This book develops a novel approach to distributed cognition and collective intentionality. It is argued that collective mentality should be only be posited where specialized subroutines are integrated in a way that yields skillful, goal-directed behavior that is sensitive to concerns that are relevant to a group as such.

While the balance between individual privacy and government monitoring or corporate surveillance has been a frequent topic across numerous disciplines, the issue of privacy within the family has been largely ignored in recent privacy debates. Yet privacy intrusions between parents and children or between adult partners or spouses can be just as profound as those found in the more “public spheres” of life. Popular access to increasingly sophisticated forms of electronic surveillance technologies has altered the dynamics of family relationships. Monitoring, (...) mediated and facilitated by practices of both covert and overt electronic surveillance, has changed the nature of privacy within the family. Parents are tracking children via GPS-enabled cell phone tracking software and are monitoring the Internet use of family members. Parents, siblings, and children are also posting information about their family members online, often without consent, and are creating social media profiles for others online. Prior scholarly work in philosophy and law has primarily addressed the privacy of children from third parties, usually commercial entities, and in the context of making medical decisions. Less attention has been directed at exploring a more general right of privacy of one family member against parents, siblings, children, or spouses. In this article, we do just that. We consider several moral rules that determine appropriate privacy boundaries within the family. More specifically, we will consider when overt or covert surveillance of a child, spouse, or partner by an adult family member is morally permitted. (shrink)

Explaining Social Behavior: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences JON ELSTER Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007484 pages, ISBN: 0521777445 (pbk); $27.99 Explaining Social Be...

We motivate five constraints on theorizing about sensory experience. We then propose a novel form of naturalistic intentionalism that succeeds where other theories fail by satisfying all of these constraints. On the proposed theory, which we call structure matching tracking intentionalism, brains states track determinables. Internal structural features of those states select determinates of those determinables for presentation in experience. We argue that this theory is distinctively well-positioned to both explain internal-phenomenal structural correlations and accord external features a role in (...) fixing phenomenology. In addition, we use the theory to shed light on how one comes to experience “missing shades”. (shrink)

Papers in experimental philosophy rarely offer an account of what it would take to reveal a philosophically significant effect. In part, this is because experimental philosophers tend to pay insufficient attention to the hierarchy of models that would be required to justify interpretations of their data; as a result, some of their most exciting claims fail as explanations. But this does not impugn experimental philosophy. My aim is to show that experimental philosophy could be made more successful by developing, articulating, (...) and advancing plausible models of the data that are collected and the analyses that are employed. (shrink)

Recent behavioral experiments, along with imaging experiments and neuropsychological studies appear to support the hypothesis that emotions play a causal or constitutive role in moral judgment. Those who resist this hypothesis tend to suggest that affective mechanisms are better suited to play a modulatory role in moral cognition. But I argue that claims about the role of emotion in moral cognition frame the debate in ways that divert attention away from other plausible hypotheses. I suggest that the available data may (...) be more plausibly explained by appeal to predictive and evaluative mechanisms, which are neither wholly affective nor straightforwardly cognitive. By recognizing this fact, we can begin to see why questions about the role of emotion in moral psychology are likely to be empirically misguided. (shrink)

Some people succeed in adopting feminist ideals in spite of the prevalence of asymmetric power relations. However, those who adopt such ideals face a number of psychological difficulties in inhibiting stereotype-based judgments. I argue that a Spinozan theory of belief fixation offers a more complete understanding of the mechanisms that underwrite our intuitive stereotype-based judgments. I also argue that a Spinozan theory of belief fixation offers resources for avoiding stereotype-based judgments where they are antecedently recognized to be pernicious and insidious. (...) Key Words: Spinozan theory of mind • stereotypes • feminism • dual-process theory. (shrink)

In this article, I defend a neuro-Yogacara framework that is based on an understanding of allostatic regulation, and organized around the following four philosophical claims: 1) experience is shaped, in deep and pervasive ways, by a person’s history and their ecological and social context; 2) each moment of experience occurs amid an ongoing flow of conscious activity, which reflects the attempt to integrate diverse sensory and cognitive experiences into a subjective awareness of a world; 3) every claim about a specific (...) feature of experience is an abstraction, which only makes sense within the context of a complex and multidimensional experience of a world; and 4) the experience of being a self, in a world, is malleable. (shrink)

