Chater & Loewenstein thoughtfully express their disillusionment with contemporary applied behavioral science, particularly as it pertains to public policy. Although they fault an overemphasis on i-frame approaches, their proposed alternatives leave doubt regarding whether behavioral science has much, if anything, useful to offer policy. We offer two critical principles to guide and motivate more relevant behavioral science.

An argument against the bias towards the near; how a defence of temporal neutrality is not a defence of S; an appeal to inconsistency; why we should reject S and accept CP.

Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate (...) the higher-order, systematic, relational capabilities of a physical symbol system (PSS) (Newell 1980). We show that this symbolic-relational discontinuity pervades nearly every domain of cognition and runs much deeper than even the spectacular scaffolding provided by language or culture alone can explain. We propose a representational-level specification as to where human and nonhuman animals' abilities to approximate a PSS are similar and where they differ. We conclude by suggesting that recent symbolic-connectionist models of cognition shed new light on the mechanisms that underlie the gap between human and nonhuman minds. (shrink)

In Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker leads an excursion to that stretch of the universe he calls the "Mindscape," where he explores infinity in all its forms: potential and actual, mathematical and physical, theological and mundane. Here Rucker acquaints us with Gödel's rotating universe, in which it is theoretically possible to travel into the past, and explains an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which billions of parallel worlds are produced every microsecond. It is in the realm of (...) infinity, he maintains, that mathematics, science, and logic merge with the fantastic. By closely examining the paradoxes that arise from this merging, we can learn a great deal about the human mind, its powers, and its limitations. Using cartoons, puzzles, and quotations to enliven his text, Rucker guides us through such topics as the paradoxes of set theory, the possibilities of physical infinities, and the results of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. His personal encounters with Gödel the mathematician and philosopher provide a rare glimpse at genius and reveal what very few mathematicians have dared to admit: the transcendent implications of Platonic realism. (shrink)

Matravers examines how emotions form the bridge between our experience of art and of life. We often find that a particular poem, painting, or piece of music carries an emotional charge; and we may experience emotions toward, or on behalf of, a particular fictional character. Matravers shows that what these experiences have in common, and what links them to the expression of emotion in non-artistic cases, is the role played by feeling. He carries out a critical survey of various accounts (...) of the nature of fiction, attacks contemporary cognitivist accounts of expression, and offers an uncompromising defense of a controversial view about musical expression: that music works by expressing the emotions it causes its listeners to feel. (shrink)

This book is intended for undergraduate courses in social theory for second and third year sociology students, as well as postgraduate and academic researchers.

The proponents of late modern war like to argue that it has become surgical, sensitive and scrupulous, and remotely operated Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or ‘drones’ have become diagnostic instruments in contemporary debates over the conjunction of virtual and ‘virtuous’ war. Advocates for the use of Predators and Reapers in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns have emphasized their crucial role in providing intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance, in strengthening the legal armature of targeting, and in conducting precision-strikes. Critics claim that their use reduces (...) late modern war to a video game in which killing becomes casual. Most discussion has focused on the covert campaign waged by CIA-operated drones in Pakistan, but it is also vitally important to interrogate the role of United States Air Force-operated drones in Afghanistan. In doing so, it becomes possible to see that the problem there may not be remoteness and detachment but, rather, the sense of proximity to ground troops inculcated by the video feeds from the aerial platforms. (shrink)

In an effort to theorize educational logics that are oppositional to capitalism, this article explores what it means to study like a communist. I begin by drawing out the tight connection between learning and capitalism, demonstrating that education is not a subset but a motor of political-economic relations. Next, I turn to the concept of study, which is being developed as an educational alternative to learning. While studying represents an educational challenge to capitalism, I argue that there are political limitations (...) to studying for which we need to account. Specifically, studying is not in itself political, but only represents the possibility of politics. To make this claim and to address these limitations, I turn to Jodi Dean’s work on the communist Party. Dean posits the Party not as a master, director, or prophet, but as an infrastructure of affective intensity that maintains a gap in the order of things. I show that the Party is one way to organize and to defend study. Throughout the article, I illuminate the ways in which educational philosophers can contribute to political movement building by showing, developing, and refining the educational components of politics that many organizers and theorists neglect. (shrink)

Indirect complaint sequences are examined in a corpus of everyday domestic telephone conversations. The analysis focuses on how a speaker/complainer displays and manages their subjective investment in the complaint. Four features are picked out: announcements, in which an upcoming complaint is projected in ways that signal the complainer’s stance or attitude; laughter accompanying the complaint announcement, and its delivery and receipt; displacement, where the speaker complains about something incidental to what would be expected to be the main offence; and uses (...) of lexical descriptions such as ‘moan’ and ‘whinge’ that formulate subjectivity, investment, and a disposition to complain, and are generally used to counter a complaint’s evidential basis or objectivity. Laughter and irony provide complaint recipients with response cues, and are used in ways that can strengthen as well as undermine a complaint’s factual basis and seriousness. (shrink)

Examines modern science, looks at scientific literature, and discusses the growth of science, invisible colleges, and the process of discovery.

