Oaksford & Chater (O&C) focus on patterns of typical adult reasoning from a probabilistic perspective. We discuss implications of extending the probabilistic approach to lifespan development, considering the role of working memory, strategy use, and expertise. Explaining variations in human reasoning poses a challenge to Bayesian rational analysis, as it requires integrating knowledge about cognitive processes.

At the Centre for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES, University of Oslo), a group of biologists has been working for decades to disentangle the complex mechanisms of plague epizootics and epidemics in places where extant wild rodent reservoirs are present. These questions have been approached through ecological and climatic studies, mathematic modeling, as well as genomics and epidemiology. In 2013-2018, the Centre hosted the ERC-project MedPlag, which explored past pandemics through the lenses of additional disciplines, like archaeogenomics (ancient DNA), anthropology, (...) archaeology, and evolution, always against the background of historical information. Here, we reflect on the end of plague in Europe based on the most recent studies on plague carried out in these different disciplines. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough item-memory for emotional information is enhanced, memory for associations between items is often impaired for negative, emotionally arousing compared to neutral information. We te...

Peer review is a widely accepted instrument for raising the quality of science. Peer review limits the enormous unstructured influx of information and the sheer amount of dubious data, which in its absence would plunge science into chaos. In particular, peer review offers the benefit of eliminating papers that suffer from poor craftsmanship or methodological shortcomings, especially in the experimental sciences. However, we believe that peer review is not always appropriate for the evaluation of controversial hypothetical science. We argue that (...) the process of peer review can be prone to bias towards ideas that affirm the prior convictions of reviewers and against innovation and radical new ideas. Innovative hypotheses are thus highly vulnerable to being “filtered out” or made to accord with conventional wisdom by the peer review process. Consequently, having introduced peer review, the Elsevier journal Medical Hypotheses may be unable to continue its tradition as a radical journal allowing discussion of improbable or unconventional ideas. Hence we conclude by asking the publisher to consider re-introducing the system of editorial review to Medical Hypotheses. (shrink)

Psychopathy is a personality disorder characterized by emotional deficits and a failure to inhibit impulsive behavior and is often subdivided into “primary” and “secondary” psychopathic subtypes. The maladaptive behavior related to primary psychopathy is thought to reflect constitutional “fearlessness,” while the problematic behavior related to secondary psychopathy is motivated by other factors. The fearlessness observed in psychopathy has often been interpreted as reflecting a fundamental deficit in amygdala function, and previous studies have provided support for a low-fear model of psychopathy. (...) However, many of these studies fail to use appropriate screening procedures, use liberal inclusion criteria, or have used unconventional approaches to assay amygdala function. We measured brain activity with BOLD imaging in primary and secondary psychopaths and non-psychopathic control subjects during Pavlovian fear conditioning. In contrast to the low-fear model, we observed normal fear expression in primary psychopaths. Psychopaths also displayed greater differential BOLD activity in the amygdala relative to matched controls. Inverse patterns of activity were observed in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) for primary versus secondary psychopaths. Primary psychopaths exhibited a pattern of activity in the dorsal and ventral ACC consistent with enhanced fear expression, while secondary psychopaths exhibited a pattern of activity in these regions consistent with fear inhibition. These results contradict the low-fear model of psychopathy and suggest that the low fear observed for psychopaths in previous studies may be specific to secondary psychopaths. (shrink)

This article provides ethical guidance on using race in health research as a variable or in defining the study population. To this end, a plain, non-exhaustive checklist is provided for researchers and research ethics committees, preceded by a brief introduction on the need for justification when using race as a variable or in defining a study population, the problem of exoticism, that distinctions pertain between race, ethnicity and ancestry, the problematic naming of races, and that race does not serve well (...) as a presumed biological construct in genetic research. (shrink)

Commonly, a switch between networks mediating memory encoding and those mediating retrieval is observed. This may not only be due to differential involvement of neural resources due to distinct cognitive processes but could also reflect the formation of new memory traces and their dynamic change during consolidation. We used resting state fMRI to measure functional connectivity (FC) changes during post-encoding rest, hypothesizing that during this phase, new functional connections between encoding- and retrieval-related regions are created. Interfering and reminding tasks served (...) as experimental modulators to corroborate that the observed FC differences indeed reflect changes specific to post-encoding rest. The right inferior occipital and fusiform gyri (active during encoding) showed increased FC with the left inferior frontal gyrus and the left middle temporal gyrus (MTG) during post-encoding rest. Importantly, the left MTG subsequently also mediated successful retrieval. This finding might reflect the formation of functional connections between encoding- and retrieval-related regions during undisturbed post-encoding rest. These connections were vulnerable to experimental modulation: Cognitive interference disrupted FC changes during post-encoding rest resulting in poorer memory performance. The presentation of reminders also inhibited FC increases but without affecting memory performance. Our results contribute to a better understanding of the mechanisms by which post-encoding rest bridges the gap between encoding- and retrieval-related networks. (shrink)

