Andrew Collier is the boldest defender of objectivity - in science, knowledge, thought, action, politics, morality and religion. In this tribute and acknowledgement of the influence his work has had on a wide readership, his colleagues show that they have been stimulated by his thinking and offer challenging responses. This wide-ranging book covers key areas with which defenders of objectivity often have to engage. Sections are devoted to the following: 'objectivity of value', 'objectivity and everyday knowledge', 'objectivity in political economy', (...) 'objectivity and reflexivity', 'objectivity, postmodernism and feminism', 'objectivity and nature'. The diverse contributions range from social and political thought to philosophy, reflecting the central themes of Collier's work. (shrink)

One of us is a teacher educator (Margaret) and the other is a prospective teacher (Andrew). In our experiences within these roles, we increasingly see and hear little educative concern for the epistemological question "What counts as knowledge?" alongside the ontological question "What does it mean to be a teacher in classrooms?" Instead of grappling with these questions, curricular enactment in many classrooms proceeds through tightly controlled conditions with criteria that insist on pre-determined management modes with little time or (...) space for teachers to ask what ought to count as knowledge or what teaching for student understanding might feel and look like in practice. At the same time, many teachers are .. (shrink)

First published in 1985. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Warming temperatures in the circumpolar north have led to new discussions around climate-driven frontiers for agriculture. In this paper, we situate northern food systems in Canada within the corporate food regime and settler colonialism, and contend that an expansion of the conventional, industrial agriculture paradigm into the Canadian North would have significant socio-cultural and ecological consequences. We propose agroecology as an alternative framework uniquely accordant with northern contexts. In particular, we suggest that there are elements of agroecology that are already (...) being practiced in northern Indigenous communities as part of traditional hunter-gatherer food systems. We present a framework for agroecology in the North and discuss its components of environmental stewardship, economies, knowledge, social dimensions and governance using examples from the Dehcho region, Northwest Territories, Canada. Finally, we discuss several challenges and cautions in creating policy around agroecology in the North and encourage community-based research in developing and testing this framework moving forward. (shrink)

Volume 19, Issue 3, June 2020, Page 217-221.

We wish to describe and acknowledge the exceptional contributions to medical ethics, both in the UK and internationally, made by Edward Shotter1 who died at home on 3 July 2019. He was founder of the London Medical Group2 3 and instigator of similar student-led medical ethics groups throughout the UK; founder of the Institute of Medical Ethics4 and founder of the Journal of Medical Ethics. Ted Shotter transformed the study of medical ethics in the UK in the interests of patients (...) and professionals alike. In 1963, he established the pioneering ‘Medical Group’ model, an innovative bottom-up method whereby students in the health professions could gain a grounding in ethics that had previously been denied to the profession.5 It was with these Medical Groups that many of the leading figures in contemporary UK medical ethics and law began their careers in the subject including Sir Kenneth Calman, Sir Ian Kennedy, Professor Margaret Brazier OBE, Professor John Harris and Professor Sir Jonathan Montgomery to name but …. (shrink)

Caring for hospitalized patients with COVID-19 raises ethical dilemmas in which clinicians must weigh the unknown value of an intervention against the unknown risk of viral transmission. Current guidelines for delivering high-value care in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic do not directly address ethical dilemmas that arise from the unique concerns of individual patients. We propose an “ethical pause” in which clinicians address ethical dilemmas by taking time to ask three questions that invoke the major bioethical principles of beneficence, (...) nonmaleficence, and distributive justice: will this intervention help my patient? Could this intervention harm my patient? Could this intervention harm or help others? Using two exemplar cases, we demonstrate how the process of deliberately asking and answering structured ethical questions is a mindful problem-solving strategy that facilitates delivery of high-value care. (shrink)

Essays in Memory of Richard Helgerson: Laureations brings together new essays by leading literary scholars of the British and European middle ages and early modern period who have been influenced by the groundbreaking scholarship of Richard Helgerson. The contributors evince the ongoing impact of Helgerson's work in critical debates including those of nationalism, formal analysis, and literary careerism.