This Article presents an innovative institutional strategy for global climate protection, quite distinct from, but ultimately complementary to and supportive of the currently stalled UNFCCC climate treaty negotiations. The bottom-up strategy relies on a variety of smallerscale transnational cooperative arrangements, involving not only states but sub-national jurisdictions, firms, and CSOs, to undertake activities whose primary goal is not climate mitigation but which will achieve greenhouse gas reductions as an inherent byproduct. This strategy avoids the inherent problems in securing an enforceable (...) treaty to secure the global public good of climate protection by mobilizing other incentives - including economic self-interest, energy security, cleaner air, and furtherance of international development - to motivate such actors to cooperate on actions that will also benefit the climate. These bottom-up regimes will contribute to global climate action not only by achieving emissions reductions in the short-term, but also by linking the bottom-up regimes to the UNFCCC system through greenhouse gas monitoring and reporting systems. In these ways, the bottom-up strategy will help secure eventual agreement on a global climate treaty. (shrink)

Critics of functionalism about the mind often rely on the intuition that collectivities cannot be conscious in motivating their positions. In this paper, we consider the merits of appealing to the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity. We demonstrate that collective mentality is not an affront to commonsense, and we report evidence that demonstrates that the intuition that there is nothing that it’s like to be a collectivity is, to some extent, culturally specific rather (...) than universally held. This being the case, we argue that mere appeal to the intuitive implausibility of collective consciousness does not offer any genuine insight into the nature of mentality in general, nor the nature of consciousness in particular. (shrink)

Bryce, Ian As part of the CAHS Convention in May this year, I organised a Panel discussion entitled 'Ethics Education Initiatives in Australia'. It was to take advantage of the presence in Sydney of Humanist Society delegates from interstate, and acquaint them with the success story of the NSW Primary Ethics program.

Developmental psychologists have long argued that the capacity to distinguish moral and conventional transgressions develops across cultures and emerges early in life. Children reliably treat moral transgressions as more wrong, more punishable, independent of structures of authority, and universally applicable. However, previous studies have not yet examined the role of these features in mature moral cognition. Using a battery of adult-appropriate cases (including vehicular and sexual assault, reckless behavior, and violations of etiquette and social contracts) we demonstrate that these features (...) also distinguish moral from conventional transgressions in mature moral cognition. Each hypothesized moral transgressions was treated as strongly and clearly immoral. However, our data suggest that although the majority of hypothesized conventional transgressions also form an obvious cluster, social conventions seem to lie along a continuum that stretches from mere matters of personal preference (e.g., getting tattoos or wearing black shoes with a brown belt) to transgressions that are treated as matters for legitimate social sanction (e.g., violating traffic laws or not paying your taxes). We use these findings to discuss issues of universality, domain-specificity, and the importance of using a well-studied set of moral scenarios to examine clinical populations and the underlying neural architecture of moral cognition. (shrink)

Altruistic self-sacrifice is rare, supererogatory, and not to be expected of any rational agent; but, the possibility of giving up one's life for the common good has played an important role in moral theorizing. For example, Judith Jarvis Thomson (2008) has argued in a recent paper that intuitions about altruistic self-sacrifice suggest that something has gone wrong in philosophical debates over the trolley problem. We begin by showing that her arguments face a series of significant philosophical objections; however, our project (...) is as much constructive as critical. Building on Thomson's philosophical argument, we report the results of a study that was designed to examine commonsense intuitions about altruistic self-sacrifice. We find that a surprisingly high proportion of people judge that they should give up their lives to save a small number of unknown strangers. We also find that the willingness to engage in such altruistic self-sacrifice is predicted by a person's religious commitments. Finally, we show that folk-moral judgments are sensitive to agent-relative reasons in a way that diverges in important ways from Thomson's proposed intuitions about the trolley problem. With this in mind, we close with a discussion of the relative merits of folk intuitions and philosophical intuitions in constructing a viable moral theory. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that recent research on episodic memory supports a limited defense of the phenomena that Daniel Wegner has termed transactive memory. Building on psychological and neurological research, targeting both individual and shared memory, I argue that individuals can collaboratively work to construct shared episodic memories. In some cases, this yields memories that are distributed across multiple individuals instead of being housed in individual brains.

