Across a wide range of legal contexts, E. Thomas Sullivan and Richard S. Frase identify three basic ways that government measures and private remedies have been ...

Theorizing about religious ritual systems from a cognitive viewpoint involves (1) modeling cognitive processes and their products and (2) demonstrating their influence on religious behavior. Particularly important for such an approach to the study of religious ritual is the modeling of participants' representations of ritual form. In pursuit of that goal, we presented in Rethinking Religion a theory of religious ritual form that involved two commitments. The theory’s first commitment is that the cognitive apparatus for the representation of action in (...) general is the same system deployed for the representation of religious ritual form. The differences between everyday action and religious ritual action turn out to be fairly minor from the standpoint of their cognitive representation. This system for the representation of action includes representations of agents. Whether we focus on an everyday action such as closing a door or a ritual action such as initiating a person into a religious group, our understanding of these forms of behavior as actions at all turns critically on recognizing agents. The theory's second crucial commitment (1990, p. 61) is that the roles of culturally postulated superhuman agents (CPS-agents hereafter) in participants' representations of religious rituals will prove pivotal in accounting for a wide variety of those rituals' properties. On our view religious ritual systems typically involve presumptions about CPS-agents. This theoretical commitment is orthogonal to the pervasive assumption throughout the study of religion that only meanings matter. By contrast, we hold that other things matter too (specifically, cognitive representations of religious ritual form). Large conflicts lurk behind the previous sentences but we cannot adequately address them here. For now we will only identify two of the most fundamental and comment on them briefly. First, amazingly (by our lights anyway), our claim that (conceptual) commitments to the existence of CPS-agents is the most important recurrent feature of religion across cultures is quite controversial.. (shrink)

A review essay of three recent publications that focus in different ways on the evolution­ary basis of religion. Asma focuses on the ways in which “religion” energizes the emotional needs of humans. Torrey pays close attention to the evolutionary stages of brain development that are necessary for the emergence of religious concepts and the attitudes that accompany them. Finally, Turner et al. develop a complex theory of different types of selection that they regard as necessary in order to account for (...) the institu­tionalization of religion: they think that biological natural selection, even though building human capacities, is insufficient to explain the sociological facts about religion. (shrink)

           No one owns 'culture'[i]: anyone with a viable theoretical proposal can contend for the right to determine that concept's fate. Not everyone agrees with this view. Throughout its century-long struggle for academic respectability, anthropology has regularly insisted on its unique role as the proprietor of 'culture.' Its variety of approaches and feuding factions notwithstanding, it is this proprietary claim that unifies anthropology to an extent sometimes unrecognized even by its (...) own (post-modernist) practitioners. The history of anthropology has witnessed at least three important moments in the case for autonomous cultural phenomena based, first, on traditional ontological and methodological presumptions, second, on the hermeneutic turn, and third, on postmodern analyses of discourses and their influences.            Historically, anthropologists cite two closely related bases for these proprietary presumptions. The first, which we shall not belabor here, hearkens to inevitably vague discussions about culture's autonomy (with various passes at making sense of the ontological foundations of that alleged autonomy). Cultural anthropologists have advanced such claims for a century, but Geertz' gloss on this topic is representative both in what it endorses and in the vagueness of the grounds for the endorsement. While advancing a host of claims about culture's ontological status (for example, (1) that culture is "ideational," (2) that it, nonetheless, "does not exist in someone's head," (3) that it has the same status--whatever that is--as a Beethoven quartet, and (4) that it is "public"), Geertz insists that "the thing to ask . . . is not what . . . [its] ontological status is." (Geertz 1973: 10-12.) Unfortunately for Geertz and cultural anthropology generally, any convincing case for the autonomy of culture must account for its relations to the things that constitute it. Moreover, because Geertz never relinquishes anthropology's scientific aspirations, the issue of.... (shrink)

