Recent writings of Professor Frank raise basic questions concerning the nature of science and its relations to social, political, theological and metaphysical issues. This paper concentrates on several of these questions. What determines the acceptance of an hypothesis in the sciences? Is it explanation of the facts and confirmation by experimentation or is it the capacity of a theory to guide human conduct? Professor Frank's espousal of the latter criterion raises the question of whether this criterion can clearly be applied. (...) Equally important: it places on the scientist the responsibility of (a) reliably predicting the effects of a theory on human conduct and (b), deciding which effects ought to be achieved, assuming we could reliably achieve them. Another set of problems arises concerning the relation between scientific views and metaphysical, political and religious beliefs. Are the former relevant to the latter? If so, how? Does not scientific method at least involve the rejection of certain political and religious philosophies? We conclude that each and all of these difficulties could be relieved if not resolved by accepting a thoroughgoing empiricism. (shrink)

Three experiments with 88 college-aged participants explored how unlabeled experiences—learning episodes in which people encounter objects without information about their category membership—influence beliefs about category structure. Participants performed a simple one-dimensional categorization task in a brief supervised learning phase, then made a large number of unsupervised categorization decisions about new items. In all three experiments, the unsupervised experience altered participants’ implicit and explicit mental category boundaries, their explicit beliefs about the most representative members of each category, and even their memory (...) for the items encountered during the supervised learning phase. These changes were influenced by both the range and frequency distribution of the unlabeled stimuli: mental category boundaries shifted toward the middle of the range and toward the trough of the bimodal distribution of unlabeled items, whereas beliefs about the most representative category members shifted toward the modes of the unlabeled distribution. One consequence of this shift in representations is a false-consensus effect (Experiment 3) where participants, despite receiving very disparate training experiences, show strong agreement in judgments about representativeness and boundary location following unsupervised category judgments. (shrink)

Drawing on the legacy of prominent pragmatic philosophers and political economists—C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and John R. Commons—Charles W. Anderson creatively brings pragmatism and liberalism together, striving to temper the excesses of both and to fashion a broader vision of the proper domain of political reason.

The ongoing pursuit of tacit knowledge Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9500-6 Authors Charles W. Smith, Department of Sociology, Queens College, CUNY, 65-30 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, NY 11367, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience.

In few cases among modern religious ethicists are the contemporary issues concerning the problem of norms and of criteria more intriguingly brought to the fore than in the ethics of Martin Buber.

This previously-unpublished essay by the late Charles W. Mills (1951–2021) seeks to demonstrate the racially-structured character of the universe created by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Written long before the popular film series, the essay critically examines Tolkien's novels and comments on the nature of fictional creation. Mills argues that Tolkien designs a racial hierarchy in the novels that recapitulates the central racist myth of European thought.

This essay offers a defense of ‘intellectual authority’, primarily by pointing out the untoward implications of its conceptual opposite, ‘institutional authority’, in a wide variety of contexts. An opening discussion explores conditions for the possibility of intellectual authority in legal, humanistic, and aesthetic disciplines. Social science literature documenting and describing the biasing influence of institutional authority is then canvassed and analyzed in some detail. A final section assays the theoretical significance of various efforts to eliminate non‐intellectual bias and influence, with (...) special reference to the example of “blind reviewing’ of scholarly manuscripts. (shrink)

It is proposed to examine the consequences which ensue if philosophy is deliberately oriented around the methods and results of science. That such reorientation has been more or less unconsciously taking place for centuries is evident; the problem demands particular discussion at this time only because the reorientation has gone so far and with such success as to challenge seriously certain past conceptions of philosophy and to demand of philosophers what, if anything, is left for them to do. For present (...) purposes the revolution indicated will be regarded as a fait accompli, and the sole concern will be with what alternatives remain open. The conclusions differ from those of certain others who accept the same fait accompli only in believing that more alternatives do in fact remain open than they envisage. (shrink)

The study of the relationship between culture and mind is cognitive anthropology. Its primary objects of study are knowledge and thinking, mostly as these appear in naturally occurring settings. Cognitive anthropology's main contribution has been to show that there are important cultural differences in perception, memory, and inference. Recently, the field has begun to consider emotions and their power to motivate cognition, historically among the most neglected subjects in cognitive science. This is leading to an interesting rapprochement with psychoanalysis and (...) to the partial eclipse of information processing models and their computer analogs. (shrink)

Kegley argues for a focus on promoting the success of Russia while using the relative success of European integration as grounds to work within a transnational collaboration framework based on Kennan's initial recommendations.

Derrick Darby’s book Rights, Race, and Recognition defends the seemingly startling thesis that all rights, moral as well as legal, are dependent upon social recognition. So there are no “natural” rights independent of social practices, and subordinated groups in oppressive societies do not have rights. Darby appeals to intersubjectivist constructivism to make his meta-ethical case, but in this critique, I argue that he conflates, or at least fails to consistently distinguish, two radically different varieties of constructivism: idealized intersubjectivist constructivism, which (...) is objectivist, and non-idealized conventionalist constructivism, which is relativist. In neither case, then, can Darby establish the shocking thesis that white supremacy objectively takes away blacks’ moral standing. (shrink)

In this essay I describe how primary and secondary narcissism are the underlying and motivating psychological states for fundamentalist religious belief. I describe the psychodynamics that produce such a belief state and I make the case that the "fundamentalist personality" is best understood as a form of barely sublimated pathological narcissism. Given the brutality of the human condition, it is understandable why this psychological-metaphysical option is an enticing one, but I follow Ralph Ellis in the conclusion that the consequences of (...) such belief systems produce much more harm than benefit for individuals and humanity at Iarge. (shrink)