Means-based harms are frequently seen as forbidden, even when they lead to a greater good. But, are there mitigating factors? Results from five experiments show that judgments about means-based harms are modulated by: 1) Pareto considerations (was the harmed person made worse off?), 2) the directness of physical contact, and 3) the source of the threat (e.g. mechanical, human, or natural). Pareto harms are more permissible than non-Pareto harms, Pareto harms requiring direct physical contact are less permissible than those that (...) do not, and harming someone who faces a mechanical threat is less permissible than harming someone who faces a non-mechanical threat. These results provide insight into the rich representational structure underlying folk-moral computations, including both the independent and interacting roles of the inevitability, directness and source of harm. (shrink)

Research on moral psychology has frequently appealed to three, apparently consistent patterns: Males are more likely to engage in transgressions involving harm than females; educated people are likely to be more thorough in their moral deliberations because they have better resources for rationally navigating and evaluating complex information; political affiliations and religious ideologies are an important source of our moral principles. Here, we provide a test of how four factors ‐ gender, education, politics and religion ‐ affect intuitive moral judgments (...) in unfamiliar situations. Using a large-scale sample of participants who voluntarily logged on to the internet-based Moral Sense Test, we analyzed responses to 145 unique moral and conventional scenarios that varied widely in content. Although each demographic or cultural factor sometimes yielded a statistically significant difference in the predicted direction, these differences were consistently associated with extremely small effect sizes. We conclude that gender, education, politics and religion are likely to be relatively insignificant for moral judgments of unfamiliar scenarios. We discuss these results in light of current debates concerning the mechanisms underlying our moral judgments and, especially, the idea that we share a universal moral sense that constrains the range of cross-cultural variation. (shrink)

Aworkshop was held August 26–28, 2015, by the Earth- Life Science Institute (ELSI) Origins Network (EON, see Appendix I) at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. This meeting gathered a diverse group of around 40 scholars researching the origins of life (OoL) from various perspectives with the intent to find common ground, identify key questions and investigations for progress, and guide EON by suggesting a roadmap of activities. Specific challenges that the attendees were encouraged to address included the following: What key (...) questions, ideas, and investigations should the OoL research community address in the near and long term? How can this community better organize itself and prioritize its efforts? What roles can particular subfields play, and what can ELSI and EON do to facilitate research progress? (See also Appendix II.) The present document is a product of that workshop; a white paper that serves as a record of the discussion that took place and a guide and stimulus to the solution of the most urgent and important issues in the study of the OoL. This paper is not intended to be comprehensive or a balanced representation of the opinions of the entire OoL research community. It is intended to present a number of important position statements that contain many aspirational goals and suggestions as to how progress can be made in understanding the OoL. The key role played in the field by current societies and recurring meetings over the past many decades is fully acknowledged, including the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life (ISSOL) and its official journal Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres, as well as the International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL). (shrink)

Bryce, Ian Robertson's talk was an analysis of the legal positions around many of the crimes of organised religion, and consequent legal actions already in progress or possible in the future.

Bryce, Ian The following are my personal observations based on several visits to public hearings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. I've also included media reports, and what I've learnt from contacts with interest groups. I recommend others sit in a public hearing for a day, to see the system in action.

This chapter examines the recent work in psychology and experimental philosophy that has targeted the commonsense understanding of group minds. It begins by setting up the conceptual and empirical terrain on which claims about the group mind in commonsense psychology have been constructed. The chapter explains an analysis of the cross‐cultural data, which suggest a greater willingness to ascribe collective mentality in East Asian cultures. It addresses that the different strands of data together support the claim that commonsense psychology is (...) committed to a form of methodological holism, which allows for properties of individuals that critically depend on group membership. The chapter concludes by suggesting that this does not cut against philosophical and scientific attempts to defend the existence of collective intentions and group minds; it merely suggests that such projects must move beyond commonsense strategies for predicting and explaining individual behavior. (shrink)

This article examines contemporary representations of sakura (cherry blossom) in cosmetics marketing. Since the Heian period, sakura has been loved and regarded as having tangible and metaphorical significance in Japan. Imagery of sakura is rich in ambiguity and has a complex history as evident in its use in the militaristic promotion of heroism, especially related to the Second World War. However, in recent decades, sakura imagery has proliferated across a range of popular culture both inside and out of Japan. In (...) this article we focus on the circulation and meanings of sakura imagery accessible and appropriated in Australia with specific attention to cosmetics. Sakura offers not only aesthetic pleasure but also potentially some health benefits. Our discussion draws on data from surveys and interviews with participants in Australia about their perspectives of sakura aesthetics related to colour symbolism. This is accompanied by close analysis of colour symbolism in recent perfume, skincare and cosmetic marketing, branding and packaging which use sakura imagery. We argue that, using the complex symbolism associated with the wide colour spectrum, sakura imagery has now been refashioned as a versatile promotional tool in the global market, as exemplified by the brand engagement of sakura-themed cosmetics. (shrink)

