ABSTRACTNegative feedback has paradoxical features to it. This form of feedback can have informational value under some circumstances, but it can also threaten the ego, potentially upsetting behaviour as a result. To investigate possible consequences of the latter type, two experiments presented positive or negative feedback within a sequence-prediction task that could not be solved. Following feedback, participants had to control their behaviours as effectively as possible in a motor control task. Relative to positive feedback, negative feedback undermined control in (...) a manner suggesting emotional upset. These reactions lasted for at least three seconds and were especially pronounced among people reporting that they typically lose control in the context of their negative emotions. The findings document a novel form of behavioural dysregulation that occurs in response to negative feedback while also highlighting the utility of motor control perspectives on self... (shrink)

In this paper, I consider some issues involving a certain closure principle for Structural Justification, a relation between a cognitive subject and a proposition that’s expressed by locutions like ‘S has a source of justification for p’ and ‘p is justifiable for S’. I begin by summarizing recent work by Peter Klein that advances the thesis that the indicated closure principle is plausible but lacks Skeptical utility. I then assess objections to Klein’s thesis based on work by (...) class='Hi'>Robert Audi and Anthony Brueckner. One finding is that the typical statement of the relevant closure principle can express a number of different closure principles, and that recognizing this helps to resolve certain disputes. (shrink)

This book is a small handbook designed to give Institutional Review Board (IRB) members the information they need to protect the rights and welfare of research subjects in a way that is both effective and efficient. The chapters of this book are short and to the point. Topic-specific chapters list the criteria IRB members should use to determine how to vote on specific kinds of studies and offer practical advice on what IRB members should do before and during full-committee meetings.

I formulate a counterfactual version of the notorious ‘Ramsey Test’. Whereas the Ramsey Test for indicative conditionals links credence in indicatives to conditional credences, the counterfactual version links credence in counterfactuals to expected conditional chance. I outline two forms: a Ramsey Identity on which the probability of the conditional should be identical to the corresponding conditional probability/expectation of chance; and a Ramsey Bound on which credence in the conditional should never exceed the latter. Even in the weaker, bound, form, the (...) counterfactual Ramsey Test makes counterfactuals subject to the very argument that Lewis used to argue against the indicative version of the Ramsey Test. I compare the assumptions needed to run each, pointing to assumptions about the time‐evolution of chances that can replace the appeal to Bayesian assumptions about credence update in motivating the assumptions of the argument. I finish by outlining two reactions to the discussion: to indicativize the debate on counterfactuals; or to counterfactualize the debate on indicatives. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive review of the psychological literature on wisdom by leading experts in the field. It covers the philosophical and sociocultural foundations of wisdom, and showcases the measurement and teaching of wisdom. The connection of wisdom to intelligence and personality is explained alongside its relationship with morality and ethics. It also explores the neurobiology of wisdom, its significance in medical decision-making, and wise leadership. How to develop wisdom is discussed and practical information is given about how to instil (...) it in others. The book is accessible to a wide readership and includes virtually all of the major theories of wisdom, as well as the full range of research on wisdom as it is understood today. It takes both a basic-science and applied focus, making it useful to those seeking to understand wisdom scientifically, and to those who wish to apply their understanding of wisdom to their own work. (shrink)

Several scholars and many religiously conservative thinkers have recently charged that Hitler’s ideas about race and racial struggle derived from the theories of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), either directly or through intermediate sources. So, for example, the historian Richard Weikart, in his book From Darwin to Hitler , maintains: “No matter how crooked the road was from Darwin to Hitler, clearly Darwinism and eugenics smoothed the path for Nazi ideology, especially for the Nazi stress on expansion, war, racial struggle, and racial (...) extermination.” In a subsequent book, Hitler’s Ethic: The Nazi Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress, Weikart argues that Darwin’s “evolutionary ethics drove him [Hitler] to engage in behavior that the rest of us consider abominable.” Other critics have also attempted to forge a strong link between Darwin’s theory and Hitler’s biological notions. In the 2008 film “Expelled,” a documentary defense of Intelligent Design, the Princeton trained philosopher David Berlinski, in conversation with Weikart, confidently asserts: “If you open Mein Kampf and read it, especially if you can read it in German, the correspondence between Darwinian ideas and Nazi ideas just leaps from the page.” John Gray, former professor at the London School of Economics, does allow that Hitler’s Darwinism was “vulgar.” Hannah Arendt also appears to have endorsed the connection when she declared: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.” Put “Darwin” and “Hitler” in a search engine and several million hits will be returned, most from religiously and politically conservative websites, articles, and books. (shrink)

