During the formation of the brain, neuronal cell migration and neurite extension are controlled by extracellular guidance cues. Here, I discuss experiments showing that the messenger nitric oxide (NO) is an additional regulator of cell motility. NO is a membrane permeant molecule, which activates soluble guanylyl cyclase (sGC) and leads to the formation of cyclic GMP (cGMP) in target cells. The analysis of specific cells types in invertebrate models such as molluscs, insects and the medicinal leech provides insight how NO (...) and cyclic nucleotides affect the wiring of nervous systems by regulating cell and growth‐cone motility. Inhibition of the NOS and sGC enzymes combined with rescue experiments show that NO signalling orchestrates neurite outgrowth and filopodial dynamics, cell migration of enteric neurons, glial migration and axonogenesis of pioneer fibers. Cultured insect embryos are accessible model systems in which cellular mechanisms of NO‐induced cytoskeletal reorganizations can be analyzed in natural settings. Finally, I will outline some indications that NO may also regulate cell motility in the developing and regenerating vertebrate nervous system. BioEssays 27:495–505, 2005. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

Together, these collected papers develop the idea that human thinking - from scientific creativity to simply understanding what a positive HIV test means - "happens" partly outside the mind.".

Drawing on respective ideas from within both liberal political philosophy and Frankfurt School critical theory, this paper seeks to examine claims about autonomy and empowerment made on behalf of educational policies such as teacher-led codeswitching; a policy that seeks to empower students from racially marginalised groups by facilitating their proficiency in the language and cultural expressions of societally dominant groups. I set out to evaluate such claims by first sketching two competing formulations of autonomy; namely, liberal autonomy concomitant to political (...) power, and autonomy that arises out of the practice of critical self-reflection. I proceed by testing codeswitching within each formulation to reveal how – in this case – these two conceptualisations of autonomy are educationally incompatible with each other. I conclude by suggesting that educational interventions such as codeswitching may ultimately be complicit in the longer term processes of racialisation and marginalisation that they seek to diminish, not only because they carry the potential to damage minority students’ self-integrity, but also because they limit possibilities for both majority and minority students to engage in dialectical encounters that may open avenues to new principles of social and political organisation. (shrink)

Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart invites readers to embark on a new journey into a land of rationality that differs from the familiar territory of cognitive science and economics. Traditional views of rationality tend to see decision makers as possessing superhuman powers of reason, limitless knowledge, and all of eternity in which to ponder choices. To understand decisions in the real world, we need a different, more psychologically plausible notion of rationality, and this book provides it. It is about (...) fast and frugal heuristics--simple rules for making decisions when time is pressing and deep thought an unaffordable luxury. These heuristics can enable both living organisms and artificial systems to make smart choices, classifications, and predictions by employing bounded rationality. But when and how can such fast and frugal heuristics work? Can judgments based simply on one good reason be as accurate as those based on many reasons? Could less knowledge even lead to systematically better predictions than more knowledge? Simple Heuristics explores these questions, developing computational models of heuristics and testing them through experiments and analyses. It shows how fast and frugal heuristics can produce adaptive decisions in situations as varied as choosing a mate, dividing resources among offspring, predicting high school drop out rates, and playing the stock market. As an interdisciplinary work that is both useful and engaging, this book will appeal to a wide audience. It is ideal for researchers in cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science, as well as in economics and artificial intelligence. It will also inspire anyone interested in simply making good decisions. (shrink)

The essays in this collection have been written for Gerd Buchdahl, by colleagues, students and friends, and are self-standing pieces of original research which have as their main concern the metaphysics and philosophy of science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They focus on issues about the development of philosophical and scientific thought which are raised by or in the work of such as Bernoulli, Descartes, Galileo, Kant, Leibniz, Maclaurin, Priestly, Schelling, Vico. Apart from the initial bio-bibliographical piece and (...) those by Robert Butts and Michael Power, they do not discuss Buchdahl or his ideas in any systematic, lengthy, or detailed way. But they are collected under a title which alludes to the book, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science: The Classical Origins, Descartes to Kant (1969), which is central in the corpus of his work, and deal with the period and some of the topics with which that book deals. (shrink)

