We set out an account of how self-domestication plays a crucial role in the evolution of language. In doing so, we focus on the growing body of work that treats language structure as emerging from the process of cultural transmission. We argue that a full recognition of the importance of cultural transmission fundamentally changes the kind of questions we should be asking regarding the biological basis of language structure. If we think of language structure as reflecting an accumulated set of (...) changes in our genome, then we might ask something like, “What are the genetic bases of language structure and why were they selected?” However, if cultural evolution can account for language structure, then this question no longer applies. Instead, we face the task of accounting for the origin of the traits that enabled that process of structure-creating cultural evolution to get started in the first place. In light of work on cultural evolution, then, the new question for biological evolution becomes, “How did those precursor traits evolve?” We identify two key precursor traits: the transmission of the communication system through learning; and the ability to infer the communicative intent associated with a signal or action. We then describe two comparative case studies—the Bengalese finch and the domestic dog—in which parallel traits can be seen emerging following domestication. Finally, we turn to the role of domestication in human evolution. We argue that the cultural evolution of language structure has its origin in an earlier process of self-domestication. (shrink)

1 Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2 During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for (...) generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3 The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4 The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. 5 Synthesis and applications. Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible. (shrink)

In February 2018 numerous pundits and commentators rained on the collective parade of countless Black Panther fans, remarking that Wakanda was totally fictional and not a real African nation. Originally created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, Wakanda's utopian underpinnings are realized through the depiction of an idealistic vision of human society as a vibranium‐powered Afrofuturistic version of Plato's Republic. Rather than seeing Wakanda as a model of “racial utopianism,” Killmonger considers it as the basis of a (...) dystopian empire. the cinematic depiction of Wakanda in Black Panther remains a dilemma of sorts, laying bare the perils as well as promises of racial utopianism by asking the film's audience if it is possible to make Black excellence a reality, while also asking what Black excellence means. (shrink)

Since the global financial crisis in 2008, corporations have faced a crisis of trust, with growing sentiment against ‘elites and ‘big business’ and a feeling that ‘something ought to be done’ to re-establish public regard for corporations. Trust and trustworthiness are deeply moral significant. They provide the ‘glue or lubricant’ that begets reciprocity, decreases risk, secures dignity and respect, and safeguards against the subordination of the powerless to the powerful. However, in deciding how to restore trust, it is difficult to (...) determine precisely what should be done, by whom, and who will bear the cost, especially if any action involves a risk to overall market efficiency and corporate profitability. The paper explores whether corporations have a moral duty to be trustworthy, to bear the cost of being so and thus contribute to resolving the current crisis of trust. It also considers where the state and other social actors have strong reason to protect and enforce such moral rights, while acknowledging that other actors have similar obligations to be trustworthy. It outlines five ‘salient factors’ that trigger specific rights to trustworthiness and a concomitant duty on corporations to be trustworthy: market power, subordination (threat and intimidation), the absence of choice, the need to preserve systemic trust, and corporate political power which might undermine a state’s legitimacy. Absent these factors and corporations do not have a general duty to be trustworthy, since a responsible actor in fair market conditions should be able to choose between the costs and benefits of dealing with generally trustworthy corporations. (shrink)

This chapter examines Thoreau’s experiences on Mt. Katahdin, vis-à-vis exposure science and wilderness therapy. A close reading of Thoreau’s account suggests the experience had a profound effect on him, emotionally and philosophically, an effect that is relevant to environmental exposure and eco-vulnerability in the contexts of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Thoreau’s experience on that mountain presented to him an aspect of wilderness antithetical to the romantic, transcendentalist notions he previously held and ultimately led to more nuanced, therapeutic depictions (...) found in works like “Walking” and Walden. That such a reconciliation was possible for Thoreau suggests a privileged insulation from trauma not afforded to many. It also indicates the value of both philosophical contemplation and wilderness therapy to promote psychological resilience and adaptability. The author argues philosophers should begin to engage conceptually and normatively with exposure, vulnerability, and resilience. (shrink)

Practical approaches to the notions of subsets and extension sets are compared, coming from broadly set-theoretic and category-theoretic traditions of mathematics. I argue that the set-theoretic approach is the most practical for ‘looking down’ or ‘in’ at subsets and the category-theoretic approach is the most practical for ‘looking up’ or ‘out’ at extensions, and suggest some guiding principles for using these approaches without recourse to either category theory or axiomatic set theory.