What does it mean to say that a scientific theory is unified? Prominent attempts by John Watkins, Philip Kitcher, and Margaret Morrison to answer this question face serious difficulties, and many analysts of science remain pessimistic about the possibility of ever rendering precise or explaining what theoretical unity consists in. This paper gives grounds for optimism, offering a novel account of the concept of unification. This account is tested against a detailed study of the standard model in contemporary high-energy (...) physics, a theory for which a high degree of unity has repeatedly been claimed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us by Christine D. PohlAndrew WattsLiving into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us CHRISTINE D. POHL Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. 176 pp. $15.00With Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us, Christine Pohl provides a useful and accessible companion to her first book, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Practice (Eerdmans, 1999). Concerned that “church and culture have not (...) provided the skills or virtues for us to be part of the very communities we long for and try to create” (4), she again challenges the identity of the Christian community. She likewise draws again upon the rich contributions of John Calvin and John Wesley as well as Catholic social movements such as L’Arche as she examines three core practices that engender hospitality: gratitude, promise-keeping, and truth-telling.This book grew out of a grant to participate in the Lilly Endowment project, “Sustaining Pastoral Excellence.” In partnership with her church, Pohl gathered a group of pastors, leaders of intentional communities, and seminary professors to think about gratitude, promise-keeping, truth-telling, and hospitality. The group met for three days twice a year, sharing and reflecting on examples of these practices in their ministries. Pohl provides the practical and theological fruit of their conversations, hoping this work will be used by leaders and members to strengthen their communities. She lays out three sections of three chapters each addressing gratitude, promise-keeping, and truth-telling. Each chapter works from the previous one, examining the practices from historical, biblical, theological, and philosophical perspectives. The last section on hospitality integrates the previous ones rather than simply reworking her previous published material. The book is strengthened by Pohl’s ability to connect together various scholarly and pastoral threads—an ability aided by the practical wisdom of a good working group—to offer helpful practical insights.For example, in the first chapter on gratitude, “Grateful Hearts,” she examines the theological attitudes of gratitude, generosity, and debt contrasted with entitlement and dissatisfaction, or grumbling—ever-present cultural complications for “good” and “holy” communities. In the second section, “Promise-Keeping,” she works through different kinds of promises in order to initiate [End Page 245] the hard work of communal reflection. There, rather than resting in the beautiful but abstract insights of thinkers such as Margaret Farley and Hannah Arendt, she distinguishes contractual and covenantal promises from one another and describes their consequences.Throughout the first two sections, qualities of contemporary culture—individualism, freedom, autonomy, mobility, distrust of institutions—affect and deform the practices of gratitude and promise-keeping essential to healthy and faithful communities. This attention to contemporary culture produces vital insight for the section on promise-keeping: while most Christian organizations appear to operate with covenantal expectations, “we actually work with a hybrid of covenantal and contractual obligations” (78). This “contemporary confusion” can lead to betrayal and loss and impede the mediation of fierce disagreements.Although Pohl provides helpful biblical narrative to support her analysis of each practice, she does not provide an adequate analysis of contemporary culture. One suspects that for Pohl—much like H. Richard Niebuhr—culture exists as a construct external to the well-formed community. It appears responsible for many of the attitudes deforming the essential practices she examines. Yet this suspicion is never fully confirmed, in part because she addresses sin as a present deforming power.Perhaps the most eloquent analysis in the book is found in its discussion of truth-telling. Rather than concede to Augustine’s (theological) or Immanuel Kant’s (rational) prohibition against lying, Pohl turns to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s invocation of the concrete situation to analyze the practice of truth-telling. Only a community that places truthfulness within the context of covenantal relationships can deal redemptively with deception and wrongdoing. Several of her examples help the reader understand the uniqueness of this practice for healthy communities. [End Page 246]Andrew WattsBelmont UniversityCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Hailed by Margaret Thatcher as the founder of modern conservatism, Keith Joseph is commonly ranked among the most influential politicians of the late-20th century. A complex and enigmatic figure Joseph was almost unique among Mrs Thatcher's senior ministers in refusing to write his own memoirs. Challenging both the "mad monk" view held by his critics and his status of mythical hero to his admirers, the authors present a picture of Joseph as a thinker and decision-maker. the authors tell of (...) Joseph's formative years before he entered Parliamnet in 1956: the powerful Jewish dynasty into which Josph was born; his time at Harrow; at Oxford; his war years in the Royal Artillery; and his Fellowship at All Souls. This volume charts the political career of Keith Joseph. The authors challenge Joseph's self-declared conversion to Conservatism in 1974 and the importance of his "education" of Margaret Thatcher. His own ambition, intellectual integrity and consistency are all examined and a different picture emerges of his role as the intellectual driving force behind Conservative Government policy in the 1980s. (shrink)

