Drawing on philosophy, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, Simple Minds explores the construction of the mind from the matter of the brain.

Some influential interpreters of Dharmakīrti have suggested understanding his thought in terms of a ‘sliding scale of analysis.’ Here it is argued that this emphasis on Dharmakīrti's alternating philosophical perspectives, though helpful in important respects, obscures the close connection between the two views in play. Indeed, with respect to these perspectives as Dharmakīrti develops them, the epistemology is the same either way. Insofar as that is right, John Dunne's characterization of Dharmakīrti's Yogācāra as ‘epistemic idealism ’ may not, after all, (...) distinguish this perspective from Sautrāntika; indeed, epistemic idealism can be understood as just the view these positions share. Thus, what distinguishes the ‘Yogācāra’ section of Dharmakīrti's texts is simply his making explicit that epistemological commitments the Sautrāntika does hold are already compatible with idealism. Sautrāntika and Yogācāra thus differ only when one turns to the metaphysical arguments that additionally show that only such mental things as sense data could be real. (shrink)

The dominant language of politics in the United States has been political individualism, with minimal restrictions on property and personal, voluntary conduct. But there are second languages of community that stress cooperation and group action. These second languages include the constitutional tradition for public health. Public health offers a community justification for paternalistic measures that, for example, discourage smoking or require seatbelts.

There has emerged in recent years the recognition that the characteristically Buddhist doctrine of svasa vitti 2 (‘apperception’, as I will render it for reasons to become clear presently) was vari...

行動経済学によって、さまざまに系統的な不合理さが見えてきた。手をかけることが高評価をもたらすIKEA効果、やる気をそいでいる高額ボーナス、自分で思いついた(と思わせられた)意見は好ましい、雑用は一気に 片づけるほうが楽...。行動経済学研究の第一人者が、わたしたちがなぜ、どのように不合理な行動をしてしまうのかをユニークな実験で紹介。わかりやすい数々の実例で経済の真の姿を解明し、よりよい決断へとつなげ る話題作。.

What can be understood of other cultures? And what can we learn about people in general from the study of other cultures? In the three closely related essays that constitute this book and which have already created considerable controversy in their original French versions, and been rewritten and expanded for this edition, Dan Sperber discusses these fundamental issues of anthropology. In the first essay he analyses the way in which anthropology is written and read. In the second, he offers a (...) novel rationalist alternative to cultural relativism, based on both anthropological and psychological arguments, and illustrated by his own fieldwork in Ethiopia. The third essay provides an assessment of the work of Lévi-Strauss, in which the arguments of the previous two essays are linked with an incisive critique of Lévi-Strauss' contribution to the study of cultural variation. (shrink)

This article develops, illustrates, and defends a conception of immanent critique. Immanent critique is construed as a form of hermeneutical practice and second-order political and normative criticism. The common charge that immanent critique is a form of philosophical conventionalism necessarily committed to value relativism and to the rejection of transcultural and cosmopolitan norms is denied. But immanent critique insists that meaningful and potentially efficacious criticism must be connected to relevant criteria and understandings internal to the culture or social order at (...) which the criticism is directed. The complaint that this demand will likely limit political and moral criticism is also denied, and the ability of immanent critique to develop from convention unconventional thinking is defended and demonstrated. (shrink)

This article – which includes a complete translation of Mūlamadhyamakakārikā chapter 2 together with Candrakīrti’s commentary thereon – argues that notwithstanding the many different and often arcane interpretations that have been offered of Nāgārjuna’s arguments against motion, there is really just one straightforward kind of argument on offer in this vexed chapter. It is further argued that this basic argument can be understood as a philosophically interesting one if it is kept in mind that the argument essentially has to do (...) with whether a personal level of description will admit of an exhaustively impersonal explanation. (shrink)

This essay defends a novel interpretation of the term xìng 性 as it occurs in Chinese texts of the late Warring States period (roughly 320–221 BCE). The term played an important role both in the famous controversy over the goodness or badness of people’s xìng and elsewhere in the intellectual discourse of the period. Extending especially the work of A.C. Graham, the essay stresses the importance for understanding xìng of early Chinese assumptions about spontaneity, continuity, health, and (in the human (...) case) motivation. These assumptions make xìng fundamentally different from the contemporary nature concepts with which it is often equated. In particular, people’s xìng is not a near-equivalent of human nature or (in modern Chinese) of rénxìng 人性. (shrink)