The eminent historian and philosopher of biology, Michael Ruse, has written several books that explore the relationship of evolutionary theory to its larger scientific and cultural setting. Among the questions he has investigated are: Is evolution progressive? What is its epistemological status? Most recently, in "Darwin and Design: Does Evolution have a Purpose?," Ruse has provided a history of the concept of teleology in biological thinking, especially in evolutionary theorizing. In his book, he moves quickly from Plato and Aristotle to (...) Kant and such British thinkers as Paley and Whewell. His main focus, though, is on Darwin's theory and its subsequent fate. Ruse rests his history on some shaky historical and philosophic assumptions, particularly the unexamined notion that evolutionary theory is an abstract entity that is unproblematically realized in different historical periods. He also assumes that Darwin conceived nature as if it were a Manchester spinning loom -- a clanking, dispassionate machine. A more subtle analysis, which Ruse eschews, might discover that Darwin's conception of nature owed a strong debt to German Romanticism and that he contrived to infuse nature with moral and aesthetic values, not to suck them from nature. Ruse proves he is a thinker to contend with, and this essay is quite contentious. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is two-fold: first, to emphasize causality in disease ontology and knowledge representation, presenting a general and cursory discussion of causality and causal chains; and second, to clarify and develop the River Flow Model of Diseases (RFM). The RFM is an ontological account of disease, representing the causal structure of pathology. It applies general knowledge of causality using the concept of causal chains. The river analogy of disease is explained, formal descriptions are offered, and the RFM (...) disease definition is refined by describing causal chains in terms of causal relations. The definition is updated to coincide with the actual RFM classes found in its upper-level ontology, YAMATO, which brings to light some challenges in developing both YAMATO and the RFM. The RFM is also discussed in relation to another ontological account of disease. Strategies are offered toward interoperability between these theories. (shrink)

This collection of 21 essays explores the creative interaction among the cognitive neurosciences, philosophy, and theology. It is the result of an international research conference co-sponsored by the Vatican Observatory, Rome, and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, Berkeley.

History of science and philosophy of science are not perfectly complementary disciplines. Several important asymmetries govern their relationship. These asymmetries, concerning levels of analysis, evidence, theories, writing, and training show that to be a decent philosopher of science is more difficult than being a decent historian. But to be a good historian-well, the degree of difficulty is reversed.

Austrian economics focuses on markets but has much to say about organizations. In particular, Austrian insights on the structure of production, the heterogeneity and subjectivity of resources, the nature of uncertainty, the role of monetary calculation, and the function of the entrepreneur provide solid foundations for a distinctly Austrian theory of organizations. This chapter reviews these insights, discusses recent literature on Austrian economics and the theory of the firm, and suggests new directions for developing and extending an Austrian approach to (...) organizations. In doing so it answers the following questions: Why, do organizations, large and small, emerge and persist? How do they avoid the problem of economic calculation faced by socialist economies? Why do organizations take the shapes they do, why do their characteristics vary over time and across industries, and why do they succeed or fail? Are most organizations stable over time, or do organizations, like markets, adapt and learn? and How do entrepreneurs arrange assets and manage individuals within organizations? (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was a watershed event when it was published in 1962, upending the previous understanding of science as a slow, logical accumulation of facts and introducing, with the concept of the “paradigm shift,” social and psychological considerations into the heart of the scientific process. More than fifty years after its publication, Kuhn’s work continues to influence thinkers in a wide range of fields, including scientists, historians, and sociologists. It is clear that The Structure (...) of Scientific Revolutions itself marks no less of a paradigm shift than those it describes. In Kuhn’s “Structure of Scientific Revolutions” at Fifty, leading social scientists and philosophers explore the origins of Kuhn’s masterwork and its legacy fifty years on. These essays exhume important historical context for Kuhn’s work, critically analyzing its foundations in twentieth-century science, politics, and Kuhn’s own intellectual biography: his experiences as a physics graduate student, his close relationship with psychologists before and after the publication of Structure, and the Cold War framework of terms such as “world view” and “paradigm.”. (shrink)