This paper attempts to specify the conditions under which a psychological explanation can undermine or debunk a set of beliefs. The focus will be on moral and religious beliefs, where a growing debate has emerged about the epistemic implications of cognitive science. Recent proposals by Joshua Greene and Paul Bloom will be taken as paradigmatic attempts to undermine beliefs with psychology. I will argue that a belief p may be undermined whenever: (i) p is evidentially based on an intuition which (...) (ii) can be explained by a psychological mechanism that is (iii) unreliable for the task of believing p; and (iv) any other evidence for belief p is based on rationalization. I will also consider and defend two equally valid arguments for establishing unreliability: the redundancy argument and the argument from irrelevant factors. With this more specific understanding of debunking arguments, it is possible to develop new replies to some objections to psychological debunking arguments from both ethics and philosophy of religion. (shrink)

Entrenched biases in favour of large, charismatic mammals, towards predators, towards terrestrial animals and towards species that have cultural importance can influence the selection of candidate species for de-extinction research. Often, the species with the highest existence value will also be the ones that raise the most serious animal welfare concerns.

We offer an account of the metaphysics of persons rooted in Latter-day saint scripture that vindicates the essentiality of origins. We then give theological support for the claim that prospects for the success of God’s soul making project are bound up in God creating particular persons. We observe that these persons would not have existed were it not for the occurrence of a variety of evils (of even the worst kinds), and we conclude that Latter-day saint theology has the resources (...) to endorse a strong soul-making non-identity theodicy. We then introduce two complications for this account rooted in the problem of horrendous evils. First, horrendous evils threaten to undermine our confidence that God is good to each created person within the context of their life. And second, horrendous evils raise concerns about the value of persons whose existence depends on the occurrence of those evils. We may wonder whether those whose existence depends on the occurrence of horrendous evils are valuable enough to motivate God’s allowance of those evils. We show that by attending to important structural features of a post-mortem, pre-eschatological state called the spirit world, Latter-day Saints can ameliorate these concerns about horrendous evils . (shrink)

Two uses of the modal verb would in police interrogation are examined. First, suspects use it to claim a disposition to act in ways inconsistent with whatever offence they are accused of. Second, police officers use it in challenging the suspect’s testimony, asking why a witness would lie. Both uses deploy a form of practical inferential reasoning from norms to facts, in the face of disputed testimony. The value of would is that its semantics provide for a sense of back-dated (...) predictability with regard to the actions in question. Further, although police officers provide minimal acknowledgement of suspects’ uses of the term, suspects tend to provide a response when police officers use it. This difference is explained by the different actions being done in each case - normative self assessments by suspects, and challenges by police officers - and their interactional and institutional relevance in and for police pursuit of factual testimony. (shrink)

We examine the asking and answering of `silly questions' in British police interviews with suspects, the courses of action SQs initiate, and the institutional contingencies they are designed to manage. We show how SQs are asked at an important juncture toward the ends of interviews, following police officers' formulations of suspects' testimony. These formulations are confirmed or even collaboratively produced by suspects. We then examine the design of SQs and show how they play a central role in the articulation of (...) suspects' reported `state of mind', and particularly attributing to them criminal intentions constitutive of the offence with which they may be charged. In cases where SQs do not produce unambiguous answers about `state of mind' or intentionality, police officers move toward direct questioning about suspects' intent, thus making explicit the project of SQs in such interviews. Following SQ—Answer sequences, police officers reformulate suspects' testimony, with subtle but crucial differences with regard to suspects' knowledge state and criminal intent. Suspects overwhelmingly align with police officers' formulations of their testimony, and such agreements have the interactional shape of affiliation. Yet SQs may work in ways that are institutionally adversarial with regard to criminal charges, relevant evidence and self-incriminating testimony. (shrink)

Examines how we should assess the effects of our acts, especially when we act together with other people, why we should reject the share‐of‐the‐total view and accept the marginalist view, which appeals to the difference made by each act, why we should not ignore either small chances, or effects that are trivial or imperceptible. It also presents several cases in which effects are overdetermined. Rational altruism is also discussed.

