s capital markets. This paper examines stresses on the global model of Big Audit that call into question both the basis and the ongoing usefulness of auditor independence: The threats to the stability of the model, based on the dominance of the Big Four international accounting networks in providing audit services to the world’s large public companies. The balance (...) between benefits and detriments of the independence requirements, and standards that are difficult to articulate and enforce. The implications for the continued value of independent assurance emerging from the evolution in Big Data tools and analytics, including the structural constraints of regulation. A broad re-examination is called for, in aide of the design of a sustainable public-company assurance model that is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century. (shrink)