Just before Ernst Haeckel’s death in 1919, historians began piling on the faggots for a splendid auto-da-fé. Though more people prior to the Great War learned of Darwin’s theory through his efforts than through any other source, including Darwin himself, Haeckel has been accused of not preaching orthodox Darwinian doctrine. In 1916, E. S. Russell, judged Haeckel's principal theoretical work, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, as "representative not so much of Darwinian as of pre-Darwinian thought."1 Both Stephen Jay Gould and Peter (...) Bowler endorse this evaluation, and see as an index of Haeckel’s heterodox deviation his use of the biogenetic law that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.2 Michael Ruse, without much analysis, simply proclaims that “Haeckel and friends were not true Darwinians.”3 These historians locate the problem in Haeckel’s inclinations toward Naturphilosophie and in his adoption of the kind of Romantic attitudes characterizing the earlier biology of Goethe. These charges of heresy assume, of course, that Darwin’s own theory harbors no taint of Romanticism and that it consequently remains innocent of the doctrine of recapitulation. I think both assumptions quite. (shrink)

Our image of Darwin is hardly that of a German metaphysician. By reason of his intellectual tradition—that of British empiricism—and psychological disposition, he was a man of apparently more stolid character, one who could be excited by beetles and earthworms but not, we assume, by abstruse philosophy. Yet Darwin constructed a theory of evolution whose conceptual grammar expresses and depends on a certain kind of metaphysics. During his youthful period as a romantic adventurer, he sailed to exotic lands and returned (...) to construct a theory that attacked the citadels of orthodoxy. In the long process of theory construction, he explored difficult philosophical questions—for instance, the nature of reason and the mind-body problem. Moreover, he founded that theory.. (shrink)

The risk of stroke for a child with SCD is many times greater than that of a healthy child without SCD or heart disease. There is a technique that allows the identification of the children with SCD who have high risk even within this relatively high-risk group. And there is a highly effective preventive treatment. While this would on the surface appear to be a straightforward medical decision, it is not. One must weigh the benefits of preventing permanent brain damage (...) against the risks of infection from transfused blood, iron overload, which is the result of the frequent transfusions, and rare transfusion reactions. (shrink)

Sickle cell anemia is a disease characterized by abnormal hemoglobin structure. There is a mutation in the beta-globin gene that changes the sixth amino acid from glutamic acid to valine causing the mutated hemoglobin to polymerize reversibly when deoxygenated to form a gelatinous network of fibrous polymers that stiffen and distort the red blood cell membrane. This leads to episodes of microvascular vasoocclusion and premature RBC destruction leading to hemolytic anemia. For reasons that are unclear, some children develop a large (...) artery vasculopathy involving the intracranial arteries supplying the brain.The risk of stroke for a child with SCD is many times greater than that of a healthy child without SCD or heart disease. There is a technique that allows the identification of the children with SCD who have high risk even within this relatively high-risk group. And there is a highly effective preventive treatment. (shrink)

Our image of Herbert Spencer is that of a bald, dyspeptic bachelor, spending his days in rooming houses, and fussing about government interference with individual liberties. Beatrice Webb, who knew him as a girl and young woman recalls for us just this picture. In her diary for January 4, 1885, she writes: Royal Academy private view with Herbert Spencer. His criticisms on art dreary, all bound down by the “possible” if not probable. That poor old man would miss me on (...) the whole more than any other mortal. Has real anxiety for my welfare—physical and mental. Told him story of my stopping cart horse in Hyde Park and policeman refusing to come off his beat to hold it. Want of public spirit in passers-by not stopping it before. “Yes, that is another instance of my first principle of government. Directly you get state intervention you cease to have public spirit in individuals; that will be a constantly increasing tendency and the State, like the policeman, will be so bound by red-tape rules that it will frequently leave undone the simplest duties.”1 Spencer appears a man whose strangled emotions would yet cling to a woman whose philosophy would be completely alien to his own, as Webb’s Fabian Socialism turned out to be. Our image of Darwin is more complex than our image of Spencer. We might think of him nestled in the bosom of his large family, kindly, and just a little sad. The photo of him taken by Julia Cameron reveals the visage of an Old Testament prophet, though one, not fearsome, but made wise by contemplating the struggle of life on this earth. These images have deeply colored our reaction to the ideas of each thinker. The pictures are not false, but they are cropped portraits that tend to distort our reactions to the theories of each. If we examine the major features of their respective. (shrink)