This study assesses the impact had by institutional isomorphic pressures in the organisational fields of 185 businesses operating within the United Kingdom. The emphasis throughout is on how external institutions affect the socially and environmentally responsible aspects of an organization’s purchasing practice. Factor analyses and a linear regression model are employed to test the influence of these pressures. Initial findings suggest that what other industry participants are doing in this area is not as important in affecting the procurement practice of (...) the focal organisation as is the managers’ perception of how legitimacy is awarded by stakeholders and, indeed, if competitors with well-developed social and environmental supply chain management programs are perceived favourably in the industry. (shrink)

Thomas Reid saw the three subjects of logic, rhetoric, and the fine arts as closely cohering aspects of one endeavor that he called the culture of the mind. This was a topic on which Reid lectured for many years in Glasgow, and this volume presents as near a reconstruction of these lectures as is now possible. Though virtually unknown today, this material in fact relates closely to Reid's published works and in particular to the late Essays on the Intellectual (...) Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of Man. When composing these works, Reid drew primarily on his lectures on "pneumatology," which presented a theory of the mental powers, broadly conceived. These lectures were basic to the course on the culture of the mind that explained the cultivation of the mental powers. Although the Essays also included some elements from the material on the culture of the mind, the bulk of the latter was left in manuscript form, and Alexander Broadie's edition restores this important extension of Reid's overall work. In addition, this volume continues the attractive combination of manuscript material and published work, in this case Reid's important and well-known essay on Aristotle's logic. This text was corrupted in earlier editions of Reid's works and is now restored to the state in which Reid left it. This volume underscores Reid's great and growing significance, viewed both as a historical figure and as a philosopher. At the same time, it is of great interdisciplinary importance. While the material emerges directly from the core of Reid's philosophy, as now understood, it will appeal widely to people in literary, cultural, historical, and communications studies. In this regard, the present volume is a true fruit of the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

Institutional review boards, tasked with facilitating ethical research, are often pulled in competing directions. In what we call the protection-inclusion dilemma, we acknowledge the tensions IRBs face in aiming to both protect potential research participants from harm and include under-represented populations in research. In this manuscript, we examine the history of protectionism that has dominated research ethics oversight in the United States, as well as two responses to such protectionism: inclusion initiatives and critiques of the term vulnerability. We look at (...) what we know about IRB decision-making in relation to protecting and including “vulnerable” groups in research and examine the lack of regulatory guidance related to this dilemma, which encourages protection over inclusion within IRB practice. Finally, we offer recommendations related to how IRBs might strike a better balance between inclusion and protection in research ethics oversight. (shrink)

In this article I claim that service-learning experiences, wherein students work directly with individuals in need—individuals from whom studentscan learn what they cannot learn elsewhere—are invaluable, and perhaps necessary, for any curriculum with an aim toward the development of ethical understanding, personal moral character and commitment, and/or conscientious citizenship, both local and global. My argument rests on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophical ethical theory that re-envisions the ethical relation as arising out of revelation from the unique and precious Other, rather than reason (...) and the rational determinations and conceptions of the ethical agent. (shrink)

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Issues of reliability are claiming center-stage in the epistemology of machine learning. This paper unifies different branches in the literature and points to promising research directions, whilst also providing an accessible introduction to key concepts in statistics and machine learning---as far as they are concerned with reliability.

I prove a version of Schanuel's conjecture for Weierstrass equations in differential fields, answering a question of Zilber, and show that the linear independence condition in the statement cannot be relaxed.

This essay argues that Jacques Derrida's early work on grammatology and the science of writing continues to have interventionary relevance for how we understand the scientific enterprise today. Catherine Malabou has argued that the importance of Derrida's contribution has waned because the metaphors and tropes that he deploys have been eclipsed with time, becoming less applicable in explanations of how things work. Offering her own replacement term, ‘plastology’, Malabou argues that insights into the operations of brain plasticity, for example, have (...) superseded graphic metaphors. I suggest that Malabou's remedial is misguided because Derrida's ‘graphematic structure’ was never intended to answer the problem of representational accuracy. Indeed, Derrida advises that his non-concepts ‘trace’, ‘gramme’ or ‘writing’ are no more graphic than phonological, no more temporal than spatial. I argue, with Derrida, that a model, or representation, is not a third term in-between the biologist and biology or the writer and the world. In grammatology's onto-epistemological confounding of subject with/in object, we find that ‘writing's’ riddles also appear in/as the entanglements of quantum physics, where the one who knows, the measuring apparatus and the object to be interpreted are strangely involved. (shrink)

Through cultural transmission, repeated learning by new individuals transforms cultural information, which tends to become increasingly compressible . Existing diffusion chain studies include in their design two processes that could be responsible for this tendency: learning and reproducing . This paper manipulates the presence of learning in a simple iterated drawing design experiment. We find that learning seems to be the causal factor behind the increase in compressibility observed in the transmitted information, while reproducing is a source of random heritable (...) innovations. Only a theory invoking these two aspects of cultural learning will be able to explain human culture's fundamental balance between stability and innovation. (shrink)

The words quoted above distill the common secular conception of death. If we decline the traditional religious reassurances of an afterlife, or their fuzzy new age equivalents, and instead take the hard-boiled and thoroughly modern materialist view of death, then we likely end up with Gonzalez-Cruzzi. Rejecting visions of reunions with loved ones or of crossing over into the light, we anticipate the opposite: darkness, silence, an engulfing emptiness. But we would be wrong.

