The sense of touch informs us of the physical properties of our surroundings and is a critical aspect of communication. Before touches are perceived, mechanical signals are transmitted quickly and reliably from the skin's surface to mechano‐electrical transduction channels embedded within specialized sensory neurons. We are just beginning to understand how soft tissues participate in force transmission and how they are deformed. Here, we review empirical and theoretical studies of single molecules and molecular ensembles thought to be involved in mechanotransmission (...) and apply the concepts emerging from this work to the sense of touch. We focus on the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a well‐studied model for touch sensation in which mechanics can be studied on the molecular, cellular, and systems level. Finally, we conclude that force transmission is an emergent property of macromolecular cellular structures that mutually stabilize one another. (shrink)

Stanley Cavell has been a brilliant, idiosyncratic, and controversial presence in American philosophy, literary criticism, and cultural studies for years. Even as he continues to produce new writing of a high standard--an example of which is included in this collection--his work has elicited responses from a new generation of writers in Europe and America. This collection showcases this new work, while illustrating the variety of Cavell's interests.

Much of the scientific work on emotion regulation has examined strategies in isolation. Now that we have a better understanding of emotion regulatory strategy use and frequency, there is an opportunity to explore new psychological territory. As a starting point, we illustrate how a highly touted strategy, cognitive reappraisal, supercharges a critical component of well-being: purpose in life. We also examine how purpose in life offers a framework to better understand when and how cognitive reappraisal is adaptive. Examining emotion regulation (...) in the context of a sense of purpose in life opens portals to new questions and testable hypotheses. We end with a reconsideration of emotion regulation flexibility over hyper specialization on singular strategies such as reappraisal. Our aim is to inspire research that examines how emotion regulation facilitates or hinders important elements of the good life, as well as how elements of well-being inform regulation choice and success. (shrink)

We summarize the recent progress made by probabilistic programming as a unifying formalism for the probabilistic, symbolic, and data-driven aspects of human cognition. We highlight differences with meta-learning in flexibility, statistical assumptions and inferences about cogniton. We suggest that the meta-learning approach could be further strengthened by considering Connectionist and Bayesian approaches, rather than exclusively one or the other.

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 574-601, July 2022.

Russell Goodman tells the story of the development of philosophy in America from the mid-18th century to the late 19th century. The key figures in this story, Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the writers of The Federalist, and the romantics Emerson and Thoreau, were not professors but men of the world, whose deep formative influence on American thought brought philosophy together with religion, politics, and literature.

This article proposes a new model of human concept learning that provides a rational analysis of learning feature‐based concepts. This model is built upon Bayesian inference for a grammatically structured hypothesis space—a concept language of logical rules. This article compares the model predictions to human generalization judgments in several well‐known category learning experiments, and finds good agreement for both average and individual participant generalizations. This article further investigates judgments for a broad set of 7‐feature concepts—a more natural setting in several (...) ways—and again finds that the model explains human performance. (shrink)

This 2002 book explores Wittgenstein's long engagement with the work of the pragmatist William James. In contrast to previous discussions Russell Goodman argues that James exerted a distinctive and pervasive positive influence on Wittgenstein's thought. For example, the book shows that the two philosophers share commitments to anti-foundationalism, to the description of the concrete details of human experience, to the priority of practice over intellect, and to the importance of religion in understanding human life. Considering in detail what Wittgenstein (...) learnt from his reading of Principles of Psychology and Varieties of Religious Experience the author provides considerable evidence for Wittgenstein's claim that he is saying 'something that sounds like pragmatism'. This provocative account of the convergence in the thinking of two major philosophers usually considered as members of discrete traditions will be eagerly sought by students of Wittgenstein, William James, pragmatism and the history of twentieth-century philosophy. (shrink)

Recent conversations with friends and students about Emerson’s essay on friendship lead me to suspect that at least some of you will find Emerson’s views so strange or radical as not to be about friendship at all. Others will be struck by his anticipations of Nietzsche, whose name I introduce here because like Nietzsche, who read him carefully, Emerson is a genealogist and refashioner of morals. When Emerson criticizes our normal friendships by writing that we mostly “descend to meet,” he (...) is recording the possibility, indeed with the word “mostly,” the actuality, of something better than what normally passes for friendship. If Emerson finds our friendships disappointing, that is because he thinks that friendship is a high, demanding virtue. In its best actualizations, it carries “the world for me,” as he puts it, “to new and noble depths, and enlarge[s] the meaning of all my thoughts.” It has the capacity to break down the barriers between people, canceling “the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, sex, circumstance.” Friendship is thus a great unifier, a servant of what Emerson calls the “Over-Soul” or “Unity” (CW 2:115). But, as Emerson says in his essay on “Montaigne: or the Skeptic,” “there are doubts.” These doubts about friendships are my main subject in the following essay. (shrink)