We cannot understand contemporary psychology without first researching its history. Unlike other books on the history of psychology, which are chronologically ordered, this Handbook is organized topically. It covers the history of ideas in multiple areas of the field and reviews the intellectual history behind the major topics of investigation. The evolution of psychological ideas is described alongside an analysis of their surrounding context. Readers learn how eminent psychologists draw on the context of their time and place for ideas and (...) practices, and also how innovation in psychology is an ongoing dialogue between past, present, and anticipated future. (shrink)

We revisit a debate initiated some 15 years ago by Ray Elugardo and Robert Stainton about the domain of arguments. Our main result is that arguments are not exclusively sets of linguistic expressions. Instead, as we put it, some non-linguistic items have ‘logical form’. The crucial examples are arguments, both deductive and inductive, made with unembedded words and phrases. … subsentential expressions such as singular terms and predicates… cannot serve as premises or conclusions in inferences.

After almost a decade, the discussion initiated by Professor Edmund Gettier's provocative paper “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” continues. The most recent contribution to this discussion is Professor John Turk Saunders' attempt to counter Professor Irving Thalberg's claim that a principle that Gettier employs in reaching his notorious negative conclusion is unjustified. I am moved to add to the discussion at this time because it seems to me that the principle in question is unjustified. But more fundamentally, Gettier's argument fails (...) because the putative counter-examples on which it rests fail to make their intended point. I shall discuss these claims in turn.The epistemic principle which I consider unjustified is the one which Thalberg has called the Principle of Deducibility for Justification and which Gettier formulates as follows: “for any proposition P, if S is justified in believing P, and P entails Q, and S deduces Q from P and accepts Q as a result of this deduction, then S is justified in believing Q.”. (shrink)

If religion means a commitment to a set of theological propositions regarding the nature of God, the soul, and an afterlife, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was never a religious enthusiast. The influence of the great religious thinker Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher (1768-1834) on his family kept religious observance decorous and commitment vague.2 The theologian had maintained that true religion lay deep in the heart, where the inner person experienced a feeling of absolute dependence. Dogmatic tenets, he argued, served merely as inadequate symbols (...) of this fundamental experience. Religious feeling, according to Schleiermacher’s Über die Religion (On religion, 1799), might best be cultivated by seeking after truth, experiencing beauty, and contemplating nature.3 Haeckel practiced this kind of Schleiermachian religion all of his life. Haeckel’s association with the Evangelical Church, even as a youth, had been conventional. The death of his first wife severed the loose threads still holding him to formal observance. The power of that death, his obsession with a life that might have been, and the dark feeling of love forever lost drove him to find a more enduring and rational sub-. (shrink)

This is a much-needed development from the first edition that provides an update on the theory and research on love by world-renowned scientific experts. It explores love from a diverse range of standpoints: social-psychological, evolutionary, neuropsychological, clinical, cultural, and even political. It considers questions such as: how men and women differ in their love, what makes us susceptible to jealousy and envy in relationships, how love differs across various cultures? As the neuropsychological basis of love is examined, this study showcases (...) what attracts people to one another, why love has developed the way it has over time, and what evolutionary purpose it serves. It also analyses why and when love relationships both succeed and fail, which means readers will be rewarded with a better understanding of their own relationships and those of others, as well as what can be done to build a lasting, loving relationship. (shrink)

I present results of recent work in the field of quantum optics and relate this work to discussions about the theory of quantum mechanics and God's divine action in the world. Experiments involving atomic decay, relevant to event uncertainty in quantum mechanics, as well as experiments aimed at elucidating the so–called Schrödinger’s–cat paradox, help clarify apparent ambiguities or paradoxes that I believe are at the heart of renewed attempts to locate God within our constructed physical theories and tend to narrow (...) the gaps proposed as an opening for divine action. Some problems arise because of imprecise use of nonmathematical language to force quantum mechanics into an intuitive “classical” framework. (shrink)