Hailed by Margaret Thatcher as the founder of modern conservatism, Keith Joseph is commonly ranked among the most influential politicians of the late-20th century. A complex and enigmatic figure Joseph was almost unique among Mrs Thatcher's senior ministers in refusing to write his own memoirs. Challenging both the "mad monk" view held by his critics and his status of mythical hero to his admirers, the authors present a picture of Joseph as a thinker and decision-maker. the authors tell of (...) Joseph's formative years before he entered Parliamnet in 1956: the powerful Jewish dynasty into which Josph was born; his time at Harrow; at Oxford; his war years in the Royal Artillery; and his Fellowship at All Souls. This volume charts the political career of Keith Joseph. The authors challenge Joseph's self-declared conversion to Conservatism in 1974 and the importance of his "education" of Margaret Thatcher. His own ambition, intellectual integrity and consistency are all examined and a different picture emerges of his role as the intellectual driving force behind Conservative Government policy in the 1980s. (shrink)

Hailed by Margaret Thatcher as the founder of modern conservatism, Keith Joseph is commonly ranked among the most influential politicians of the late-20th century. A complex and enigmatic figure Joseph was almost unique among Mrs Thatcher's senior ministers in refusing to write his own memoirs. Challenging both the "mad monk" view held by his critics and his status of mythical hero to his admirers, the authors present a picture of Joseph as a thinker and decision-maker. the authors tell of (...) Joseph's formative years before he entered Parliamnet in 1956: the powerful Jewish dynasty into which Josph was born; his time at Harrow; at Oxford; his war years in the Royal Artillery; and his Fellowship at All Souls. This volume charts the political career of Keith Joseph. The authors challenge Joseph's self-declared conversion to Conservatism in 1974 and the importance of his "education" of Margaret Thatcher. His own ambition, intellectual integrity and consistency are all examined and a different picture emerges of his role as the intellectual driving force behind Conservative Government policy in the 1980s. (shrink)

This paper offers a composite portrait of the concept of magnanimity in nineteenth-century America, focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau. A composite portrait, as a method in the history of philosophy, is designed to bring out characteristic features of a group's philosophizing in order to illuminate characteristic features that may still resonate in today's philosophy. Compared to more standard methods in the historiography of philosophy, the construction of a composite portrait de-privileges the views of (...) individual authors. These philosophers saw the virtue of magnanimity as a remedy for a number of modern ills. American philosophers suggest that the best sort of magnanimity is acquired by adopting the correct relation to the natural world, including new forms of inquiry, or by adopting a life of voluntary poverty. Magnanimous individuals are critics of capitalism and offer themselves as exemplars of a better, experimental life. (shrink)

In ‘Considering Equality’, Mrs Margaret Coady criticizes my discussion of Professor Bernard Williams's justly renowned essay ‘The Idea of Equality’. During the course of her paper, Mrs Coady ascribes to me views that I do not hold. But I shall not consider these points of detail because they deflect from the substantive disagreement between Professor Williams and myself. I shall merely examine what, as I see it, is the core of Mrs Coady's case against me. This certainly does relate (...) to the substantive issue. (shrink)