We examine the British newspapers' coverage of the death of Princess Diana and its immediate aftermath. Our main focus is on how the press dealt with the issue of their own potential culpability, as a feature of news reporting itself. The press deployed a series of descriptive categories and rhetorical oppositions, including regular press vs paparazzi; tabloid vs broadsheet; British vs foreign; supply vs demand ; and a number of general purpose devices such as a contrast between emotional reactions and (...) considered judgments. The study has two major aims: to analyse the textual workings of the press, as a medium of factual reportage operating within a range of normative requirements for factual objectivity, public concern, responsible journalism, meeting readers' demands, etc.; and to contribute to a generally applicable discourse analytic approach to how factual reports are assembled, used, and undermined, in an interplay of description and accountability. (shrink)

This article assesses the current state of the philosophical debate regarding the expression of emotion in music, or expressive properties of music. It defines the question, explores a few false‐starts and then considers the solution that expressive properties are a matter of a certain ‘way of appearing’ of the music. This solution is associated with Stephen Davies and Jerrold Levinson, whose work is discussed. It is argued that work in this area has reached an impasse, and it is not clear (...) where we should go next. (shrink)

Moral Internalism proposes a necessary link between judging that an action is right/wrong and being motivated to perform/avoid that action. Internalism is central to many arguments within ethics, including the claim that moral judgments are not beliefs, and the claim that certain types of moral skepticism are incoherent. However, most of the basis for accepting Internalism rests on intuitions that have recently been called into question by empirical work. This paper further investigates the intuitions behind Internalism. Three experiments show not (...) only that these intuitions are not widespread, but that they are significantly influenced by normative evaluations of the situation in question. These results are taken to undermine Internalist intuitions, and contribute to the growing body of evidence showing that normative evaluations influence supposedly non-normative judgments. (shrink)

Linguistic theories of lexical semantics support a Neoclassical Theory of concepts, where entities like CAUSE, STATE, and MANNER serve as necessary conditions for the possession of individual event concepts. Not all concepts have a neoclassical structure, and whether or not words participate in regular linguistic patterns such as verbal alternations will be proposed as a probe for identifying whether their corresponding concepts do indeed have such structure. I show how the Neoclassical Theory supplements existing theories of concepts and supports a (...) version of analyticity and conceptual analysis. (shrink)

This paper explores the cognitive content, and the cognitive benefits, of the state of wonder.

Cultural relativism was the subject of a panel presentation at the 2005 meetings of the American Anthropological Association. In 2007, three of the four presentations were published in Anthropological Quarterly. The present article comprises what was presented in the fourth panel presentation, my own, plus a critical realist critique of the other three papers and the discussant’s introduction of them. The critical realist method of immanent critique, applied here, reveals the gaps, contradictions and non-sequiturs of cultural relativism, and suggests that (...) the critical realist meta-philosophy of philosopher Roy Bhaskar, sociologist Margaret Archer, and others offers anthropologists a stronger theoretical paradigm from which to operate. (shrink)

It is by now a well-supported hypothesis in cognitive neuroscience that there exists a functional network for the moral appraisal of situations. However, there is a surprising disagreement amongst researchers about the significance of this network for moral actions, decisions, and behavior. Some researchers suggest that we should uncover those ethics [that are built into our brains ], identify them, and live more fully by them, while others claim that we should often do the opposite, viewing the cognitive neuroscience of (...) morality more like a science of pathology. To analyze and evaluate the disagreement, this paper will investigate some of its possible sources. These may include theoretical confusions about levels of explanation in cognitive science, or different senses of ‘morality’ that researchers are looking to explain. Other causes of the debate may come from empirical assumptions about how possible or preferable it is to separate intuitive moral appraisal from moral decisions. Although we will tentatively favor the ‘Set Aside’ approach, the questions outlined here are open areas of ongoing research, and this paper will be confined to outlining the position space of the debate rather than definitively resolving it. (shrink)

In this commentary, we consider how Balcetis’s proposals may interface with the study of motivation and emotion in lifespan developmental psychology, pointing to open questions regarding the distance perception of long-term chronic goals as well as age-related shifts from informational to emotional goals.