Edward W. Said’s Orientalism has attained canonical status as the key study of the cultural politics of western representation of the East, specifically the imaginative geographies underwriting constructions such as the Middle East and the Islamic world. The Ottoman Empire overlapped both European and exteriorized Oriental space during much of the period that Said dealt with, yet while the existence of the empire is referred to in Said’s study, the theoretical implications of that presence for his critique of Orientalist discourse (...) are not. The material presence of the Ottoman state, in the Arabic-speaking lands, but also crucially, and for a longer period, much of south-east Europe and Anatolia, highlights long-standing Oriental geopolitical and cultural agency in the face of unidirectional narratives of western encroachment. Attention to the specific discursive manoeuvres undertaken by the West to handle that disruptive, intrinsic Ottoman presence in Europe itself may add traction to the notion that the Orient was imagined as a radically exterior point of comparison. It is argued that the history of western representation of the Ottoman Empire constitutes a pre-Orientalist discourse, whose dual, perennial purpose is to make pragmatic accommodation for an Ottoman Oriental material presence in Europe yet never to fully acknowledge its discursive presence as being of Europe. I argue that by supplementing Said’s critique with a full consideration of the Ottoman legacy, a reformulation is possible that integrates the Islamic Orient as an intrinsic component of historically informed notions of European space, while dissolving notions of the absolute distinction of that latter construct from the wider milieus in which it is embedded. (shrink)

language-theoretic attempt to ground a post-liberal theory of democracy on Kant's intuitions concerning subjective autonomy is flawed because it leaves unexamined the internally contradictory experiential content of the Cartesian subject's experience of self. This case is made through reference to aspects of Habermas’ reconstructions of Kant and Mead; iek's criticisms of Kant, Heidegger and Habermas; and Honneth's idea that autonomy, for the post-Cartesian self, involves the ability of the subject to come to terms with the experience of negativity. The article (...) concludes by arguing that a post-liberal account of democracy needs to leave behind the Kantian notion of autonomous subjectivity and base itself on a fundamentally different, post-individualist understanding of the self. Key Words: autonomy • critical theory • democratic theory • Jürgen Habermas • Axel Honneth • subjectivity • Slavojiek. (shrink)

The enduring failure of financial institutions to identify and deal with risk events continues to have serious repercussions, whether in the form of small but significant losses or major and potentially far-reaching scandals. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines an innovative version of the classic dictator game to inform prosocial tendencies with the survey-based Theory of Planned Behaviour, we examine the risk-escalation behaviour of individuals within a large financial institution. We discover evidence of purely selfish behaviour that explains the lack (...) significance in pressure to adhere to the Subjective Norms of colleagues around intention to report risks. A finding that has potentially important implications for efforts to instil a high-error management climate and incentivise risk reporting within organisations where risk, if ignored or unchecked, could ultimately have consequences that extend far beyond the institutions themselves. (shrink)

Bryce, Ian At a World Humanism Day seminar held at Parliament House, Sydney, the theme was the role of the Enlightenment in the development of humanist thought. My new role as President of HSNSW has led me to reflect further on the journeys many made from the physical sciences to the social sciences.

It would be a mistake to deny commonsense intuitions a role in developing a theory of consciousness. However, philosophers have traditionally failed to probe commonsense in a way that allows these commonsense intuitions to make a robust contribution to a theory of consciousness. In this paper, I report the results of two experiments on purportedly phenomenal states and I argue that many disputes over the philosophical notion of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ are misguided—they fail to capture the interesting connection between commonsense ascriptions (...) of pain and emotion. With this data in hand, I argue that our capacity to distinguish between ‘mere things’ and ‘subjects of moral concern’ rests, to a significant extent, on the sorts of mental states that we take a system to have. (shrink)

