People are biased toward beliefs that are welcomed by their in-group. Some beliefs produced by these biases—such as climate change denial and religious belief—can be fruitfully modeled by signaling theory. The idea is that the beliefs function so as to be detected by others and manipulate their behavior, primarily for the benefits that accrue from favorable tribal self-presentation. Signaling theory can explain the etiology, distinctive form, proper function, and alterability of these beliefs.

Recently, Doolittle and Inkpen formulated a thought provoking theory, asserting that evolution by natural selection was responsible for the sideways evolution of two radically different kinds of selective units (also called Domains). The former entities, termed singers, correspond to the usual objects studied by evolutionary biologists (gene, genomes, individuals, species, etc.), whereas the later, termed songs, correspond to re‐produced biological and ecosystemic functions, processes, information, and memes. Singers perform songs through selected patterns of interactions, meaning that a wealth of critical (...) phenomena might receive novel evolutionary explanations. However, this theory did not provide an empirical approach to study evolution in such a broadened context. Here, we show that analyzing songs and singers, using patterns of interaction networks as a common ontology for both, offers a novel, actionable, inclusive and mathematical way to analyze not only the re‐production but also the evolution and fitness of biological and ecosystemic interconnected processes. (shrink)

There is much to admire in this book. It is written in a pleasingly straightforward style, and offers insight on a wide range of important issues.

This paper explains Sophie de Grouchy’s philosophical debts to Adam Smith. I have three main reasons for this: first, it should explain why eighteenth-century philosophical feminists found Smith, who has—to put it mildly—not been a focus of much recent feminist admiration, a congenial starting point for their own thinking; second, it illuminates De Grouchy’s considerable philosophical originality, especially her important, overlooked contributions to political theory; third, it is designed to remove some unfortunate misconceptions that have found their way into Karin (...) Brown’s ‘Introduction’ to the recent and much-to-be-welcomed translation of Sophie de Grouchy’s Lettres Sur La Sympathie. While Brown claims that there are major ‘differences’ in their programs of ‘social reform’, I argue there are important commonalities between Smith and De Grouchy. In particular, I highlight how they share a common understanding of how human sensibilities are shaped by social institutions and I show that De Grouchy’s path-breaking analysis of negative and positive liberty is grounded in her extension of Smith’s political theory and moral psychology. (shrink)

Recent attempts to define being moved have difficulties agreeing on its eliciting conditions. The status quaestionis is often summarized as a question of whether the emotion is evoked by exemplifications of a wide range of positive core values or a more restricted set of values associated with attachment. This conclusion is premature. Study participants associate being moved with interactions with their loved ones not merely for what they exemplify but also for their affective bond to them. Being moved is elicited (...) when we apprehend the value of entities to which we are connected through basic as well as extended forms of affiliative attachment. These comprise people, certain objects, and even abstract entities, including the unshakable life-guiding ideas we call “core values.”. (shrink)

The prosaic content of these sayings is that events change from future to present and from present to past. Your next birthday is in the future, but with the passage of time it draws nearer and nearer until it is present. 24 hours later it will be in the past, and then lapse forever deeper into history. And things get older: even if they don’t wear out or lose their hair or change in any other way, their chronological age is (...) always increasing. These changes are universal and inescapable: no event could ever fail to be first future, then present, then past, and no persisting thing can avoid growing older. We call this process time’s passage. (shrink)

What is a temporal part? Most accounts explain it in terms of timeless parthood: a thing's having a part without temporal qualification. Some find this hard to understand, and thus find the view that persisting things have temporal parts--fourdimensionalism--unintelligible. T. Sider offers to help by defining temporal parthood in terms of a thing's having a part at a time. I argue that no such account can capture the notion of a temporal part that figures in orthodox four-dimensionalism: temporal parts must (...) be timeless parts. This enables us to state four-dimensionalism more clearly. (shrink)

Differing views on reduction are briefly reviewed and a suggestion is made for a working definition of 'approximate reduction'. Ab initio studies in quantum chemistry are then considered, including the issues of convergence and error bounds. This includes an examination of the classic studies on CH2 and the recent work on the Si2C molecule. I conclude that chemistry has not even been approximately reduced.

E. J. Lowe and others argue that there can be 'uncountable' things admitting of no numerical description. This implies that there can be something without there being at least one such thing, and that things can be identical without being one or nonidentical without being two. The clearest putative example of uncountable things is portions of homogeneous stuff or 'gunk'. The paper argues that there is a number of portions of gunk if there is any gunk at all, and that (...) the possibility of uncountable things is inadequately supported. (shrink)

I defend a how-possibly argument for Kantian (or Kant*-ian) transcendental idealism, drawing on concepts from David Chalmers, Nick Bostrom, and the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. If we are artificial intelligences living in a virtual reality instantiated on a giant computer, then the fundamental structure of reality might be very different than we suppose. Indeed, since computation does not require spatial properties, spatiality might not be a feature of things as they are in themselves but instead only the way that (...) things necessarily appear to us. It might seem unlikely that we are living in a virtual reality instantiated on a non-spatial computer. However, understanding this possibility can help us appreciate the merits of transcendental idealism in general, as well as transcendental idealism’s underappreciated skeptical consequences. (shrink)

