An examination of the role of the scientist in the process of understanding the world, and a reexamination of scientific objectivity, model building, and the place of scientists in the hierarchy of natural systems.

But what are functions? Here, 15 leading scholars of philosophy of psychology and philosophy of biology present new essays on functions.

ABSTRACTIn this study, we developed a cognitive bias modification procedure that targets inferential style, and tested its effect on hope, mood, and self-esteem. Participants were randomly assigned to training conditions intended to encourage either a negative or a positive inferential style. Participants’ inferences for their failure on a cognitive challenge were congruent with their training condition. Moreover, compared to participants in the positive training condition, those in the negative condition reported less hope and exhibited lower mood and self-esteem following the (...) failure. Finally, the training affected mood and self-esteem indirectly via its effect on participants’ inferences for their failure. These findings provide support for the causal role of inferential style in depressed affect. (shrink)

Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to. First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic (...) than words with abstract meanings. Moreover, iconicity is not distributed equally across sensory modalities: Auditory and tactile words tend to be more iconic than words denoting concepts related to taste, smell and sight. Last, we examined the relationship between iconicity and systematicity. We find that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, our results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English. (shrink)

Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to. First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic (...) than words with abstract meanings. Moreover, iconicity is not distributed equally across sensory modalities: Auditory and tactile words tend to be more iconic than words denoting concepts related to taste, smell and sight. Last, we examined the relationship between iconicity and systematicity. We find that iconicity in English words is more strongly related to sensory meanings than systematicity. Altogether, our results shed light on the extent and distribution of iconicity in modern English. (shrink)

Several disciplines within the cognitive sciences have advanced the idea that people comprehend the actions of others, including the linguistic meanings they communicate, through embodied simulations where they imaginatively recreate the actions they observe or hear about. This claim has important consequences for theories of mind and meaning, such as that people’s use and interpretation of language emerges as a kind of bodily activity that is an essential part of ordinary cognition. Daniel Weiskopf presents several arguments against the idea that (...) experiential simulations play a major role in immediate language use and meaning. We offer several rebuttals to Weiskopf, in which we critique his interpretation of simulation theory, present additional psycholinguistic evidence supportive of the simulation perspective, and suggest that a more traditional theory of linguistic meaning and processing has little psychological and empirical validity.Keywords: Language; Comprehension; Embodied cognition; Embodied simulation; Linguistic meaning, Psycholinguistics. (shrink)

Many objects in the world have functions. Typewriters are for typing. Can-openers are for opening cans. Lawnmowers are for cutting grass. That is what these things are for. Every day around the world people attribute functions to objects. Some of the objects with functions are organs or parts of living organisms. Hearts are for pumping blood. Eyes are for seeing. Countless works in biology explain the “Form, Function, and Evolution of... ” everything from bee dances to elephant tusks to pandas’ (...) ‘thumbs’. Many scientific explanations, in areas as diverse as psychology, sociology, economics, medical research, and neuroscience, rest on appeals to the function and/or malfunction of things or systems. They talk of how humans and other organisms or their parts work, what their functions are, why they are present, and how different situations will affect them and how they will react. Philosophers, going back to Aristotle, used to make generous use of functions in describing objects, organisms, their interactions, and even as the basis of ethics and metaphysics. And yet, since the Enlightenment, talk of the function of natural objects, teleological function, began to be viewed with suspicion, as the mechanical model of the world replaced the old Aristotelian model. From a religious standpoint, it used to be easy to see how objects in the natural world could have natural functions, for God was said to instill functions by design throughout Creation. But philosophers became increasingly reluctant to invoke God to solve every difficult philosophical problem, and became unwilling to indulge in such religious explanations of teleology. (shrink)

Recent experiments have shown that people iconically modulate their prosody corresponding with the meaning of their utterance. This article reports findings from a story reading task that expands the investigation of iconic prosody to abstract meanings in addition to concrete ones. Participants read stories that contrasted along concrete and abstract semantic dimensions of speed and size. Participants read fast stories at a faster rate than slow stories, and big stories with a lower pitch than small stories. The effect of speed (...) was distributed across the stories, including portions that were identical across stories, whereas the size effect was localized to size-related words. Overall, these findings enrich the documentation of iconicity in spoken language and bear on our understanding of the relationship between gesture and speech. (shrink)