In a range of contexts, individuals arrive at collective decisions by sharing confidence in their judgements. This tendency to evaluate the reliability of information by the confidence with which it is expressed has been termed the ‘confidence heuristic’. We tested two ways of implementing the confidence heuristic in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task: either directly, by opting for the judgement made with higher confidence, or indirectly, by opting for the faster judgement, exploiting an inverse correlation between confidence (...) and reaction time. We found that the success of these heuristics depends on how similar individuals are in terms of the reliability of their judgements and, more importantly, that for dissimilar individuals such heuristics are dramatically inferior to interaction. Interaction allows individuals to alleviate, but not fully resolve, differences in the reliability of their judgements. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of confidence and collective decision-making. (shrink)

The central characteristic of cognitive explanations of behavior is the appeal to inner representations. I examine the grounds which justify representational explanations, seeking the minimum conditions which organisms must meet to be candidates for such explanations. I first discuss Fodor's proposal that representationality be attributed to systems which respond to nonnomic properties, arguing that the distinction between the nomic and nonnomic in perception is fatally ambiguous. Then I turn to an illustrative review of the behavior and neurobiology of Hermissenda crassicornis, (...) a marine mollusk. Concerning this "model system," I compare the representational style of explanation with both behaviorist and neurophysiological explanations. Representational explanation is potentially more comprehensive than its rivals, and thus I conclude that representations are useful posits wherever internal information-bearing states mediate behavior. (shrink)

The Later Moists grounded our linguistic abilities in our ability to distinguish between kinds on the basis of manifest similarities and differences among things. Proper names, however, require a different treatment. According to the Moists, when we use a proper name, we borrow a word for one kind of thing and use it to refer to something else, as when we name dogs “crane.” This view probably responds in part to arguments that the possibility of using any word to refer (...) to any thing threatens the stability of language. Proper names may borrow from terms with existing uses, but arguably they do not thereby undermine those uses. (shrink)

Commonsense psychology and cognitive science both regularly assume the existence of representational states. I propose a naturalistic theory of representation sufficient to meet the pretheoretical constraints of a "folk theory of representation", constraints including the capacities for accuracy and inaccuracy, selectivity of proper objects of representation, perspective, articulation, and "efficacy" or content-determined functionality. The proposed model states that a representing device is a device which changes state when information is received over multiple information channels originating at a single source. The (...) changed state of a representing device is a representation. The unitary information source which would give rise to the information impinging on the representing device, and hence, give rise to the representation, is the content of the representation. The model meets the pretheoretic constraints, and also conforms to available neurobiological data for two invertebrate species. (shrink)

An innovative theory of consciousness, drawing on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and supported by brain-imaging, presented in the form of a hardboiled ..

This study focuses on the effects of socially responsible human resource management practices on female employees’ turnover intentions and the moderating effect of supervisor gender on this relationship. With a sample of 212 female employees from eight different industries in Finland, the results indicate that SR-HRM practices promoting equal career opportunities and work–family integration play a significant role in reducing women's turnover intentions. The study adds to the academic discourse of corporate social responsibility by highlighting the impact of the organizational-level (...) HRM determinants on the individual-level outcome. In addition, supervisor gender makes a difference in the studied relationship: female supervisors have a stronger and more significant impact on the relationship than male supervisors. Our findings suggest that organizational measures which support work–family integration should be taken seriously to decrease female employees’ turnover intentions. Male supervisors could adopt some gender-incongruent leadership behaviors, such as individualized emotional concern and caring when dealing with female employees. In the future, other gender combinations in the supervisor–employee relationship would merit research. (shrink)