Is wisdom a virtue? I think it is and also that it is an important virtue. But, it should be granted at the outset that the claim is controversial, that there are philosophers who either do not think of wisdom as a virtue1, or do not think of it as relevantly similar to other virtues. For example, Stanley Godlovitch comments: Wisdom sits alone. We cannot rehearse or practice it. We cannot be prompted to assume it—wheth er for our sake or (...) for the sake of others. We cannot expect, should we be in possession of it, to win friends and influence people. Wisdom calls into prominence a state of mind rather than a readiness to act in specified ways. As such, its status as a virtue must remain rather aloof.2. (shrink)

Un examen de la division quasi officielle du monde philosophique en deux blocs : phénoménologique et analytique. Bilan de ses prolongements en France ces vingt dernières années.

In a survey on research misconduct, roughly 20% of the respondents admitted that they have submitted federal grant proposals that include scholars as research participants even though those scholars were not expected to contribute to the research effort. This manuscript argues that adding such false investigators is illegal, violating multiple federal statutes including the False Statements Act, the False Claims Act, and False, Fictitious, or Fraudulent Claims. Moreover, it is not only the offending academics and the false investigators that face (...) civil and criminal penalties because administrators may also be liable if they sign off on proposals and are in a position to know that false investigators might be included. Policy recommendations that should reduce the use of false investigators include changing institutional cultures, better training and oversight of the responsible conduct of research, and, most importantly, making all grant reviews double blind. (shrink)

Research on the perception of silence has led to insights regarding its positive effects on individuals. We conducted a series of studies during which individuals were exposed to several minutes of silence in different contexts. Participants were introduced to different social and environmental settings, either in a seminar room at a university or in a city garden, alone or in a group. Instructions across studies varied, as participants were exposed to real waiting situations, were asked to just think and to (...) explicitly experience the time interval without further instructions or following a session of Depth Relaxation Music Therapy (DRMT)/ Hypnomusictherapy (HMT). Silence was judged to significantly increase relaxation, improve mood states, and alter the perception of time and the orientation towards the present moment. We controlled for influences of trait variables, such as impulsivity, mindfulness, daydreaming, and time perspective. Findings empirically demonstrate that exposure to silence can be effective in therapeutic and educational contexts to promote relaxation and well-being. (shrink)

Common knowledge, intersubjectivity, and false intersubjective beliefs -- Détente -- The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty -- The decline of détente.

Common understandings of neuroethics, i.e., of its distinctive nature, are premised on two distinct sets of claims: (1) neuroscience can change views about the nature of ethics itself and neuroethics is dedicated to reaping such an understanding of ethics; (2) neuroscience poses challenges distinct from other areas of medicine and science and neuroethics tackles those issues. Critiques have rightfully challenged both claims, stressing how the first may lead to problematic forms of reductionism while the second relies on debatable assumptions about (...) the nature of bioethics specialization and development. Informed by philosophical pragmatism and our experience in neuroethics, we argue that these claims are ill-founded and should give way to pragmatist reconstructions. Namely, neuroscience, much like other areas of empirical research on morality, can provide useful information about the nature of morally problematic situations but it does not need to promise radical and sweeping changes to ethics based on neuroscientism. Furthermore, the rationale for the development of neuroethics as a specialized field need not to be premised on the distinctive nature of the issues it tackles or of neurotechnologies. Rather, it can espouse an understanding of neuroethics as both a scholarly and a practical endeavor dedicated to resolving a series of problematic situations raised by neurological and psychiatric conditions. (shrink)

Recent work in the cognitive sciences has argued that beliefs sometimes acquire signaling functions in virtue of their ability to reveal information that manipulates “mindreaders.” This paper sketches some of the evolutionary and design considerations that could take agents from solipsistic goal pursuit to beliefs that serve as social signals. Such beliefs will be governed by norms besides just the traditional norms of epistemology. As agents become better at detecting the agency of others, either through evolutionary history or individual learning, (...) the candidate pool for signaling expands. This logic holds for natural and artificial agents that find themselves in recurring social situations that reward the sharing of one’s thoughts. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a novel interpretation of Antoine Arnauld’s conception of God, namely a ‘partially hidden’ conception of God. I focus on divine simplicity and whether God acts for reasons. I argue that Arnauld holds the view that: God, God’s action and God’s attributes are (i) identical, and (ii) conceptually distinct, but that (iii) there are no conceptual priorities among them. Next, I argue that Arnauld’s view about whether God has any type of reasons is agnosticism, but that (...) there are certain types of reasons we know that God does not have, e.g., practical reasons. (shrink)

The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind. . ???aop.label???