Cognitive science is beginning to make a contribution to the science-and-religion dialogue by its claims about the nature of both scientific and religious knowledge and the practices such knowledge informs. Of particular importance is the distinction between folk knowledge and abstract theoretical knowledge leading to a distinction between folk science and folk religion on the one hand and the reflective, theoretical, abstract form of thought that characterizes both advanced scientific thought and sophisticated theological reasoning on the other. Both folk science (...) and folk religion emerge from commonsense reasoning about the world, a form of reasoning bequeathed to us by the processes of natural selection. Suggestions are made about what scientists and theologians can do if they accept these claims. (shrink)

Levine's discussion of Rethinking Religion (1990) and "Crisis of Conscience, Riddle of Identity" (1993) includes some rash charges, some useful comments, and some profound misunderstandings. The latter, especially, reveal areas where we need to clarify and further defend our claims. In the second section we shall discuss the epistemological and methodological issues that Levine raises. Then we shall turn in the third section to theoretical and substantive matters. In fact, Levine remains almost completely silent on substantive matters (except to say (...) that our claims are "obvious" and "trite.") Levine claims, in effect, (1) that religion is outside of the scope of scientific analysis, (2) that our competence approach to theorizing is not necessary for generating the theoretical claims that we make, and (3) that the substantive consequences of those theoretical claims are obvious and trivial. We unequivocally reject the first and third claims and, Levine's profound misunderstandings about the competence approach to theorizing notwithstanding, completely agree with the second. Identifying the confusions in Levine's discussion that inform item (3) will clarify our position. We turn first, though, to matters of epistemology and method (as these bear on items (1) and (2)). (shrink)

This book is an ambitious attempt to develop a cognitive approach to religion. Focusing particularly on ritual action, it borrows analytical methods from linguistics and other cognitive sciences. The authors, a philosopher of science and a scholar of comparative religion, provide a lucid critical review of established approaches to the study of religion, and make a strong plea for the combination of interpretation and explanation. Often represented as competitive approaches, they are rather, complementary, equally vital to the study of symbolic (...) systems. (shrink)

First published in Essays: Second Series in 1844, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience” has long been considered an enigmatic touchstone of the Emersonian corpus. This essay seems to point to many difficult—and key—questions as to the aims and implications of Emerson’s literary style, intellectual methods, and philosophical inquiries. Conventionally viewed as evidence of a hinge in Emerson’s intellectual development from youthful innocence to middle-aged experience, this essay has often been understood as an arena for the contestation of Emersonian ideas about self-reliance, (...) philosophical idealism, and self-knowledge; as with ancient gladiatorial spectacles, not all of these ideas may walk out of the arena alive.1 .. (shrink)

Lawson and McCauley have argued that non-cultural regularities in how actions are conceptualized inform and constrain participants' understandings of religious rituals. This theory of ritual competence generates three predictions: 1) People with little or no knowledge of any given ritual system will have intuitions about the potential effectiveness of a ritual given minimal information about the structure of the ritual. 2) The representation of superhuman agency in the action structure will be considered the most important factor contributing to effectiveness. 3) (...) Having an appropriate intentional agent initiate the action will be considered relatively more important than any specific action to be performed. These three predictions were tested in two experiments with 128 North American Protestant college students who rated the probability of various fictitious rituals to be effective in bringing about a specified consequence. Results support Lawson and McCauley's predictions and suggest that expectations regarding ordinary social actions apply to religious rituals. (shrink)

