In this essay I will explore the important connection between conformism as an adaptive psychological strategy, and the emergence of the phenomenon of ethnicity. My argument will be that it makes sense that nature made us conformists. And once humans acquired this adaptive strategy, I will argue further, the development of ethnic organization was inevitable. Understanding the adaptive origins of conformism, as we shall see, is perhaps the most useful way to shed light on what ethnicity is—at least (...) when examined from the functional point of view, which is to say from the point of view of the adaptive problems that ethnicity solves. I shall begin with a few words about our final destination. (shrink)

This article argues that college-educated women play a crucial part in successful resistance against genocide because they are more likely to forge secure interregional networks and, consequently, better able to shelter victims of mass-persecution than their male peers. We develop our argument through a study of Jewish rescue networks in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. College-educated women were especially valuable during rescue efforts due to their ability to operate as defiant conformists. These women – a small minority who were anything (...) but traditional – could more fully exploit their biographical availability and university networks by concealing interregional resistance work through the strategic performance of traditional feminine roles. Statistical analyses of geocoded rescue networks reveal that rescue networks involving college-educated women were more successful because they funneled Jews across the country without getting exposed. More in-depth exploration of distinct networks identifies three dramaturgical strategies that college-educated women deployed to facilitate clandestine and geographically expansive rescue work: 1) strategic coquetry; 2) strategic self-devaluation; 3) strategic motherhood and wedlock. Taken together, our findings suggest we should focus on how gender and other forms of social status interact to produce the relational and dramaturgical underpinnings of civilian agency in times of emergency. (shrink)

Most research on transmission biases in cultural evolution has treated different biases as distinct strategies. Here I present a model that combines both frequency dependent bias (including conformist bias) and payoff bias in a single decision-making calculus and show that such an integrated learning strategy may be superior to relying on either bias alone. Natural selection may operate on humans’ relative dependence on frequency and payoff information, but both are likely to contribute to the spread of variants with high payoffs. (...) Importantly, the magnitude of conformist bias affects the evolutionary dynamics, and I show that an intermediate level of conformity may be most adaptive and may spontaneously evolve as it resists the invasion of low-payoff variants yet enables the fixation of high-payoff variants in the population. (shrink)

The first of the two epigraphs selected for this paper comes from G. J. Warnock’s book, English Philosophy Since 1900. As one might expect given the title, Warnock’s subject is what has come to be known as analytic philosophy, and the hostility to metaphysics he mentions is that peculiar hostility which, for a time at least, seemed to be part and parcel of the analytic movement. What is important about this quotation in the present context is the pregnant suggestion that (...) what was for a long time thought to be one of analytic philosophy’s defining features might have been a matter of mere fashion rather than the result of sufficiently well formulated arguments and views. My primary aim in this paper will be to develop this suggestion vis-à-vis the phenomenon of conformism and to show that, thus construed, there are good grounds for thinking it true. Specifically, I shall argue for what I call the conformist hypothesis: the view that it is a mistake to regard analytic philosophy as a philosophical school, movement, or tradition, and that, instead, it is a purely social entity unified by what are called interactional memes, maintained at high frequency by conformist transmission. My secondary aim will be to make a case for the claim that, if Warnock was right, then something was terribly wrong about the way analytic philosophy came not only to exist, but to dominate the social world of academic philosophy in certain geographical regions during the twentieth century. (shrink)

The study by Ceci et al. shows that academic behavior associated with the core principles of intellectual freedom is more shaped by institutional incentives than by organizational culture. From an organizational theoretical point of view, this is quite an unexpected finding, not least because we do believe universities to be fairly strong and explicit cultures that should be successful in socialization. (Published Online February 8 2007).

Justina Gregory, Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians, University of Michigan Press, ISBN - 9780472102303Charles Segal, Euripides and the Poetics of Sorrow: Art, Gender, and Commemoration in Alcestis, Hippolytus, and Hecuba, Duke University Press, ISBN - 9780822313601Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Anxiety Veiled: Euripides’ Traffic in Women, Cornell University Press, ISBN - 9780801428456.