When the atomic theory was revived in the seventeenth century, the atomists faced a problem concerning the status of the laws of nature. On the face of it, the postulation of absolutely hard, rigid, and impenetrable atoms seems to entail the existence of natural necessities and impossibilities: Atoms A and B cannot interpenetrate, so atom A must push atom B when they collide. The properties of compound bodies are to be explained in terms of their “textures” (i.e., the arrangements of (...) their constituent atoms) on the famous lock-and-key model. Once again, it looks as if we have a domain of natural necessities depending on the textures of compound bodies. But the atomists seem to think of the laws of nature as radically contingent, not the sorts of things that could in principle be known a priori. This article seeks to address this tension between what the atomists seem committed to by their matter theory (real necessary connections in nature) and what they in fact say (that all the laws are contingent). In my Atomism (1995) I sought to resolve the tension by appealing to a sharp distinction between the atomists’ metaphysics and their epistemology. On this interpretation, they remain committed to natural necessity, but insist that we can never do Natural Philosophy in the “high priori” manner, by discovering real essences and their necessary connections. Our sciences of nature must remain empirical. Since publication of Atomism, however, this possible solution of the problem has come to seem more doubtful. Reflection on the work of my three “dissenting voices” (Margaret Osler, Peter Anstey and Rae Langton) has forced a radical rethink, focussing on the problematic relation between the intrinsic properties of the atoms and their (dynamic) powers. If there is no discoverable intelligible connection between what the atom is in itself (its intrinsic properties) and what it does (its powers), then my earlier solution will turn out to be untenable. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us by Christine D. PohlAndrew WattsLiving into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us CHRISTINE D. POHL Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012. 176 pp. $15.00With Living into Community: Cultivating Practices That Sustain Us, Christine Pohl provides a useful and accessible companion to her first book, Making Room: Recovering Hospitality as a Christian Practice (Eerdmans, 1999). Concerned that “church and culture have not (...) provided the skills or virtues for us to be part of the very communities we long for and try to create” (4), she again challenges the identity of the Christian community. She likewise draws again upon the rich contributions of John Calvin and John Wesley as well as Catholic social movements such as L’Arche as she examines three core practices that engender hospitality: gratitude, promise-keeping, and truth-telling.This book grew out of a grant to participate in the Lilly Endowment project, “Sustaining Pastoral Excellence.” In partnership with her church, Pohl gathered a group of pastors, leaders of intentional communities, and seminary professors to think about gratitude, promise-keeping, truth-telling, and hospitality. The group met for three days twice a year, sharing and reflecting on examples of these practices in their ministries. Pohl provides the practical and theological fruit of their conversations, hoping this work will be used by leaders and members to strengthen their communities. She lays out three sections of three chapters each addressing gratitude, promise-keeping, and truth-telling. Each chapter works from the previous one, examining the practices from historical, biblical, theological, and philosophical perspectives. The last section on hospitality integrates the previous ones rather than simply reworking her previous published material. The book is strengthened by Pohl’s ability to connect together various scholarly and pastoral threads—an ability aided by the practical wisdom of a good working group—to offer helpful practical insights.For example, in the first chapter on gratitude, “Grateful Hearts,” she examines the theological attitudes of gratitude, generosity, and debt contrasted with entitlement and dissatisfaction, or grumbling—ever-present cultural complications for “good” and “holy” communities. In the second section, “Promise-Keeping,” she works through different kinds of promises in order to initiate [End Page 245] the hard work of communal reflection. There, rather than resting in the beautiful but abstract insights of thinkers such as Margaret Farley and Hannah Arendt, she distinguishes contractual and covenantal promises from one another and describes their consequences.Throughout the first two sections, qualities of contemporary culture—individualism, freedom, autonomy, mobility, distrust of institutions—affect and deform the practices of gratitude and promise-keeping essential to healthy and faithful communities. This attention to contemporary culture produces vital insight for the section on promise-keeping: while most Christian organizations appear to operate with covenantal expectations, “we actually work with a hybrid of covenantal and contractual obligations” (78). This “contemporary confusion” can lead to betrayal and loss and impede the mediation of fierce disagreements.Although Pohl provides helpful biblical narrative to support her analysis of each practice, she does not provide an adequate analysis of contemporary culture. One suspects that for Pohl—much like H. Richard Niebuhr—culture