Anthropology's approach to answering the question of the role of suffering in our lives is limited to empirical data and at best describes an individual's capability to endure it and make sense of it. Levinas was at odds to find meaning in suffering once it had exceeded certain proportions. Various cultures demonstrate greater and lesser capacities for integrating corporate suffering when it has crossed a significant threshold. What is the role of ritual and productive suffering in revealing meaning in suffering? (...) Some examples are drawn from the experiences of pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago de Compostella. Drawing from Dr. Eleonore Stump's exploration of second-person narratives and relationships, a Christian philosophical-theological response is provided. (shrink)

Recent research offers good reason to think that various psychedelic drugs—including psilocybin, ayahuasca, ketamine, MDMA, and LSD—may have significant therapeutic potential in the treatment of various mental health conditions, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, existential distress, and addiction. Although the use of psychoactive drugs, such as Diazepam or Ritalin, is well established, psychedelics arguably represent a therapeutic step change. As experiential therapies, their value would seem to lie in the subjective experiences they induce. As it is the only way for (...) trainee psychedelic therapists to fully understand their subjective effects, some have suggested that firsthand experience of psychedelics should form part of training programs. We question this notion. First, we consider whether the epistemic benefits offered by drug-induced psychedelic experience are as unique as is supposed. We then reflect on the value it might have in regard to the training of psychedelic therapists. We conclude that, absent stronger evidence of the contribution drug-induced experiences make to the training of psychedelic therapists, requiring trainees to take psychedelic drugs does not seem ethically legitimate. However, given the potential for epistemic benefit cannot be entirely ruled out, permitting trainees who wish to gain first-hand experience of psychedelics may be permissible. (shrink)

Thought experimental methods play a central role in empirical moral psychology. Against the increasingly common interpretation of recent experimental data, I argue that such methods cannot demonstrate that moral intuitions are produced by reflexive computations that are implicit, fast, and largely automatic. I demonstrate, in contrast, that evaluating thought experiments occurs at a near-glacial pace relative to the speed at which reflexive information processing occurs in a human brain. So, these methods allow for more reflective and deliberative processing than has (...) commonly been assumed. However, these methods may still provide insight into some human strategies for navigating unfamiliar moral dilemmas. (shrink)

The Philosophy of Daniel Dennett explores the intellectual significance of Daniel C. Dennett's 45 years of philosophical research, while providing a critical and constructive overview of Dennett's stance-based methodology and his claims about metal representation, consciousness, cultural evolution, and religion.

In this paper, I develop an empirically-driven approach to the relationship between conceptual and non-conceptual representations. I begin by clarifying Wilfrid Sellars's distinction between a non-conceptual capacity to picture significant aspects of our world, and a capacity to stabilize semantic content in the form of conceptual representations that signify those aspects of the world that are relevant to our shared practices. I argue that this distinction helps to clarify the reason why cognition must be understood as embodied and situated. Drawing (...) on recent models of attention and valuation, I then argue that the human brain constructs a dynamic model of the world that it has encountered, encoding higher-level regularities in the form of linguistically structured representations. And I conclude by arguing that this approach to cognition provides a set of critical resources for understanding the situated nature of social cognition. (shrink)

Collectivities (states, club, unions, teams, etc.) are often fruitfully spoken of as though they possessed representational capacities. Despite this fact, many philosophers reject the possibility that collectivities might be thought of as genuinely representational. This paper addresses the most promising objection to the possibility of collective representation, the claim that there is no explanatory value to positing collective representations above and beyond the representational states of the individuals that compose a particular collectivity. I claim that this argument either proves too (...) much, also giving us reason to abandon person-level representations, or it proves too little, demonstrating precisely the sort of continuity between individual and collective representations that would warrant the positing of genuine collective representations. I conclude with a brief sketch of two promising cases of collective representation that lend credence to my claim that individual representations and collective representations are analogous in a way that warrants the study of collective mentality from within the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Does the brain behave indeterministically? I argue that accounting for ion channels, key functional units in the brain, requires indeterministic models. These models are probabilistic, so the brain does behave indeterministically in a weak sense. I explore the implications of this point for a stronger sense of indeterminism. Ultimately I argue that it is not possible, either empirically or through philosophical argument, to show that the brain is indeterministic in that stronger sense.