The contrast between the Marxian emancipatory project and what the progressive left has made of it has never been more glaring than now, a time in which capital no longer seems to confront a political barrier. It is this predicament that The Conformist Rebellion evaluates, for a renewed approach to emancipation from capital.

Why do societies collapse? We use an individual-based evolutionary model to show that, in environmental conditions dominated by low-frequency variation (“red noise”), extirpation may be an outcome of the evolution of cultural capacity. Previous analytical models predicted an equilibrium between individual learners and social learners, or a contingent strategy in which individuals learn socially or individually depending on the circumstances. However, in red noise environments, whose main signature is that variation is concentrated in relatively large, relatively rare excursions, individual learning (...) may be selected from the population. If the social learning system comes to lack sufficient individual learning or cognitively costly adaptive biases, behavior ceases tracking environmental variation. Then, when the environment does change, fitness declines and the population may collapse or even be extirpated. The modeled scenario broadly fits some human population collapses and might also explain nonhuman extirpations. Varying model parameters showed that the fixation of social learning is less likely when individual learning is less costly, when the environment is less red or more variable, with larger population sizes, and when learning is not conformist or is from parents rather than from the general population. Once social learning is fixed, extirpation is likely except when social learning is biased towards successful models. Thus, the risk of population collapse may be reduced by promoting individual learning and innovation over cultural conformity, or by preferential selection of relatively fit individuals as models for social learning. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

We compare replicator dynamics for some simple games with and without the addition of conformist bias. The addition of conformist bias can create equilibria, it can change the stability properties of existing equilibria, it may leave the equilibrium structure intact but change the relative size of basins of attraction, or it may do nothing at all. Examples of each of the foregoing are given.

The article examines the phenomenon of conformism in the context of socialist realism, which for a long time was the main direction for the Soviet art sphere. Conformism is interpreted as an effective way for the artist to optimize relations with the authorities and society, giving the opportunity for social self-preservation. Conformism is a kind of strategy for artists, thanks to which they manage to achieve their creative goals and successfully exist within the established cultural framework. The (...) author of the article argues that conformism helped artists who put their creativity at the service of socialist realism to find some basis for their activities, because socialist realism did not initially have such a basis. The author comes to the conclusion that in the conditions of constant transformation of cultural requirements and the need to fully comply with them, conformism becomes for the artist not just a tactic in achieving creative goals, but also a kind of self-defense mechanism that allows to preserve mental and physical health. The most successful Soviet artists were able to realize their talent by creating many bright works of art due to the fact that they created precisely in the mainstream of socialist realism, and if it were not for it, perhaps the world would never have known about some outstanding Soviet artists, as well as not seen their works of art, since the realization of Soviet artists in another cultural environment might well not have taken place. (shrink)

In pluralistic Western societies, schools have a specific task in moral education. This task is to be understood neither as the transmission of specific values, nor as the development of moral reasoning skills or universal values, but as teaching pupils to handle plurality in an autonomous way. The concept of autonomy is interpreted from a Vygotskian and Deweyan position, where learning in school means learning to participate in cultural activities in a reflective and critical way. Participation has both intellectual and (...) moral aspects, and thus moral education can never be separated from cognitive education. (shrink)

Only during a brief period in the aftermath of the revolution was a portion of the Soviet intelligentsia eager sincerely to cooperate with the Soviet system. Soon, with Stalin''s repressions, the intelligentsia, and especially its elite — the intellectuals, or those involved in creative activities such as science, literature and the arts, became locked in permanent conflict with the government.Once mass terror disappeared after Stalin''s death in 1953, intellectuals faced the possibility of confronting the regime without fear of instant arrest (...) and eventual death in the Gulag. (shrink)