& Functional brain imaging offers new opportunities for the begin with single-subject (preprocessed) scan series, and study of that most pervasive of cognitive conditions, human consider the patterns of all voxels as potential multivariate consciousness. Since consciousness is attendant to so much encodings of phenomenal information. Twenty-seven subjects of human cognitive life, its study requires secondary analysis from the four studies were analyzed with multivariate of multiple experimental datasets. Here, four preprocessed methods, revealing analogues of phenomenal structures, datasets from the (...) National fMRI Data Center are considered: particularly the structures of temporality. In a second Hazeltine et al., Neural activation during response competi- interpretive approach, artificial neural networks were used tion; Ishai et al., The representation of objects in the human to detect a more explicit prediction from phenomenology, occipital and temporal cortex; Mechelli et al., The effects of namely, that present experience contains and is inflected by presentation rate during word and pseudoword reading; and past states of awareness and anticipated events. In all of 21 Postle et al., Activity in human frontal cortex associated with subjects in this analysis, nets were successfully trained to spatial working memory and saccadic behavior. The study of extract aspects of relative past and future brain states, in consciousness also draws from multiple disciplines. In this comparison with statistically similar controls. This exploratory article, the philosophical subdiscipline of phenomenology study thus concludes that the proposed methods for provides initial characterization of phenomenal structures ‘‘neurophenomenology’’ warrant further application, includ- conceptually necessary for an analysis of consciousness. These ing the exploration of individual differences, multivariate structures include phenomenal intentionality, phenomenal differences between cognitive task conditions, and explora- superposition, and experienced temporality.. (shrink)

This chapter contains section titles: Proper Functions Representations: The Basic Teleosemantic Framework Concepts Externalism, Language, and Meaning Rationalism.

The concept of protosemiosis or semiosis at the lower levels of the living goes back to Giorgio Prodi, Thomas A. Sebeok and others. More recently, a typology of proto-signs was introduced by Sharov and Vehkavaara. Kull uses the term of vegetative semiosis, defined by iconicity, when referring to plants and lower organism semiosis. The criteria for the typology of proto-signs by Sharov and Vehkavaara are mostly based on two important presuppositions: agency and a lack of representation in low-level semiosis. We (...) would like to focus on an alternative approach to protosign classification. In particular, we aim to provide a sign-typological characteristic of proteins (in analogy to Maran’ s classification of environmental signs). Our approach is focused on representation, that is, we only consider the relation between a sign and its object. We are considering representation independently from the role of interpretant and interpretation (which is an epiphenomenon of agency). Two hypotheses are investigated and accordingly evaluated in this paper: (I) Proteins are indexical protosigns. (II) Proteins are iconic protosigns. The conclusion our argumentation leads to supports the hypothesis (II). (shrink)

Most research on student plagiarism defines the concept very narrowly or with much ambiguity. Many studies focus on plagiarism involving large swaths of text copied and pasted from unattributed sources, a type of plagiarism that the overwhelming majority of students seem to have little trouble identifying. Other studies rely on ambiguous definitions, assuming students understand what the term means and requesting that they self-report how well they understand the concept. This study attempts to avoid these problems by examining student perceptions (...) of more complex citation issues. We presented 240 students with a series of examples, asked them to indicate whether or not each should be considered plagiarism, and followed up with a series of demographic and attitudinal questions. The examples fell within the spectrum of inadequate citation, patchwriting, and the reuse of other people’s ideas. Half were excerpted from publicized cases of academic plagiarism, and half were modified from other sources. Our findings indicated that students shared a very strong agreement that near verbatim copy and paste and patchwriting should be considered plagiarism, but that they were much more conflicted regarding the reuse of ideas. Additionally, this study found significant correlation between self-reported confidence in their understanding and the identification of more complex cases as plagiarism, but this study found little correlation between academic class status or exposure to plagiarism detection software and perceptions of plagiarism. The latter finding goes against a prevailing sentiment in the academic literature that the ability to recognize plagiarism is inherently linked to academic literacy. Overall, our findings indicate that more pedagogical emphasis may need to be placed on complex forms of plagiarism. (shrink)