Supervenience in metaethics is the notion that there can be no moral dif-ference between two acts, persons or events without some non-moral difference underlying it. If St. Francis is a good man, there could not be a man exactly like St. Francis in non-evaluative respects that is not good. The phenomenon was first systematically discussed by R. M. Hare (1952), who argued that realists about evaluative properties struggle to account for it. As is well established, Hare, and following him, Simon (...) Blackburn, mistakenly took the relevant phenomenon to be weak rather than strong supervenience, and the explanations they offered for it are accordingly outdated. In this paper, I present a non-factualist account of strong su-pervenience of the evaluative and argue that it fares better than compet-ing realist views in explaining the conceptual nature of the phenomenon, as well as in offering an account of the supervenience of the evaluative in general, rather than more narrowly the moral. While Hare and Blackburn were wrong about the specifics, they were right in that non-factualists can offer a plausible account of the supervenience of the evaluative, that in certain respects is superior to competing realist explanations. (shrink)

Das Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Einzelinteressen und kollektivem Handeln ist ein klassisches Phänomen der Politik. Die Beiträge des Bandes behandeln dieses Thema aus verschiedenen theoretischen und methodischen Perspektiven.

The problem that confronts us when we try to compare the structure of discourse and explanation in different domains of knowledge is that no one is an insider in more than one field, and insider information is essential. An observer who is not immersed in the practice of a particular scholarship and who wants to understand it is at the mercy of the practitioners. Yet those practitioners are themselves mystified by a largely unexamined communal myth of how scholarship is carried (...) on. R. G. Collingwood, although primarily a philosopher, was immersed in the community of historians and understood how history is done, so that he has had an immense influence on our ideas about historiography. Every historian knows The Idea of History.1 He was also a metaphysician, yet his influence on scientists’ understanding of nature, and of science, has been nil, and it is a rare scientist indeed who has ever heard of Collingwood or read The Idea of Nature.2 Collingwood’s views of the structure of science had to be constructed in large part from the elaborate fictions created by scientists and by an earlier generation of philosophers and historians of science who participated in the Baconian myth of the hypothetical-deductive scheme. 1. See R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History .2. See Collingwood, The Idea of Nature . R. C. Lewontin is Alexander Agassiz Professor at Harvard University. He is an experimental and theoretical evolutionary geneticist who has also worked extensively on epistemological issues in biology. He is the author of The Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Change and, with Richard Levins, of The Dialectical Biologist . His current research concerns the nature of genetic variation among individuals within species. (shrink)

For G. R. Evans the determinative factor for philosophy in the Middle Ages is that "after Bede's day" "one could no longer meet a philosopher in the way that Augustine and Boethius could." Philosophy as a distinctive "way of life" has disappeared. If there are philosophers in the Middle Ages, they are "Christian thinkers who have read a little ancient philosophy and not... those whose lives are guided by a philosophical system." Likewise, although medieval thinkers were familiar with theologia in (...) the classical sense as a speculative discipline related to others in an hierarchical arrangement, the study of a sacred text was what they understood theology to be. Revelation had replaced philosophy, even philosophy understood as the study of God, as the guide to life. (shrink)

An alternative neutrino oscillation process is presented as a counterexample for which the neutrino may have nil mass consistent with the standard model. The process is developed in a quantum trajectories representation of quantum mechanics, which has a Hamilton–Jacobi foundation. This process has no need for mass differences between mass eigenstates. Flavor oscillations and \ oscillations are examined.

In his erudite and detailed study, now made available in Nils Schott’s commendable translation a decade after the initial publication of the German version, Emm.