ArgumentThe article describes a special type of scientific and philosophical “non-conformism” as exemplified in the versatile work of Richard von Mises. While the historical impact of von Mises' practical and organizational work in applied mathematics is beyond doubt, it is shown that von Mises' insistence on cognitive connectibility of various scientific domains was not, in the end, successful although it stimulated the theoretical discussion considerably. Von Mises developed a principally critical attitude towards what he considered “one-sided” in several streams (...) of modernity and tended to be “anti-modern” even in those of his activities which belonged to “modernism.” Reasons can be found in his biographical experiences, in particular in his unorthodox academic education and repeated emigrations. Thus biographical research has considerable potential for historical explanation. The paper delves into the existing premises and sources for a scientific biography of Richard von Mises which is yet to be written, and publishes in the appendix a revealing biographical sketch authored by von Mises' widow, the applied mathematician Hilda Geiringer. (shrink)

This article attempts to investigate the three strands of citizenship, nationalism and education and their interconnectedness in India after independence. It seeks to address questions like how has the post-colonial state in India visualized its models of citizenship through its education policies and programmes and what has become of their fate? In what ways the changing nature of public versus private education has shaped contested models of citizenship? What challenges are thrown at the models of citizenship that the Indian state (...) has tried to posit through education? It is argued that the journey of citizenship in post-independent India is that of contradictory pulls around key strands of ethno-cultural nationalism and civic nationalism and around an economically productive nation versus an economic consumer nation. The article will look at some of the key policy shifts and operational models and attempt to locate the dynamic behind those shifts. (shrink)

In recent work, J. Adam Carter argues that truth-relativism should be compatible with the so-called conformist response to peer disagreement about taste to the effect that subjects should revise their opinions. However, Carter claims that truth-relativism cannot make sense of this response since it cannot make sense of the idea that when two subjects are recognised as epistemic peers, they should acknowledge that they are equally likely to be right about the targeted issue. The main aim of this paper is (...) a modest one: to argue that truth-relativists should not be worried about their alleged incompatibility with conformism for they should be non-conformists. (shrink)

Recently there has been a surge of interest in the intersection between epistemology and action theory, especially in principles linking rationality in thought and rationality in action. Recently there has also been a surge of interest in the epistemic significance of perceived peer disagreement: what, epistemically speaking, is the rational response in light of disagreement with someone whom one regards as an epistemic peer? The objective of this paper is to explore these two issues—separately, but also in connection with one (...) another. I turn first to the idea that the normative standing of our actions depends on the normative standing of our beliefs. I endorse this idea. More precisely, I endorse a principle according to which sufficiently high credence in success conditions for a given goal-directed action is a necessary condition on rational execution of that action. I then turn to the debate concerning the epistemic significance of perceived peer disagreement. The basic issue is whether such disagreement is always epistemically significant in the sense of serving as a defeater of the initial credences of the disagreeing parties. Conformists argue that this is so while non-conformists deny it. I present a new argument against a brand of non-conformism that I call “strong non-conformism”. The key premise is the principle that sufficiently high credence in success conditions for a given goal-directed action is a necessary condition on rational execution of that action. I argue that, given this principle, strong non-conformism fails to yield the verdict that the epistemic requirement on rational action is violated in a case where, intuitively, it is violated. This is because strong non-conformism has it that disagreement with a perceived peer does not act as a defeater in the relevant case. Conformism fares better. (shrink)