The concept of performance has gradually become established in health policies. Presented as necessary and positive, it is often reduced to efficiency, which results in policies and management styles aimed at optimisation. While they are supposed to guarantee the sustainability of our healthcare systems, these practices have made them fragile. Insights from the life sciences help us understand why. Indeed, biologists observe that living beings do not prioritise optimisation but robustness. To cope with fluctuations, a robust organisation operates with redundancies, (...) apparent waste, heterogeneity, organised fluctuations, slowness, and hesitation. It functions sub‐optimally. This article offers a theoretical reflection and management directions for more robust healthcare systems. (shrink)

There is good evidence that the cerebral cortex is the seat of the human mind, so an understanding of representation in the cortex could help us understand the nature of mental representation. I argue that the cortex represents in the way that models do; it is an evolutionarily designed model-building machine. The cortex belongs to a general class of model-building machines that produce isomorphisms to structures in the environment by interacting with them. The representational content of a particular model produced (...) by such a machine is determined by the operational principles according to which the machine was designed, and the history of machine-environment interaction that resulted in the production of that model. ;I explore the possibility that the operational principles according to which the cerebral cortex was designed, i.e. aspects of its causal profile that were selected for, are those described by the SINBAD theory. The SINBAD theory implies that it is the biological function of the cortex to make its constituent neurons come to interact in a way that is isomorphic to regularities structured around "sources of correlation". In the context of this isomorphism, it is the function of a particular SINBAD cell to correspond to a particular source of correlation, the one that is responsible for that cell's tuning. In other words, the cortex builds models of environmental regularities structured around sources of correlation. ;Understanding mental representation as cortical representation of this kind allows us to explain a number of important and/or puzzling features of mental intentionality as we know it: the possibility of equivocation, misrepresentation, empty representation, and twin cases, the relation between concepts and inferential roles, how it is possible for us to acquire objective concepts and beliefs via our subjective and idiosyncratic senses, and the distinction between usefulness and truth. I conclude by outlining an account of the occurrent propositional attitudes as non-representational uses of a SINBAD model that has been built up through experience. Non-representational use is cashed out in terms of causal role. Together with an account of the non-occurrent attitudes, this yields an understanding of the nature of psychological explanation. (shrink)

In this chapter, we focus on the debate over publicly maintained racist monuments as it manifests in the mid-2010s Anglosphere, primarily in the United States and South Africa. After pointing to some representative examples of racist monuments, we discuss ways a monument can be thought racist and neutrally categorize removalist and preservationist arguments heard in the monument debate. We suggest that both extremist and moderate removalist goals are likely to be self-defeating and that when concerns of civic sustainability are put (...) on moral par with those of fairness and justice, something like a Mandela-era preservationist policy is best: one which removes the most offensive of the minor racist monuments, but which focuses on closing the monumentary gap between peoples and reframing existing racist monuments. (shrink)

Three-time New York Times bestselling author Dan Ariely teams up with legendary The New Yorker cartoonist William Haefeli to present an expanded, illustrated collection of his immensely popularWall Street Journal advice column, “Ask Ariely”. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely revolutionized the way we think about ourselves, our minds, and our actions in his books Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. Ariely applies this scientific analysis of the human condition in his “Ask Ariely” Q & A (...) column in the Wall Street Journal, in which he responds to readers who write in with personal conundrums ranging from the serious to the curious: What can you do to stay calm when you’re playing the volatile stock market? What’s the best way to get someone to stop smoking? How can you maximize the return on your investment at an all-you-can-eat buffet? Is it possible to put a price on the human soul? Can you ever rationally justify spending thousands of dollars on a Rolex? In Ask Ariely, a broad variety of economic, ethical, and emotional dilemmas are explored and addressed through text and images. Using their trademark insight and wit, Ariely and Haefeli help us reflect on how we can reason our way through external and internal challenges. Readers will laugh, learn, and most importantly gain a new perspective on how to deal with the inevitable problems that plague our daily life. (shrink)