This is the second volume in the new monograph series sponsored by the American Philosophical Quarterly and judging by the high quality of most of the essays in this collection the idea for such a series seems to be a good one. A wide variety of topics in contemporary philosophical logic are discussed in seven essays, as suggested by the following brief account of their contents: Montgomery Furth's "Two Types of Denotation" is a careful study of Frege's views of denotation, (...) function, and object which manages to make some original suggestions as well as to clear up some confusing features of Frege's discussion. Jaako Hintikka's "Language Games for Quantifiers" develops interesting connections between the uses of quantifiers and various verbs related to seeking and finding and with these connections in mind offers a game theoretic interpretation of quantifiers. J. W. Cornman's admirably clear essay "Types, Categories and Nonsense" discusses the views of Ryle, Russell, Black, Pap, and Sommers on categories and types, formulating criteria of type difference close to that of Sommers. In "A Theory of Conditionals," R. C. Stalnaker takes some clues from the semantical analysis of modal logics in order to present an analysis of 'if... then...' statements and to deal with some epistemological problems about counterfactuals. In "Goodman's Nominalism," A. Hausman and C. Echelberger discuss certain facts which, in their view, no nominalist ontology, including Goodman's can deal with. Ted Honderlich's "Truth: Austin, Strawson, Warnock" is a discussion of Austin's views on truth and some of the confusions surrounding commentary on and criticism of it. Honderlich suggests his own definition of truth in the article. Finally, Colwyn Williamson in "Propositions andPropositions" discusses the various arguments which have been put forward to show that propositions are entities of a sort distinct from sentences. He rejects all such arguments as well as their conclusion.--R. H. K. (shrink)

Arthur O. Lovejoy conceived of the history of ideas as an interdisciplinary study, encompassing a variety of fields, including literary history, comparative literature, the history of folklore and ethnography, the history of language and the history of religious beliefs. This volume gathers together some of the most significant articles concerning the theory and practice of intellectual history, by Lovejoy himself and other scholars. Contributors: DONALD R. KELLEY, ARTHUR O. LOVEJOY, FREDERICK J. TEGGART, LEO SPITZER, THEODORE SPENCER, ABRAHAM EDEL, PAUL O. (...) KRISTELLER, PHILIP P. WIENER, JOSEPH A. MAZZEO, LEONARD KRIEGER, DANIEL J. WILSON, EDWARD P. MAHONEY, FRANCIS OAKLEY,JOHANN HUIZINGA, JOSEPH KATZ, CALVIN G. RAND, NILS B. KVASTAD, LESTER G. CROCKER and PATRICK H. HUTTON. (shrink)

There are times when we are so much in harmony with our surroundings that we are content to bask in the sunshine and to say to the passing hour, like Faust, “Stay with us; you are so fair.” There have been times when whole nations, or the most vocal part of them, have believed themselves to be living in a world which, if not the best of all possible worlds, is an abode from which they have no desire to escape. (...) They are being challenged, for, as Walt Whitman says, “it is provided in the essence of things that from any fruition of success, no matter what, shall come forth something to make a greater struggle necessary.” But the challenge is unheeded, and the price is demanded later. Ubi nil timetur, quod timeatur nascitur. (shrink)

A ring is said to be clean if every element of the ring can be written as a sum of an idempotent element and a unit element of the ring and a ring is said to be nil-clean if every element of the ring can be written as a sum of an idempotent element and a nilpotent element of the ring. In this paper, we generalize these arguments to symbolic 2-plithogenic structure. We introduce the structure of clean and nil-clean symbolic (...) 2-plithogenic rings and some of its elementary properties are presented. Also, we have found the equivalence between classical clean(nil-clean) ring R and the corresponding symbolic 2-plithogenic ring 2-SPR. (shrink)

I argue here that r. Van straaten's four modifications of f. Sommers' 'rule for enforcing ambiguity' are based upon a misunderstanding of the basis of the rule and a failure to see the spanning/predicability distinction. The effect is that none of van straaten's several counterexamples are telling against the rule. In place of van straaten's modifications I offer the following simple but important changes in the rule: the restriction of things to individuals and the reading of 'makes sense to predicate' (...) and similar phrases in terms of the spanning relation. (shrink)

This contribution traces the parallel development of two distinct approaches to peasant agroecological education: the peasant-to-peasant horizontal method that disseminated across Mesoamerica and the Caribbean beginning in the 1970s, and the political-agroecological training schools of combined consciousness-building and skill-formation that have been at the heart of the educational processes of member organizations of La Via Campesina since the 1990s. Applying a theoretical framework that incorporates territorial struggle, agroecology and popular education, we examine spatial and organizational aspects of each of these (...) models for peasant education and movement-building. Recognizing that the models, their respective contexts, and the dialectical relationships therein have been in constant evolution, we share findings on the movement-place as a territorial system with socio-historical subjectivity, that is, peasant movements as territorially-embedded, collective historical actors. This leads to some conclusions in moving past educational theory that has centered upon individual subjects, and approaching a conception of territory as a subject of learning processes. (shrink)