exists as a construct external to the well-formed community. It appears responsible for many of the attitudes deforming the essential practices she examines. Yet this suspicion is never fully confirmed, in part because she addresses sin as a present deforming power.Perhaps the most eloquent analysis in the book is found in its discussion of truth-telling. Rather than concede to Augustine’s (theological) or Immanuel Kant’s (rational) prohibition against lying, Pohl turns to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s invocation of the concrete situation to analyze the practice of truth-telling. Only a community that places truthfulness within the context of covenantal relationships can deal redemptively with deception and wrongdoing. Several of her examples help the reader understand the uniqueness of this practice for healthy communities. [End Page 246]Andrew WattsBelmont UniversityCopyright © 2014 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 47, no. 1. © 2021 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 147 Eric Andrew James The Representational Necropolitics of Black Women in Zombie Dystopia Video Games Though Stuart Hall defends popular representation as an important terrain of political struggle, he also argues that images of difference are dominated by “racialized regimes of representation” manifest in stereotypes and invisibilities.1 These ensure that marginal identities are reduced, essentialized, and rendered other. (...) One of the most powerful tools for this form of silencing in the popular representation repertoire is the notion of an established genre. In US popular culture, creators and critics alike often position people who experience multiple layers of oppression as constitutively outside the expectations of existing genres. Their absence is attributable not simply to creator racism but also to that genre’s relationships to intersecting categories of difference and domination, such as race and gender. Beginning with the preponderance of representational violence in popular media, this article draws from existing work by feminists of color in order to model a critique of US representational precarity. To illustrate the political tensions in popular US culture, I stage my intervention into a medium whose industry has had particularly fraught struggles with representation: video gaming. There, I focus specifically on 1. Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of the Other,” in Discourse Theory and Practice: A Reader, ed. Margaret Wetherell, Stephanie Taylor, and Simeon J. Yates. (London: Sage, 2001), 325–44. 148 Eric Andrew James recent attempts to represent Black women, whom the gaming industry has held up as emblematic of difference and diversity. 2 These attempts are marred by predictable disasters and pitfalls. In particular, I discuss how the representational politics of Black women in popular zombie dystopia games repeats a similar violence as the previous silencing of Black women in these spaces. The gaming industry’s struggles with representation in the wake of Gamergate are demonstrative of broader tensions in Black women’s representation in popular media. Thus, while I am focused on video games, I also intend this analysis to reflect on feminist studies of the relationship between genre and representation. I advance existing scholarship on video game representations of Blackness by theorizing violence enacted at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in game genres. Specifically, I position this intervention as a point of departure from TreaAndrea M. Russworm’s chapter in Gaming Representation: “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us.”3 This chapter provides a compelling critique of the relationship between the dystopian game genre and Black representation, highlighting the lack of self-reflexivity in mass-market representations of Blackness. Expanding this project by taking another look at her objects of study—The Last of Us (2013– 2014) and Telltale’s The Walking Dead (2012)—I argue that taking Black women’s multiple jeopardy as foundational to the zombie dystopia genre offers a deeper look at the grammars of representational violence. My use of multiple jeopardy refers to Deborah K. King’s theorization of how multiple layers of oppression exponentially multiply individual disadvantages. As King describes, “The modifier ‘multiple’ refers not only to several, simultaneous oppressions but to the multiplicative 2. AnnaMaria Jackson-Phelps, “Representation Matters: Positive Portrayals of Black Women in Video Games,” Medium, February 28, 2017, https:// medium.com/legendary-women/representation-matters-positive-portrayals -of-black-women-in-video-games-c96cf9f66fdf; Jef Rouner, “Would You Believe There Have Been Only 14 Playable Black Women in Gaming?” Houston Press, June 5, 2015, https://www.houstonpress.com/arts/would-you-believethere -have-been-only-14-playable-black-women-in-gaming-7484017. 3. TreaAndrea M. Russworm, “Dystopian Blackness and the Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us,” Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, ed. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2017), 109–28. Eric Andrew James 149 relationships among them as well.”4 These layers of oppression are often contradictory and may leave no avenues for action; the expectations placed on one for their race become impossible to fulfill because of the contradictory expectations placed on them for their gender or sexuality. This multiple jeopardy thus introduces... (shrink)