When people disagree about what is moral, we face an epistemological challenge—when the answer to a moral question is not obvious, how do we determine who is right? What if, under the circumstances, we do not have the means to show one party or the other is right? In recent years, a number of epistemologists have turned their attention to the general epistemic problem of how to respond reasonably to disagreement, and we can look to their work for guidance. While (...) there remains significant disagreement about how to respond to disagreement, I will focus on what I take to be the best position in the debate, known as the “Conciliatory” position (or “Conciliation” for short), which holds that parties to a disagreement should become less confident of their initial opinions to some degree, according to the credibility of the parties involved. Conciliation, if interpreted straightforwardly, has some counter-intuitive implications for unpopular opinions, including unpopular moral judgments. If a moral non-conformist becomes somewhat less confident of her view in response to each disagreement with a presumed epistemic peer, she will eventually have such a low degree of confidence in her initial view that she will effectively have switched positions. This result is troubling because almost everyone accepts moral views that were non-conforming views at some point in time, and these views probably would not have become widespread if non-conformists had changed their positions. I propose a modified version of Conciliation which would enable moral non-conformists to engage in cautious “experiments in living.” This modified view, I argue, is reasonable for those who are concerned, not only with correcting their own mistaken moral views, but with promoting moral progress in general. (shrink)

This comment addresses two issues that arise in Sacconi/faillo/ottone's essay. The first is the problem of compliance as it arises in social contract theory. The second is the problem of avoiding an incoherence that arises in the formulation of welfarist principles of distributive justice if these principles are taken to be concerned with the distribution of welfare without restriction. Sacconi, Faillo, and Ottone define an interesting class of principles that govern only the distribution of 'material utility', which they distinguish from (...) 'conformist utility'. Sacconi, Faillo, and Ottone are primarily concerned, however, to argue that there is a need to revise 'the utility maximization model of a rational economic man'. I discuss this claim briefly, in concluding the paper. (shrink)

This article describes a logic of distinction and succession within the late-twentieth-century Leningrad-St. Petersburg cultural field, whereby consecutive intelligentsia mainstreams were replaced by their avant-garde peripheries. In this dynamic picture of socio-cultural transformations, I propose a working hypothesis of a repeated stratification of the field into an ‘official’, an ‘unofficial’, and a third ‘non-aligned’ intelligentsia. This hypothesis is tested in reference to the ‘non-aligned’ groups founded by the avant-garde artist and ideologue Timur Novikov (1958–2002). Three major shifts are described: from (...) the politicized late-Brezhnevite early 1980s to the apolitical radicalism of Novikov’s New Artists; from this anarchistic underground, through the perestroika era, to the playful ‘classicism’ of the New Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s; and from this postmodern international orientation to an arch-reactionary, neo-imperial posturing at the turn of the 2000s. Lastly, this ‘non-aligned’ intelligentsia is suggested as a possible precedent, or, indeed, a model for understanding other historically significant avant-garde peripheries, which commonly seek to distinguish themselves from (often mutually-exclusive) centres. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s view of conformity comes in his description and understanding of Das Man or “the One”. There is controversy within Heidegger scholarship regarding the interpretation of Das Man as an existential mode. Most scholars interpret Das Man to mean the existential mode of inauthenticity and delineate the two modes of authenticity and inauthenticity in Heideggerian existentialism. Less popularly, scholars like Hubert Dreyfus and Michael Zimmerman interpret the positive and negative aspects of Das Man and suggest the third mode of (...) indifference in Heidegger’s _Being and Time_. This paper follows Dreyfus’ understanding of Das Man to posit indifference as a third mode of being that is structurally similar to inauthenticity but motivationally different from it. It then uses this difference to categorize two forms of moral conformity in Hannah Arendt’s analysis of the difference between a morality of custom and a morality of conviction. The problematic of this paper concerns the distinction between these two forms of moral conformity and the moral status of people like Adolf Eichmann whose actions Arendt describes as the banality of evil. Usually seen as preservative of morality, Arendt shows how conformity may be a site for moral conflict. (shrink)