In language, recombination of a discrete set of meaningless building blocks forms an unlimited set of possible utterances. How such combinatorial structure emerged in the evolution of human language is increasingly being studied. It has been shown that it can emerge when languages culturally evolve and adapt to human cognitive biases. How the emergence of combinatorial structure interacts with the existence of holistic iconic form-meaning mappings in a language is still unknown. The experiment presented in this paper studies the role (...) of iconicity and human cognitive learning biases in the emergence of combinatorial structure in artificial whistled languages. Participants learned and reproduced whistled words for novel objects with the use of a slide whistle. Their reproductions were used as input for the next participant, to create transmission chains and simulate cultural transmission. Two conditions were studied: one in which the persistence of iconic form-meaning mappings was possible and one in which this was experimentally made impossible. In both conditions, cultural transmission caused the whistled languages to become more learnable and more structured, but this process was slightly delayed in the first condition. Our findings help to gain insight into when and how words may lose their iconic origins when they become part of an organized linguistic system. (shrink)

We used a retrospective survey to model the patterns of appraisal, motivation, and coping that uniquely correspond with 12 positive emotions (affection/love, amusement, awe, challenge/det...

This paper is an exposition and evaluation of the Agustín Rayo's views about the epistemology and metaphysics of mathematics, as they are presented in his book The Construction of Logical Space.

How do cognitive biases and mechanisms from learning and use interact when a system of language conventions emerges? We investigate this question by focusing on how transitive events are conveyed in silent gesture production and interaction. Silent gesture experiments have been used to investigate cognitive biases that shape utterances produced in the absence of a conventional language system. In this mode of communication, participants do not follow the dominant order of their native language, and instead condition the structure on the (...) semantic properties of the events they are conveying. An important source of variability in structure in silent gesture is the property of reversibility. Reversible events typically have two animate participants whose roles can be reversed. Without a syntactic/conventional means of conveying who does what to whom, there is inherent unclarity about the agent and patient roles in the event. In experiment 1 we test a novel, fine-grained analysis of reversibility. Presenting a silent gesture production experiment, we show that the variability in word order depends on two factors that together determine how reversible an event is. We relate our experimental results to principles from information theory, showing that our data support the “noisy channel” account of constituent order. In experiment 2, we focus on the influence of interaction on word order variability for reversible and non-reversible events. We show that when participants use silent gesture for communicative interaction, they become more consistent in their usage of word order over time, however, this pattern less pronounced for events that are classified as strongly non-reversible. We conclude that full consistency in word order is theoretically a good strategy, but word order use in practice is a more complex phenomenon. (shrink)

Some moral theorists argue that being an innocent beneficiary of significant harms inflicted by others may be sufficient to ground special duties to address the hardships suffered by the victims, at least when it is impossible to extract compensation from those who perpetrated the harm. This idea has been applied to climate change in the form of the beneficiary-pays principle. Other philosophers, however, are quite sceptical about beneficiary pays. Our aim in this article is to examine their critiques. We conclude (...) that, while they have made important points, the principle remains worthy of further development and exploration. Our purpose in engaging with these critiques is constructive — we aim to formulate beneficiary pays in ways that would give it a plausible role in allocating the cost of addressing human-induced climate change, while acknowledging that some understandings of the principle would make it unsuitable for this purpose. (shrink)

This volume is a study of the influence of Timaeus on the development of Western cosmology in three axial periods of European culture: Late Antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance.

European Enlightenment thinkers like Emer de Vattel in his epic work The Laws of Nations argued that engaging in warfare should comply, as much as possible, with humane rules in the treatment of both combatants and noncombatants. Encapsulated by the phrase jus in bello, or justice in warfare, the question remains whether this idealist doctrine had application in military actions conducted during the Revolutionary War fought over the issue of American independence. This essay concludes that in such frontier regions as (...) the Mohawk Valley of New York, the doctrine of jus in bello had virtually no impact in restraining wartime cruelties. What actually occurred in such areas was vicious partisan warfare, or a contagion of violence characterized by brutal retribution and retaliation among combatants, along with merciless actions directed against civilian noncombatants. The Revolutionary War, at least in regions like frontier New York where partisan fighting predominated, had more in common wit.. (shrink)