Given the importance of scientific research in shaping our perception of the world, and our senses of what policies will and won’t succeed in altering that world, it is of great practical, political, and moral importance that we carry out scientific research with integrity. The phenomenon of scientific fraud stands in the way of that, as scientists may knowingly enter claims they take to be false into the scientific literature, often knowingly doing so in defiance of norms they profess allegiance (...) to. In this chapter we take a look at some of the causes of scientific fraud, and how it might be manifested in large-scale research teams and situations of anonymous authorship. We find that such cases make trouble for what might seem like intuitive answers to the question “who should be held responsible for this fraud?”, and we argue that in such cases it would be better to hold the entire community responsible for seeing to it that there is less fraud. (shrink)

A scholarly edition of a work by Adam Smith. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

In this chapter, we explore three social functions of emotion, which parallel three interpretations of Herman Melville's Bartleby. We argue that emotions can serve as commitment devices, which nudge individuals toward social conformity and thereby increase the likelihood of ongoing cooperation. We argue that emotions can play a role in Machiavellian strategies, which help us get away with norm violations. And we argue that emotions can motivate social recalibration, by alerting us to systemic social failures. In the second half of (...) the chapter, we then argue that emotions guide behavior by attuning us to our social environment through a process of error-driven learning. We suggest that their most basic social function is to reveal tensions between individuals and social norms; and we contend that because emotions are socially scaffolded, they leave open multiple strategies for resolving such tensions. Specifically, we argue that differences in conceptualization, as well as differences in circumstance, can generate emotions that nudge us toward cooperation, lead us to adopt Machiavellian strategies, or motivate us to engage in forms of social recalibration. Bartleby’s despair signaled a mismatch between his expectations and the expectations of Wall Street, and each of these three strategies could have moderated his misery. (shrink)

This book contains thirteen original essays about Puritan culture in colonial New England. Prompted by the growing interest in secular studies, as well as postnational, transnational, and postcolonial critique in the humanities, American Literature and the New Puritan Studies seeks to represent and advance contemporary interest in a field long recognized, however problematically, as foundational to the study of American literature. It invites readers of American literature and culture to reconsider the role of seventeenth-century Puritanism in the creation of the (...) United States of America and its consequent cultural and literary histories. It also records the significant transformation in the field of Puritan studies that has taken place in the last quarter century. In addition to re-reading well known texts of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, the volume contains essays focused on unknown or lesser studied events and texts, as well as new scholarship on post-Puritan archives, monuments, and historiography. (shrink)

This article describes and discusses research into lifelong learning in secondary schools that was undertaken at the Australian Council for Educational Research. The project explored ways of helping secondary school students develop an intrinsic interest in learning, in the belief that such an approach will encourage young people to keep learning throughout their lives. Skills and values that help young people to develop characteristics of lifelong learners are outlined. The article suggests that development of these characteristics may be impeded by (...) the strong influence of competitive end-of-school assessment in many schools, and the difficulty of changing the practices and attitudes of some of the people who play a significant role in a young person's education: parents and teachers. (shrink)

Peterson et al. (2023) present a range of ethical issues that arise when considering the use of psychedelic substances within medicine. But psychedelics are, by their nature, boundary-dissolving, a...

The neural reuse framework developed primarily by Michael Anderson proposes that brain regions are involved in multiple and diverse cognitive tasks and that brain regions flexibly and dynamically interact in different combinations to carry out cognitive functioning. We argue that the evidence cited by Anderson and others falls short of supporting the fundamental principles of neural reuse. We map out this problem and provide solutions by drawing on recent advances in network neuroscience, and we argue that methods employed in network (...) neuroscience provide the means to fully engage in a research program operating under the principles of neural reuse. (shrink)

In the last two decades, philosophy of neuroscience has predominantly focused on explanation. Indeed, it has been argued that mechanistic models are the standards of explanatory success in neuroscience over, among other things, topological models. However, explanatory power is only one virtue of a scientific model. Another is its predictive power. Unfortunately, the notion of prediction has received comparatively little attention in the philosophy of neuroscience, in part because predictions seem disconnected from interventions. In contrast, we argue that topological predictions (...) can and do guide interventions in science, both inside and outside of neuroscience. Topological models allow researchers to predict many phenomena, including diseases, treatment outcomes, aging, and cognition, among others. Moreover, we argue that these predictions also offer strategies for useful interventions. Topology-based predictions play this role regardless of whether they do or can receive a mechanistic interpretation. We conclude by making a case for philosophers to focus on prediction in neuroscience in addition to explanation alone. (shrink)