Wittgenstein as Shakespearean critic. Because Wittgenstein’s commentators agree that Shakespeare is the world’s greatest ever playwright, they have to account for those few remarks of his that may suggest a negative evaluation of Shakespeare as a poet. But these remarks can also be used to reveal that Shakespeare is a poet of a kind uniquely different to the majority of those whom Wittgenstein admired. This view is central to John Middleton Murry’s interpretation of Shakespeare and Keats. In a more positive (...) light, he echoes those remarks of Wittgenstein that are often assumed to embody a critical devaluation or “misunderstanding” of Shakespeare’s work.Recent commentators: Wolfgang Huemer and William Day. If we were... (shrink)

Peter Singer’s recent appointment to Princeton University created considerable controversy, most of it focused on his proposal for active euthanasia of disabled infants. Singer articulates utilitarian ideas that often appear in public discussions of euthanasia. Drawing on Pope John Paul II’s work on ethics and suffering, I argue that Singer’s utilitarian theory of value is impoverished. After introducing the Pope’s ethic based on the imago dei, I discuss love as self-gift. I show how this concept supports a theory of value (...) in which spiritual goods are preeminent over material goods. I then describe how suffering reveals spiritual goods, discussing how participation in Christ’s suffering can alter our perception of value. I also consider how communal responses to suffering provide opportunities for self-giving. Third, I consider Singer’s proposal for killing infants with hemophilia, arguing that it arbitrarily ignores spiritual goods. I then discuss proposals to kill anencephalic infants, discussing how parental response to their suffering can demonstrate an extraordinary love in seemingly hopeless circumstances. I conclude by calling for a more sustained social response to euthanasia initiatives. (shrink)

This paper considers the view, recently put forward by David Davies in Art and Performance , that works of art should be identified with the generative performances that result in the object, rather than with the object. It attempts to disarm two of Davies arguments by, first, providing a criterion by which the contextualist can accommodate all and only the relevant generative properties as properties of the work, and, second, providing an alternative explanation for his modal intuitions. Finally, it draws (...) attention to Davies’ difficulties in providing a clear criterion for the identity of the work of art. (shrink)

Drawing upon a range of theorists (Derrida, Lacan, Barthes), photographers (Adams, Weston, Lange) and literary texts (Baudelaire, Proust, Breton, Camus, Barnes, Kundera), this article explores the role of memory in grounding identity. If the subject is constituted in language, it is argued, identity can be achieved only in the realm of the imaginary, through fixation in an imago of the self. It is memory above all that gives this being-in-denial its imagined solidity; but that solidity is an effect of language’s (...) ability to create verisimilitude in an eternal present of signification, and not of memory’s relation to a real past. Identity therefore always remains precarious, because the signifiers that furnish the points de capiton of what we remember always also defer elsewhere. (shrink)

Is it better if more people live? This chapter examines the effects of population growth on existing people, overpopulation, whether a decline in the quality of life could always be made up for by a sufficient increase in the number of people living. It discusses a repugnant conclusion and the level at which lives cease to be worth living.

In this paper I argue against the current consensus that there is such a thing as 'the philosophy of fiction'. I argue instead that what are taken to be problems with fiction, are in fact problems with narrative more generally.

This article is a commentary on Alana Jelinek's book, This Is Not Art. It broadly agrees with Jelinek in her diagnosis of the current ills of the artworld, who is to blame for this, and the need for an endogenous value of art. Furthermore, it agrees with her that the value of art lies in its status as a ‘knowledge-forming discipline’. However, it takes issue with the very notion of an ‘avant-garde’ art, with Jelinek's claims concerning truth, and raises questions (...) as to what it is for the discipline of art to be ‘knowledge-forming’. It ends with a sceptical doubt as to whether it is the nature of art to favour politically progressive messages. (shrink)

This paper is a response to that of Christopher New. It argues that New has no alternative to an earlier solution I proposed to the problem of specifying the content of a fiction fails, as his solution is in terms of facts external to the game of make-believe being played, while mine was internal. It argues that understanding fiction is only a special case of understanding representation, which can be given a Gricean analysis. It proposes that the inferences crucial to (...) our understanding should be those we think reasonable of the world of the fiction. (shrink)

Richard Wollheim was born in 1923 in London. His father was Eric Wollheim who was at the time the London manager for Diaghilev. His mother had been a Gaiety girl; she left the stage when she married. Wollheim was educated at Westminster School and then, after active service in the Second World War, he went to Oxford to complete degrees in history and PPE. Despite relatively little study of the subject he was recruited by A. J. Ayer for the Philosophy (...) Department at University College London. He remained there for thirty-three years, becoming Grote Professor in 1963. In 1983 he moved to America where he taught at various universities before returning to England shortly before his death in 2003. (shrink)