Gesture-first theories of language origins often raise two unsubstantiated arguments against vocal origins. First, they argue that great ape vocal behavior is highly constrained, limited to a fixed, species-typical repertoire of reflexive calls. Second, they argue that vocalizations lack any significant potential to ground meaning through iconicity, or resemblance between form and meaning. This paper reviews the considerable evidence that debunks these two “myths”. Accumulating evidence shows that the great apes exercise voluntary control over their vocal behavior, including their breathing (...) apparatus, larynx, and supralaryngeal articulators. They are also able to learn new vocal behaviors, and even show some rudimentary ability for vocal imitation. In addition, an abundance of research demonstrates that the vocal modality affords rich potential for iconicity. People can understand iconicity in sound symbolism, and they can produce iconic vocalizations to communicate a diverse range of meanings. Thus, two of the primary arguments against vocal origins theories are not tenable. As an alternative, the paper concludes that the origins of language – going as far back as our last common ancestor with great apes – are rooted in iconicity in both gesture and vocalization. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Function and Malfunction Function and Evolution Function Based on Past Origins Biological Functions Based on the Distant Past: Natural Selection Fitness and Goal‐Contribution Accounts Neo‐Teleology Looking at the Present: Causal Roles and Functions Evolution Bites Back: Vindication of the Selectionist Approach Postscript: Counterpoint Acknowledgments Notes References.

Charles Darwin "had medicine in his blood" (Bynum 1983). His father and grandfather were physicians, and he himself studied medicine. Although Darwin left medical school after two years and did not become a physician, he retained a strong interest in medicine and regularly used examples drawn from human biology and medicine in his writings. Clearly, he believed that medicine fell within the purview of his theory of evolution, and he recognized the ways in which the study of evolution and of (...) medicine could be mutually enriching. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin argued that humans, like other species, have evolved from earlier, ancestral species. "Descent with modification," Darwin's term for evolution, accounts .. (shrink)

Lachman, Grace and Gaylord have argued that for bioethics education for undergraduate nursing students, a preferred combination of instruction involves a clinically-based nurse with ethics training and a philosophically-based ethicist with clinical training. At the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, undergraduate nursing ethics instruction takes this form. The course director is a philosopher with extensive clinical experience in ethics. The course utilises four distinct forms of nursing clinical inputs to educate undergraduate nursing students using a unique combination of didactic (...) and experiential learning exercises to simulate real ethics cases. This paper describes how the course was developed and refined over the past several years and suggests several ideas for improvements in nursing ethics education at an undergraduate level. (shrink)

Readership: One of the most thorough examinations of mental representation and meaning holism available, this book should be read by everyone interested in the...

In his speech against Meidias Demosthenes describes the arrogant and proud behaviour of his opponent in which Meidias persists in spite of the popular vote condemning him. Whenever there is voting, Demosthenes says, Meidias is put forward as a candidate; he is the proxenos of Plutarch, he knows everything, the city is too small for his aspirations. This illustration of the enormous popularity of an Athenian politician shows his predominant influence in the two spheres of domestic and foreign policy. The (...) main line of this foreign policy —the passage is obviously intended as an accusation—is expressed by the relationship of proxenia and xenia between Meidias and Plutarch, the leading politician of Eretria who, pro-Athenian at first, changed his attitude and almost brought disaster on the Athenian army intervening in Euboea. (shrink)

Morton Arnsdorf, the book review editor of Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, was tragically killed in an automobile accident on June 9, 2010. Mort grew up in Chicago, went to college at Harvard, and then to medical school at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. In college, Mort majored in History of Science, and he retained strong interests in history throughout his medical career. Mort did a residency in medicine at the University of Chicago, went back to Columbia (...) for fellowship training, and then joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1973. During his tenure in Chicago, he became Professor of Medicine and served both as Chief of the Section of Cardiology and as .. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics is seen to be incomplete not because it cannot explain the correlations that characterize entanglement without invoking either non-locality or realism, both of which, despite special relativity or no-go theorems, are at least conceivable. Quantum mechanics is incomplete, in a perhaps broader than hidden variable sense, because it fails to address within its theoretical structure the question of how even a single particle, by being in a given quantum state, causes the frequency distribution of measurement values specified by (...) the state. This incompleteness of quantum mechanics as it is currently conceived is both fundamental and indefeasible. Failure to address the question of how the states of entangled particles are given effect to yield the correlations they specify is simply a particular albeit attention arresting instance of this incompleteness. But if that is so then quantum mechanics cannot be held to be inconsistent with locality. (shrink)

A number of unique problems plague human research protection efforts at United States (U.S.) State and Territorial Departments of Health (DOHs) problems which might be ameliorated through a consolidated national or regional, independent, not-for-profit Institutional Review Board (IRB).