Buddhist philosophers provide several toolkits for exploring the relationship between meditation and introspection. Drawing on some of their tools, we explore three models of mind, which offer different ways of thinking about the possibility of introspection: an entirely mindful observer, who introspectively experiences 'pure consciousness'; a thin mind, which avoids appealing to a witness or observer of mental episodes by positing a form of reflexive selfawareness; and a thicker mind, which is active, historically situated, and dependent upon an ecological and (...) social context. We then explore practical and theoretical models of a thicker mind, which suggest that meditation is not simply a matter of representing mental episodes and then using these representations for online behavioural control. Drawing upon these models, we close by proposing that meditation should be understood as a practice of mental cultivation, which requires a more radical reconceptualization of knowing a mind. (shrink)

In analyzing oppressive systems like racism, social theorists have articulated accounts of the dynamic interaction and mutual dependence between psychological components, such as individuals’ patterns of thought and action, and social components, such as formal institutions and informal interactions. We argue for the further inclusion of physical components, such as material artifacts and spatial environments. Drawing on socially situated and ecologically embedded approaches in the cognitive sciences, we argue that physical components of racism are not only shaped by, but also (...) shape psychological and social components of racism. Indeed, while our initial focus is on racism and racist things, we contend that our framework is also applicable to other oppressive systems, including sexism, classism, and ableism. This is because racist things are part of a broader class of oppressive things, which are material artifacts and spatial environments that are in congruence with an oppressive system. (shrink)

Vaesen disregards a plausible alternative to his position, and so fails to offer a compelling argument for unique cognitive mechanisms. We suggest an ecological alternative, according to which divergent relationships between organism and environment, not exotic neuroanatomy, are responsible for unique cognitive capacities. This approach is pertinent to claims about primate cognition; and on this basis, we argue that Vaesen's inference from unique skills to unique mechanisms is unwarranted.

We conducted a narrative review of existing literature to identify the knowledge, skills, and abilities necessary for officers who police in democratic societies to successfully manage potentially volatile police–public interactions. This review revealed 10 such KSAs that are frequently discussed in the literature. These KSAs include: knowledge of policies and laws; an understanding of mental health-related issues; an ability to interact effectively with, and show respect for, individuals from diverse community groups; awareness and management of stress effects; communication skills; decision-making (...) and problem-solving skills; perceptual skills; motor skills related to use-of-force; emotion and behavior regulation; and an ability to treat people in a procedurally just manner. Following our review, we conducted semi-structured interviews with researchers who specialize in police training and adult education, interactions with individuals in crisis, and racialized policing, as well as two police trainers with expertise in de-escalation and use-of-force training. These interviews confirmed the importance of the 10 KSAs and highlighted two additional KSAs that are likely to be critical: understanding the role of policing in a free and democratic society and tactical knowledge and skills. To ensure that police–public interactions are managed effectively, police trainers may want to focus on the development and evaluation of these KSAs—something that is not always done currently. (shrink)

This paper discusses a crisis of accountability that arises when scientific collaborations are massively epistemically distributed. We argue that social models of epistemic collaboration, which are social analogs to what Patrick Suppes called a “model of the experiment,” must play a role in creating accountability in these contexts. We also argue that these social models must accommodate the fact that the various agents in a collaborative project often have ineliminable, messy, and conflicting interests and values; any story about accountability in (...) a massively distributed collaboration must therefore involve models of such interests and values and their methodological and epistemic effects. (shrink)

More than 200 million children under the age of 5 years are affected by malnutrition worldwide according to the World Health Organization. The Barbados Nutrition Study (BNS) is a 55-year longitudinal study on a Barbadian cohort with histories of moderate to severe protein-energy malnutrition (PEM) limited to the first year of life and a healthy comparison group. Using quantitative electroencephalography (EEG), differences in brain function duringchildhood(lower alpha1 activity and higher theta, alpha2 and beta activity) have previously been highlighted between participants (...) who suffered from early PEM and controls. In order to determine whether similar differences persisted intoadulthood, our current study used recordings obtained during a Go-No-Go task in a subsample of the original BNS cohort [population size (N) = 53] at ages 45–51 years. We found that previously malnourished adults [sample size (n) = 24] had a higher rate of omission errors on the task relative to controls (n= 29). Evoked-Related Potentials (ERP) were significantly different in participants with histories of early PEM, who presented with lower N2 amplitudes. These findings are typically associated with impaired conflict monitoring and/or attention deficits and may therefore be linked to the attentional and executive function deficits that have been previously reported in this cohort in childhood and again in middle adulthood. (shrink)