This paper reports the preliminary findings of an analysis of the Moray House (verbal IQ) results of a base sample of 4383 Orkney children due to be tested in the schools at age 11±1[fraction one-half] years in 1947–75. Girls enjoy a 3·63% premium relative to phenotypically equivalent boys at test age. Relationships within the sample, which includes some members of the parental generation, are known. The trait is found to be X-linked, with nine phenotypes in the boys, and lyonization is (...) involved. (shrink)

This paper considers some sources, mostly within the pragmatist tradition, for the full-fledged pragmatism that Putnam set out in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in The Many Faces of Realism and Realism with a Human Face. In considering Putnam's views about metaphysics, I pay particular attention to his pluralism , which I trace back through Nelson Goodman to William James. In considering Putnam's idea that facts and values are intertwined, I discuss both John Dewey and that neglected middle-generation pragmatist, (...) C. I. Lewis. I briefly consider James's essay "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," where metaphysical pluralism and a pluralistic ethics of toleration come together, and I conclude with some suggestions about the relation of Putnam's pragmatism to the very different American philosophy developed by his Harvard colleague Stanley Cavell. (shrink)

I've been teaching Wittgenstein's On Certainty lately, and coming again to the question of Wittgenstein's relation to pragmatism.1 This is of course a question Wittgenstein raises himself when he writes in the middle of that work: 'So I am trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism'.2 He adds to this sentence the claim that 'Here I am being thwarted by a kind of Weltanschauung', but in the remarks to follow I want to focus not on Wittgenstein's differences from or (...) antipathy to pragmatism, nor on the world view that he felt thwarted him, but on those elements of his philosophy that sound like pragmatism-as he says. I will work primarily from On Certainty but also from the Philosophical Investigations, which intersects with that late, unfinished work at various places, and which also, at times, sounds like pragmatism. (shrink)

_Examines the implications of Aristotle’s political thought for contemporary political theory._.

Professional philosophers have tended either to shrug off American philosophy as negligible or derivative or to date American philosophy from the work of twentieth century analytical positivists such as Quine. Russell Goodman expands on the revisionist position developed by Stanley Cavell, that the most interesting strain of American thought proceeds not from Puritan theology or from empirical science but from a peculiarly American kind of Romanticism. This insight leads Goodman, through Cavell, back to Emerson and Thoreau and thence (...) to William James and John Dewey, as they assimilated to American circumstances and intellectual habits the currents of European thought from Kant to Wittgenstein. (shrink)

In this paper I reconsider James and Wittgenstein, not in the quest for what Wittgenstein might have learned from James, or for an answer to the question whether Wittgenstein was a pragmatist, but in an effort to see what these and other related but quite different thinkers can help us to see about animals, including ourselves. I follow Cora Diamond’s lead in discussing a late paper by Vicki Hearne entitled “A Taxonomy of Knowing: Animals Captive, Free-Ranging, and at Liberty”, which (...) draws on Wittgenstein and offers some insights that accord with pragmatist accounts of knowledge. (shrink)

Thirty-eight individuals (mean age: 34.8 years old) participating in a 3-month yoga and meditation retreat were assessed before and after the intervention for psychometric measures, brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), circadian salivary cortisol levels, and pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines. Participation in the retreat was found to be associated with decreases in self-reported anxiety and depression as well as increases in mindfulness. As hypothesized, increases in the plasma levels of BDNF and increases in the magnitude of the cortisol awakening response (CAR) (...) were also observed. The normalized change in BDNF levels was inversely correlated with BSI-18 anxiety scores at both the pre-retreat (r = 0.40, p < 0.05) and post-retreat (r = 0.52, p < 0.005) such that those with greater anxiety scores tended to exhibit smaller pre- to post-retreat increases in plasma BDNF levels. In line with a hypothesized decrease in inflammatory processes resulting from the yoga and meditation practices, we found that the plasma level of the anti-inflammatory cytokine Interleukin-10 was increased and the pro-inflammatory cytokine Interleukin-12 was reduced after the retreat. Contrary to our initial hypotheses, plasma levels of other pro-inflammatory cytokines, including Interferon Gamma (IFN-γ), Tumor Necrosis Factor (TNF-α), Interleukin-1β (IL-1β), Interleukin-6 (IL-6), and Interleukin-8 (IL-8) were increased after the retreat. Given evidence from previous studies of the positive effects of meditative practices on mental fitness, autonomic homeostasis and inflammatory status, we hypothesize that these findings are related to the meditative practices throughout the retreat; however, some of the observed changes may also be related to other aspects of the retreat such as physical exercise-related components of the yoga practice and diet. We hypothesize that the patterns of change observed here reflect mind-body integration and well-being. The increased BDNF levels observed is a potential mediator between meditative practices and brain health, the increased CAR is likely a reflection of increased dynamic physiological arousal, and the relationship of the dual enhancement of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokine changes to healthy immunologic functioning is discussed. (shrink)