I argue that it is rational and appropriate for atheists to give thanks to deep impersonal agents for the benefits they give to us. These agents include our evolving biosphere, the sun, and our finely-tuned universe. Atheists can give thanks to evolution by sacrificially burning works of art. They can give thanks to the sun by performing rituals in solar calendars. They can give thanks to our finely-tuned universe, and to existence itself, by doing science and philosophy. But these linguistic (...) types of thanks-giving are forms of non-theistic contemplative prayer. Since these behaviors resemble ancient pagan behaviors, it is fair to call them pagan. Atheistic paganism may be part of an emerging ecosystem of naturalistic religions. (shrink)

Uncertainty and affect are fundamental and interrelated aspects of the human condition. Uncertainty is often associated with negative affect, but in some circumstances it is associated with positive affect. In this paper, we review different explanations for the varying relationship between uncertainty and affect. We identify “mental simulation” as a key process that links uncertainty to affective states. We suggest that people have a propensity to simulate negative outcomes, which results in a propensity towards negative affective responses to uncertainty. We (...) also propose the existence of several important moderators of this process, including context and individual differences such as uncertainty tolerance, as well as emotion regulation strategies. Finally, we highlight important knowledge gaps and promising areas for future research, both empirical and conceptual, to further elucidate the relationship between uncertainty and affect. (shrink)

This book analyzes crucial episodes in the history of American higher education in order to discover the best way to rescue the humanities. It urges apologists to stop focusing on the humanistic disciplines as inculcators of poorly defined skills and envisions a globalized approach to education based on humanistic masterworks.

This article addresses the place of situationist ideas in the current drive to make meaningful social and political change to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change. After a brief review of some key situationist concepts, the article shows how situationist thinkers post-1968 saw the prospect of environmental degradation as one of the key consequences of the social apathy induced by the spectacle and the grim prospects for the prevailing liberal assemblage of power to address the problem. The article concludes (...) by briefly discussing the place of a situationist-inspired environmentalism in the larger debates about radical solutions to climate change. (shrink)

The will to power has non-trivial physical models taken from the class of parallel dis¬tributed processing systems, specifically wave-mechanical discrete dynamical systems with cyclical entropy. The will to power is thus linked to research in non-linear self-organizing dynami¬cal systems, includ¬ing oscillons, cellular automata, spin-glasses, Ising systems, and connectionist networks.

The idea that there is incommensurability in science has been controversial since its popularization by Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. While incommensurability in science does have significant implications for understanding science and its development, much of the controversy about incommensurability appears to be at least in part due to a lack of clarity about exactly what is being claimed, what that claim implies, and how the claim is justified. This can easily be seen in recent literature, which has continued to (...) struggle to delineate a coherent account of incommensurability in science, with some opponents attempting to undercut its legitimacy entirely, and others attempting to accept it in some weakened form, so as to downplay its significance for our understanding of science. For this reason, a clear, precise and unambiguous statement of incommensurability, its causes, consequences and implications may help to demystify something that has proven to be especially difficult to pin down. The remainder of the paper attempts to explain much of the confusion surrounding incommensurability on the basis of metaincommensurability, in an attempt to expose the exact nature of the relationship between incommensurability and scientific realism more clearly. (shrink)

The overriding question Stroud confronts in John Dewey and the Artful Life is how to render more of life’s experiences, including the ensuing benefits, as aesthetic or artful as possible. The answer to this question is challenging and complex. The claim most aesthetic theories make is that an object, activity, or experience is artful if and only if it has intrinsic value. Although what constitutes intrinsic value is widely contested, having value in and of itself is a necessary and sufficient (...) condition for an object to be art or an experience aesthetic. This value gives art and aesthetic experience their unique quality and separates them from everyday objects, activities and experiences with only instrumental... (shrink)

Does a penny viewed at an angle in some sense look elliptical, as though projected on a two-dimensional surface? Many philosophers have said such things, from Malebranche (1674/1997) and Hume (1739/1978), through early 20th-century sense-data theorists, to Tye (2000) and Noë (2004). I confess that it doesn't seem this way to me, though I'm somewhat baffled by the phenomenology and pessimistic about our ability to resolve the dispute. I raise geometrical complaints against the view and conjecture that views of this (...) sort draw some of their appeal from over-analogizing visual experience to painting or photography. Theorists writing in contexts where vision is typically analogized to less-projective media--wax signet impressions in ancient Greece, stereoscopy in introspective psychology circa 1900--are substantially less likely to attribute such projective distortions to visual appearances. (shrink)

In this philosophy classic, which was first published in 1951, E. R. Dodds takes on the traditional view of Greek culture as a triumph of rationalism. Using the analytical tools of modern anthropology and psychology, Dodds asks, "Why should we attribute to the ancient Greeks an immunity from 'primitive' modes of thought which we do not find in any society open to our direct observation?" Praised by reviewers as "an event in modern Greek scholarship" and "a book which it would (...) be difficult to over-praise," _The Greeks and the Irrational _was Volume 25 of the Sather Classical Lectures series. (shrink)