No one owns 'culture' [i]: anyone with a viable theoretical proposal can contend for the right to determine that concept's fate. Not everyone agrees with this view. Throughout its century long struggle for academic respectability, anthropology has regularly insisted on its unique role as the proprietor of 'culture.' Its variety of approaches and feuding factions notwithstanding, it is this proprietary claim that unifies anthropology to an extent sometimes unrecognized even by its own (post modernist) practitioners. The history of anthropology has (...) witnessed at least three important moments in the case for autonomous cultural phenomena based, first, on traditional ontological and methodological presumptions, second, on the hermeneutic turn, and third, on postmodern analyses of discourses and their influences. Historically, anthropologists cite two closely related bases for these proprietary presumptions. The first, which we shall not belabor here, hearkens to inevitably vague discussions about culture's autonomy (with various passes at making sense of the ontological foundations of that alleged autonomy). Cultural anthropologists have advanced such claims for a century, but Geertz' gloss on this topic is representative both in what it endorses and in the vagueness of the grounds for the endorsement. While advancing a host of claims about culture's ontological status (for example, (1) that culture is "ideational," (2) that it, nonetheless, "does not exist in someone's head," (3) that it has the same status -whatever that is -as a Beethoven quartet, and (4) that it is "public"), Geertz insists that "the thing to ask . . . is not what . . . [its] ontological status is." (Geertz 1973: 10 12.) Unfortunately for Geertz and cultural anthropology generally, any convincing case for the autonomy of culture must account for its relations to the things that constitute it. Moreover, because Geertz never relinquishes anthropology's scientific aspirations, the issue of clarifying such ontological questions.... (shrink)

Drawing on philosophy, history, moral psychology, and ethics, this revised and expanded edition of French’s The Code of the Warrior examines historical and contemporary warrior cultures and their values, arguing that today’s warriors need a code, as their ancestors did, to prevent them from crossing the thin but critical line that separates warriors from murderers in the battle against global terrorism.

We question whether Plamondon & Alimi's model is useful in accounting for the nonsymmetrical and multiple-peaked velocity profiles observed in young and elderly subjects for ballistic aiming tasks. For these subjects, both data and observation suggest that a central representation initiates the movement in an appropriate direction but that multiple adjustments are made, both early and late, to achieve spatial accuracy.

This paper is about the semantic analysis of referentially opaque verbs like seek and owe that give rise to nonspecific readings. It is argued that Montague's categorization (based on earlier work by Quine) of opaque verbs as properties of quantifiers runs into two serious difficulties: the first problem is that it does not work with opaque verbs like resemble that resist any lexical decomposition of the seek ap try to find kind; the second one is that it wrongly predicts de (...) dicto (i.e. narrow scope) readings due to quantified noun phrases in the object positions of such verbs. It is shown that both difficulties can be overcome by an analysis of opaque verbs as operating on properties. This is a strongly modified version of a paper entitled lsquoDo We Bear Attitudes towards Quantifiers?rsquo that I have presented at conferences in Gosen (Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft), Ithaca (SALT I), and Konstanz (Lexikon). I owe a special debt to Hans Kamp and Arnim von Stechow for shaping my views on the subject of this paper during the past ten years or so. Comments from and discussions with the following friends and colleagues have also led to considerable improvements: Heinrich Beck, Steve Berman, David Dowty, Veerle van Geenhoven, Fritz Hamm, Irene Heim, Wolfgang Klein, Angelika Kratzer, Michael Morreau, Barbara Partee, Mats Rooth, Roger Schwarzschild, Wolfgang Sternefeld, Emil Weydert, Henk Zeevat, and three referees. (shrink)

We present a new road map for research on “How the Brain Got Language” that adopts an EvoDevoSocio perspective and highlights comparative neuroprimatology – the comparative study of brain, behavior and communication in extant monkeys and great apes – as providing a key grounding for hypotheses on the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys and chimpanzees and the processes which guided the evolution LCA-m → LCA-c → protohumans → H. sapiens. Such research constrains and is constrained by analysis of (...) the subsequent, primarily cultural, evolution of H. sapiens which yielded cultures involving the rich use of language. (shrink)