Russell Goodman examines the curious reemergence of pragmatism in a field dominated in the past decades by phenomenology, logic, positivism, and deconstruction. With contributions from major contemporary and classical thinkers such as Cornel West, Richard Rorty, Nancy Fraser, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Ralph Waldo Emerson Russell has gathered an impressive chorus of philosophical voices that reexamine the origins and complexities of neo-pragmatism. The contributors discuss the relationship between pragmatism and literary theory, phenomenology, existentialism, and the work of Ralph Waldo (...) Emerson. They question the meaning of pragmatics, what it is to be practical, and ask provocative questions such as: what is reading? and whether or not democracy is a precondition for the functioning of intelligence. This work places this reemergent and interesting neo-development in its proper context and will provide readers with a strong sense of the movement's foundations, history, and subtlities. (shrink)

In many learning or inference tasks human behavior approximates that of a Bayesian ideal observer, suggesting that, at some level, cognition can be described as Bayesian inference. However, a number of findings have highlighted an intriguing mismatch between human behavior and standard assumptions about optimality: People often appear to make decisions based on just one or a few samples from the appropriate posterior probability distribution, rather than using the full distribution. Although sampling-based approximations are a common way to implement Bayesian (...) inference, the very limited numbers of samples often used by humans seem insufficient to approximate the required probability distributions very accurately. Here, we consider this discrepancy in the broader framework of statistical decision theory, and ask: If people are making decisions based on samples—but as samples are costly—how many samples should people use to optimize their total expected or worst-case reward over a large number of decisions? We find that under reasonable assumptions about the time costs of sampling, making many quick but locally suboptimal decisions based on very few samples may be the globally optimal strategy over long periods. These results help to reconcile a large body of work showing sampling-based or probability matching behavior with the hypothesis that human cognition can be understood in Bayesian terms, and they suggest promising future directions for studies of resource-constrained cognition. (shrink)

The essay begins with a history of the term pluralism, the philosophical uses of which owe much to William James. Following Jean Wahl and others, we can distinguish various senses of the term in James’s writings, including the metaphysical theses that human action is not fully determined, and that the world contains a multiplicity of unique entities that cannot be fully described in concepts. On the epistemological front, James embraces scheme pluralism, the view that there are many correct schemes for (...) describing the universe. According to James’s vertical scheme pluralism, there are different non-rival schemes, for example those of mathematics, ethics, and the consular service. According to his horizontal scheme pluralism there can be more than one correct account of how things are in any given domain. James also embraces ethical pluralism, the thesis that there are different reasonable or valid systems of values, and point of view pluralism, that claim that there are many legitimate but—at least in some cases—incommensurable points of view on the universe. James is particularly interested in the cases of human/human, human/animal, and human/higher consciousness points of view. The essay traces the development of James’s views about pluralism from the early eighteen eighties onward, including the essays collected in The Will to Believe (1897), his lecture “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (1899) Pragmatism (1907), and from the last years of his life, A Pluralistic Universe (1909), “A Pluralistic Mystic” (1910), Some Problems of Philosophy (1911). It concludes with a brief discussion of contemporary pluralism in the work of Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, and others. (shrink)

Drawing upon two independent national samples of 201 and 241 psychology graduate students, this article describes the development and psychometric evaluation of 4 Web-based student self-report scales tapping student socialization in the responsible conduct of research (RCR) with human participants. The Mentoring the Responsible Conduct of Research Scale (MRCR) is composed of 2 subscales assessing RCR instruction and modeling by research mentors. The 2 subscales of the RCR Department Climate Scale (RCR-DC) assess RCR department policies and faculty and student RCR (...) practices. The RCR Preparedness scale (RCR-P) and the RCR Field Integrity scale (RCR-FI) measure respectively students' confidence in their ability to conduct research responsibly and their belief in the RCR integrity of psychology as a discipline. Factor analysis, coefficient alphas, correlations, and multiple regression analyses demonstrated each of the scales had good internal consistency and concurrent and construct validity. (shrink)