Andrews argues for a pluralistic folk psychology that employs different kinds of practices and different kinds of cognitive tools (including personality trait attribution, stereotype activation, inductive reasoning about past behavior, and ...

Andrews Reath presents a selection of his best essays on various features of Kant's moral psychology and moral theory, with particular emphasis on his conception of rational agency and his conception of autonomy. Together the essays articulate Reath's original approach to Kant's views about human autonomy, which explains Kant's belief that objective moral requirements are based on principles we choose for ourselves. With two new papers, and revised versions of several others, the volume will be of great interest to (...) all students and scholars of Kant and of moral philosophy. (shrink)

The study of animal cognition raises profound questions about the minds of animals and philosophy of mind itself. Aristotle argued that humans are the only animal to laugh, but in recent experiments rats have also been shown to laugh. In other experiments, dogs have been shown to respond appropriately to over two hundred words in human language. In this introduction to the philosophy of animal minds Kristin Andrews introduces and assesses the essential topics, problems and debates as they cut (...) across animal cognition and philosophy of mind. She addresses the following key topics: what is cognition, and what is it to have a mind? What questions should we ask to determine whether behaviour has a cognitive basis? the science of animal minds explained: ethology, behaviourist psychology, and cognitive ethology rationality in animals animal consciousness: what does research into pain and the emotions reveal? What can empirical evidence about animal behaviour tell us about philosophical theories of consciousness? does animal cognition involve belief and concepts; do animals have a ‘Language of Thought’? animal communication other minds: do animals attribute ‘mindedness’ to other creatures? moral reasoning and ethical behaviour in animals animal cognition and memory. Extensive use of empirical examples and case studies is made throughout the book. These include Cheney and Seyfarth’s ververt monkey research, Thorndike’s cat puzzle boxes, Jensen’s research into humans and chimpanzees and the ultimatum game, Pankseep and Burgdorf’s research on rat laughter, and Clayton and Emery’s research on memory in scrub-jays. Additional features such as chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary make this an indispensable introduction to those teaching philosophy of mind, animal cognition. It will also be an excellent resource for those in fields such as ethology, biology and psychology. (shrink)

This paper develops an interpretation of what is essential to kant's doctrine of the highest good, Which defends it while also explaining why it is often rejected. While it is commonly viewed as a theological ideal in which happiness is proportioned to virtue, The paper gives an account in which neither feature appears. The highest good is best understood as a state of affairs to be achieved through human agency, Containing the moral perfection of all individuals and the satisfaction of (...) their permissible ends-I.E., One in which all act from the moral law and in doing so achieve their intended ends. The paper shows that the texts contain two distinct conceptions not distinguished by kant-Both a theological and a secular (political) notion. The standard objections apply to the theological, But the secular conception is consistent with kant's conception of moral conduct. Moreover, That the highest good is introduced as an end to be constructed out of the moral law indicates that the secular version is the essential notion. (shrink)

Entry for the Stanford Encylcopedia of Philosophy.

I respond to an argument presented by Daniel Povinelli and Jennifer Vonk that the current generation of experiments on chimpanzee theory of mind cannot decide whether chimpanzees have the ability to reason about mental states. I argue that Povinelli and Vonk’s proposed experiment is subject to their own criticisms and that there should be a more radical shift away from experiments that ask subjects to predict behavior. Further, I argue that Povinelli and Vonk’s theoretical commitments should lead them to accept (...) this new approach, and that experiments which offer subjects the opportunity to look for explanations for anomalous behavior should be explored. (shrink)

I argue that having a theory of mind requires having at least implicit knowledge of the norms of the community, and that an implicit understanding of the normative is what drives the development of a theory of mind. This conclusion is defended by two arguments. First I argue that a theory of mind likely did not develop in order to predict behavior, because before individuals can use propositional attitudes to predict behavior, they have to be able to use them in (...) explanations of behavior. Rather, I suggest that the need to explain behavior in terms of reasons is the primary function of a theory of mind. I further argue that in order to be motivated to offer explanations of behavior, one must have at least an implicit understanding of appropriate behavior, which implies at least an implicit understanding of norms. The second argument looks at three cases of nonhuman animal societies that appear to operate within a system of norms. While there is no evidence that any species other than humans have a theory of mind, there is evidence that other species have sensitivity to the normative. Finally, I propose an explanation for the priority of norms over a theory of mind: given an understanding of norms in a society, and the ability to recognize and sanction violations, there developed a need to understand actions that violated the norms, and such explanations could only be given in terms of a person's reasons. There is a significant benefit to being able to explain behavior that violates norms, because explanations of the right sort can also serve to justify behavior. (shrink)

I suggest a pluralistic account of folk psychology according to which not all predictions or explanations rely on the attribution of mental states, and not all intentional actions are explained by mental states. This view of folk psychology is supported by research in developmental and social psychology. It is well known that people use personality traits to predict behavior. I argue that trait attribution is not shorthand for mental state attributions, since traits are not identical to beliefs or desires, and (...) an understanding of belief or desire is not necessary for using trait attributions. In addition, we sometimes predict and explain behavior through appeal to personality traits that the target wouldn't endorse, and so could not serve as the target's reasons. I conclude by suggesting that our folk psychology includes the notion that some behavior is explained by personality traits—who the person is—rather than by beliefs and desires—what the person thinks. Consequences of this view for the debate between simulation theory and theory theory, as well as the debate on chimpanzee theory of mind are discussed. (shrink)