Un fait Mooréen, selon l'expression de David Lewis, est « l'une des choses que nous savons mieux que toute prémisse d'une argumentation philosophique visant à é tablir le contraire. » Le sujet des faits Mooréens soulève des questions profondes, à la fois de méthode philosophique et d'épistémologie de premier ordre. Comment devrions-nous répondre aux arguments qui remettent en question des croyances dont nous sommes extrêmement confiants ? Dans quelle mesure ces arguments – ou plutôt ceux qui les avancent – peuvent-ils (...) espérer avoir une emprise ou une traction rationnelle sur nous ? Dans quelle mesure, si même c'est le cas, notre point de départ limite-t-il les types de révisions de nos croyances que la philosophie pourrait légitimement inspirer ? Quand sommes-nous justifiés (si jamais nous le sommes) à refuser de se laisser influencer par un argument qui, pour autant qu'on puisse en juger, est sans faille, et quand un tel refus relève-t-il simplement du dogmatisme ? Ce sont là de vastes questions, auxquelles je ne tenterai pas ici de répondre complétement. Mon ambition, plus modeste, est de tenter de progresser sur ces questions, et d'autres questions connexes, en examinant la notion de fait Mooré que je trouve chez Lewis et chez d'autres. (shrink)

The Alternative Model of Personality Disorders integrates several theoretical models of personality functioning, including interpersonal theory. The interpersonal circumplex dimensions of warmth and dominance can be conceptualized as traits similar to those in AMPD Criterion B, but interpersonal theory also offers dynamic hypotheses about how these variables that change from moment to moment, which help to operationalize some of the processes alluded to in AMPD Criterion A. In the psychotherapy literature, dynamic interpersonal behaviors are thought to be critical for identifying (...) therapeutic alliance ruptures, yet few studies have examined moment-to-moment interpersonal behaviors that are associated with alliance ruptures at an idiographic level. The current study examined the concurrent and cross-lagged relationships between interpersonal behaviors and alliance ruptures within each session in the famous Gloria films. Interpersonal behaviors as well as alliance ruptures were calculated at half minute intervals for each dyad. We identified distinct interpersonal patterns associated with alliance ruptures for each session: Gloria ’s warmth was positively related with withdrawal ruptures concurrently in the session with Carl Rogers; Gloria’s dominance and coldness were related with increased confrontation ruptures in the session with Fritz Perls concurrently, while her coldness was also predicted by confrontation ruptures at previous moments; lastly, both Gloria’s dominance and Albert Ellis’s submissiveness were positively related with withdrawal ruptures. These interpersonal patterns demonstrated the promise of using AMPD dimensions to conceptualize momentary interpersonal processes related to therapy ruptures, as well as the clinical importance of attuning to repetitive, dyad-specific interpersonal cues of ruptures within each session. (shrink)

In this thorough compendium, nineteen accomplished scholars explore, in some manner the values they find inherent in the world, their nature, and revelence through the thought of Frederick Ferré. These essays, informed by the insights of Ferré and coming from manifold perspectives—ethics, philosophy, theology, and environmental studies, advance an ambitious challenge to current intellectual and scholarly fashions.

Compared to our understanding of positive prediction error signals occurring due to unexpected reward outcomes, less is known about the neural circuitry in humans that drives negative prediction errors during omission of expected rewards. While classical learning theories such as Rescorla–Wagner or temporal difference learning suggest that both types of prediction errors result from a simple subtraction, there has been recent evidence suggesting that different brain regions provide input to dopamine neurons which contributes to specific components of this prediction error (...) computation. Here, we focus on the brain regions responding to negative prediction error signals, which has been well-established in animal studies to involve a distinct pathway through the lateral habenula. We examine the activity of this pathway in humans, using a conditioned inhibition paradigm with high-resolution functional MRI. First, participants learned to associate a sensory stimulus with reward delivery. Then, reward delivery was omitted whenever this stimulus was presented simultaneously with a different sensory stimulus, the conditioned inhibitor. Both reward presentation and the reward-predictive cue activated midbrain dopamine regions, insula and orbitofrontal cortex. While we found significant activity at an uncorrected threshold for the CI in the habenula, consistent with our predictions, it did not survive correction for multiple comparisons and awaits further replication. Additionally, the pallidum and putamen regions of the basal ganglia showed modulations of activity for the inhibitor that did not survive the corrected threshold. (shrink)