À la croisée de la philosophie et de l’histoire de l’art, Bernard Teyssèdre a ouvert des champs de recherche très divers, ce qui a suscité l’enthousiasme de ses étudiants, mais aussi déconcerté ceux qui restaient attachés à leur pré carré disciplinaire. Présenter aujourd’hui son parcours intellectuel revient à faire redécouvrir certains de ses travaux oubliés en esthétique afin de montrer leur singularité et leur cohérence profondément hégélienne, bien que ses recherches aient pris des formes très différentes et abordés avec érudition (...) des domaines très éloignés les uns des autres. Sans oublier de situer philosophiquement des aspects moins connus de ses activités, littéraires, artistiques et aussi institutionnelles avec sa contribution déterminante au développement de la discipline esthétique et à l’introduction des arts plastiques à l’université. Ce panorama n’aurait pas été complet si n’était pas signalée la place de ses recherches en paléontologie restées longtemps secrètes et a priori fort éloignées de l’esthétique. (shrink)

L’indiscipline d’Edgar Morin est une manière d’être. Une volonté permanente d’apprendre, de défricher en ne respectant ni les frontières ni les codes établis entre les disciplines universitaires. En ce sens, Edgar Morin est un maître de l’indiscipline, un esprit curieux qui entend se jouer des étiquettes. Notre article s’attache à son itinéraire d’éditorialiste, notamment au Monde, où il a inventé un style combinant le reportage, l’enquête sociologique et l’analyse. De même qu’il a accepté, depuis 1997, la présidence du jury du (...) Prix « Le Monde de la recherche universitaire » en sciences humaines, à condition qu’il soit porteur de l’idée d’interdisciplinarité.The indiscipline of Edgar Morin is a way of being. A constant desire to learn, in clear disregard for borders or codes established between academic disciplines. In this sense, Edgar Morin is a master of the discipline, an inquiring mind who intends to play labels. This article focuses on the route editor, including World, where he invented a style combining reportage, sociological inquiry and analysis. Well accepted that, since 1997, President of the Jury of "The World of academic research" in the humanities, provided it carries the idea of ​​interdisciplinarity. (shrink)

The Acknowledgements are missing from the original publication.

In the heated debates over identity politics, few theorists have looked carefully at the conceptualizations of identity assumed by all sides. Visible Identities fills this gap. Drawing on both philosophical sources as well as theories and empirical studies in the social sciences, Martín Alcoff makes a strong case that identities are not like special interests, nor are they doomed to oppositional politics, nor do they inevitably lead to conformism, essentialism, or reductive approaches to judging others. Identities are historical formations (...) and their political implications are open to interpretation. But identities such as race and gender also have a powerful visual and material aspect that eliminativists and social constructionists often underestimate.Visible Identities offers a careful analysis of the political and philosophical worries about identity and argues that these worries are neither supported by the empirical data nor grounded in realistic understandings of what identities are. Martín Alcoff develops a more realistic characterization of identity in general through combining phenomenological approaches to embodiment with hermeneutic concepts of the interpretive horizon. Besides addressing the general contours of social identity, Martín Alcoff develops an account of the material infrastructure of gendered identity, compares and contrasts gender identities with racialized ones, and explores the experiential aspects of racial subjectivity for both whites and non-whites. In several chapters she looks specifically at Latino identity as well, including its relationship to concepts of race, the specific forms of anti-Latino racism, and the politics of mestizo or hybrid identity. (shrink)

Afro-communalism has been largely conceptualized as a system in which individuals attain meaningfulness from the point of view of the community. We assess the implications of Afro-communalism on the individual’s rights. With particular focus on the transformative values of non-conformist features of individualism, this paper shows how Afro-communalism’s emphasis on the community is counter-productive. Our approach goes beyond the argument that Afro-communalism stifles the autonomy of the individual. Instead, we demonstrate how the community’s conformist expectations from the individual within the (...) Afro-communalist system, sets the community against the individual and against itself. We draw the conclusion that Afro-communalism as a project is no longer relevant and needs to end. We do this by showing how most of the interpretations of Afro-communalism are attempts to sustain a reductive contrast between the West and Africa. We also show how that contrast exaggerates the idea of community in Africa, to the detriment of a balance between the individual’s right and her duties to the community. Keywords: Afro-communalism, individualism, non-conformist expectations, community, individual autonomy, Africa. (shrink)