The leader–member relationship has been identified as a key determinant of successful working relationships and business outcomes in China. A high-quality leader–member relationship helps managers and employees to meet the demands they face and gives them the opportunity to develop socially, emotionally and morally. Such relationships form the basis of the overall well-being and success of the organisation. This article contributes to relationally oriented leadership theories and more specifically to the leader–member exchange theory by examining the theory in the context (...) of Western expatriate managers and Chinese employees in China. The first aim of the study is to analyse the similarities and differences between the LMX theory, which owes its origins to Western corporate experience, and the social and moral norms of guanxi, a crucial element in the Chinese value system. Since Westerners and Chinese people can give different interpretations to guanxi, the second aim of the article is to discuss the ethical challenges to the Western manager arising from guanxi. The findings of this study have implications not only for China, but also for other Chinese communities where guanxi is endorsed and practised. (shrink)

This paper presents a computational model that integrates a dynamically structured holographic memory system into the ACT-R cognitive architecture to explain how linguistic representations are encoded and accessed in memory. ACT-R currently serves as the most precise expression of the moment-by-moment working memory retrievals that support sentence comprehension. The ACT-R model of sentence comprehension is able to capture a range of linguistic phenomena, but there are cases where the model makes the wrong predictions, such as the over-prediction of retrieval interference (...) effects during sentence comprehension. Here, we investigate one such case involving the processing of sentences with negative polarity items and consider how a dynamically structured holographic memory system might provide a cognitively plausible and principled explanation of some previously unexplained effects. Specifically, we show that by replacing ACT-R's declarative memory with a dynamically structured memory, we can explain a wider range of behavioral data involving reading times and judgments of grammaticality. We show that our integrated model provides a better fit to human error rates and response latencies than the original ACT-R model. These results provide proof-of-concept for the unification of two independent computational cognitive frameworks. (shrink)

Organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) are essential for effective organizational functioning. Decisions by employees to engage in these important discretionary behaviors are based on how they make sense of the organizational context. Using fairness heuristic theory, we tested two important OCB predictors: manager trustworthiness and interactional justice. In the process, we control for the effects of dispositional factors (propensity to trust) and for system-based organizational fairness (procedural and distributive justice). Results, based on surveys collected from 120 employee–supervisor dyads, indicate that manager (...) trustworthiness explains variance in OCBs over and above the variance accounted for by interactional fairness. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. (shrink)

This paper examines some Indian philosophical arguments that are understandable as transcendental arguments—i.e., arguments whose conclusions cannot be denied without self-contradiction, insofar as the truth of the claim in question is a condition of the possibility even of any such denial. This raises the question of what kind of self-contradiction is involved—e.g., pragmatic self-contradiction, or the kind that goes with logical necessity. It is suggested that these arguments involve something like practical reason—indeed, that they just are arguments against the primacy (...) of “theoretical reason.” This characterization illuminates a characteristically Indic appeal to ordinary language. (shrink)

A standard view about criminal law distinguishes between two kinds of offenses, “mala in se” and “mala prohibita.” This view also corresponds to a distinction between two bases for criminalization: certain acts should be criminalized because they are moral wrongs; other acts may be criminalized for the sake of promoting overall welfare. This paper aims to show two things: first, that allowing for criminalization for the sake of promoting welfare renders the category of wrongfulness crimes largely redundant. Second, and more (...) importantly, accepting welfare as a legitimate ground for criminalization implies a certain view about legitimate state action, which makes criminalization for wrongfulness more difficult to justify. If I am right, the view that keeps the two categories of criminalization as largely separate is untenable. I conclude with some remarks about the advantages of welfare as the basis for criminalization. (shrink)

Interest in the political relevance of the emotions is growing rapidly. In light of this, Hannah Arendt’s claim that the emotions are apolitical has come under renewed fire. But many critics have misunderstood her views on the relationship between individuals, emotions and the political. This paper addresses this issue by reconstructing the conceptual framework through which Arendt understands the emotions. Arendt often describes the heart – where the emotions reside – as a place of darkness. I begin by tracing this (...) metaphor through her work to demonstrate that it is meant to convey the inherently uncertain nature of emotions rather than a devaluation of them. I proceed to challenge the notion that Arendt adopts the Enlightenment dichotomy between reason and emotion. In fact, she rejects both as a basis for politics. However, she does identify some constructive roles for the emotions. I argue that fear is intrinsically connected to courage – the principal political virtue – in Arendt’s philosophy. In ligh... (shrink)