The present work is a study of the method of contemporary Soviet philosophy. By "Soviet philosophy" we mean philosophy as published in the Soviet Union. For practical purposes we have limited our attention to Soviet sources in Russian in spite of the fact that Soviet philosophical works are also published in other languages (see B 2029(21)(38». The term "method" is taken in the sense usual in Western books on methodology .1 In view of the content of the first chapter it (...) will be useful to explain the last term a little more fully. By method we mean a procedure and it is obvious that the principles according to which a procedure is carried out are rules, i.e. imperatives, which tell us not what is but what should be done. Such imperatives mayor may not be connected with and founded on certain descriptive statements (the fact that every rule of formal logic is based on a corresponding law has been well-known since Husserl's "Logische Unter suchungen" and is generally accepted in contemporary logic), but such a foundation is irrelevant to a methodological study. The object of such a study is to find out what these rules are, why they are accepted and how they are inter-connected and applied. This is how methodology - the science of method - is conceived in Western treatises on the subject and this is also the standpoint assumed here. (shrink)

This collection of essays by leading American philosophers honors John E. Smith, a major figure in the struggle for the American profession of philosophy to redefine itself and return to its grander traditions.

While almost everyone has heard of human rights, few will have reflected in depth on what human rights are, where they originate from and what they mean. A Philosophical Introduction to Human Rights – accessibly written without being superficial – addresses these questions and provides a multifaceted introduction to legal philosophy. The point of departure is the famous 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which provides a frame for engagement with western legal philosophy. Thomas Mertens sketches the philosophical and (...) historical background of the Declaration, discusses the ten most important human rights with the help of key philosophers, and ends by reflecting on the relationship between rights and duties. The basso continuo of the book is a particular world view derived from Immanuel Kant. 'Unsocial sociability' is what characterises humans, i.e. the tension between man's individual and social nature. Some human rights emphasize the first, others the second aspect. The tension between these two aspects plays a fundamental role in how human rights are interpreted and applied. (shrink)

La guerre peut-elle être un objet de la philosophie? Si la réalité guerrière obsède les philosophes, elle leur oppose néanmoins une résistance permanente. En parcourant les représentations de la guerre produites de Platon à Clausewitz, et en mettant à nu les stratégies constantes et les impensés qui les sous-tendent, on constate que le philosophe n'a cessé de manquer un enjeu guerrier qu'il ne peut toucher qu'en le neutralisant. Quelques figures à la fois persistantes et exclues de ces philosophies de la (...) guerre - l'esclave, le pirate, le colonisé..., de même que des pratiques philosophiques restées plus marginales - la pensée romaine, le matérialisme machiavélien, la déconstruction..., permettent cependant de bousculer ce discours neutralisant et, ce faisant, de révéler une certaine compromission de la philosophie dans la guerre."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The development of a `theory of mind' may not only be important for understanding the minds of others but also for using one's own mind. To investigate this supposition, forty children between the ages of three and four were given false-belief and creativity tasks. The numbers of appropriate and of original responses in the creativity test were found to correlate positively with performance on false-belief tasks. This association was robust, as it continued to be strong and significant even when age (...) and verbal intelligence were partialled out. The results support the hypothesis that the metarepresentational skills involved in theory of mind also affect the way children can access and scan their own mental repertoire beyond the areas of currently activated content (i.e. divergent thinking). With the advent of theory of mind a basic cognitive shift takes place in human development, and possibly took place in cognitive evolution. (shrink)

Thomas E. Hill, Jr.; Servility and Self-Respect, The Monist, Volume 57, Issue 1, 1 January 1973, Pages 87–104, https://doi.org/10.5840/monist197357135.