For the classA of uncountable Archimedian real closed fields we show that the statement “TheL <ω-theory ofA is complete” is independent of ZFC. In particular we have the following results:Assuming the Continuum-Hypothesis (CH) is incomplete. Conversely it is possible to build a model of set theory in which is complete and decidable. The latter can also be deduced from the Proper Forcing Axiom (PFA). In this case turns out to be equivalent to the elementary theory of the real numbers ℝ (...) (by a quantifier-elimination procedure).Formally: is incomplete. is complete and decidable. (shrink)

This volume collects Gigerenzer's recent articles on the psychology of rationality. This volume should appeal, like the earlier volumes, to a broad mixture of cognitive psychologists, philosophers, economists, and others who study decision making.

Zwischen 1992 und 2008 erschienen in der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung 133 Buchbesprechungen aus der Feder von Gerd Roellecke, der 2011 verstarb. Die in diesem Band nachgedruckte Auswahl bietet ein Panorama wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse, philosophischer Gedanken und politischer Standpunkte im Spiegel der pointierten Urteile Roelleckes. Den zeithistorischen Hintergrund bildet die Neuorientierung Deutschlands und Europas in den Jahren zwischen Wiedervereinigung und globaler Finanzkrise. Der Mannheimer Staatsrechtslehrer pruft Bucher aus allen Fachern, die sich im weitesten Sinne mit der Verfassung des sozialen Lebens beschaftigen, (...) von der Rechtsphilosophie bis zur Geschichtswissenschaft. Den roten Faden bildet in Anknupfung an Niklas Luhmann ein gesellschaftstheoretisches Interesse an den Uberlebensbedingungen der modernen Zivilisation. Kuriose Zeitzeugnisse sind fur den Kritiker nicht weniger aufschlussreich als epochemachende Standardwerke. Durch die Kunst der witzigen Zuspitzung ladt Roellecke zum Widerspruch ein - damit die Aufklarung weitergeht. (shrink)

Humans and animals make inferences about the world under limited time and knowledge. In contrast, many models of rational inference treat the mind as a Laplacean Demon, equipped with unlimited time, knowledge, and computational might. Following H. Simon's notion of satisficing, the authors have proposed a family of algorithms based on a simple psychological mechanism: one-reason decision making. These fast and frugal algorithms violate fundamental tenets of classical rationality: They neither look up nor integrate all information. By computer simulation, the (...) authors held a competition between the satisficing "Take The Best" algorithm and various "rational" inference procedures. The Take The Best algorithm matched or outperformed all competitors in inferential speed and accuracy. This result is an existence proof that cognitive mechanisms capable of successful performance in the real world do not need to satisfy the classical norms of rational inference. (shrink)

Gerd Buchdahl; XIV—The Relation Between ‘Understanding’ and ‘Reason’ in the Architectonic of Kant's Philosophy1, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume.

In this article, I discuss my experiences of being an insider researching Laestadianism. I present my research, noting the advantages and disadvantages, ending with a conclusion in which I refer to the discussion among anthropologists and ethnologists, especially in the study of religion. The outcome is that even though the distinction insider–outsider researcher is complicated, both insider and outsider researchers will improve the research, contributing to its nuanced presentation.

Axiomatic rationality is defined in terms of conformity to abstract axioms. Savage limited axiomatic rationality to small worlds, that is, situations in which the exhaustive and mutually exclusive set of future states S and their consequences C are known. Others have interpreted axiomatic rationality as a categorical norm for how human beings should reason, arguing in addition that violations would lead to real costs such as money pumps. Yet a review of the literature shows little evidence that violations are actually (...) associated with any measurable costs. Limiting axiomatic rationality to small worlds, I propose a naturalized version of rationality for situations of intractability and uncertainty, all of which are not in. In these situations, humans can achieve their goals by relying on heuristics that may violate axiomatic rationality. The study of ecological rationality requires formal models of heuristics and an analysis of the structures of environments these can exploit. It lays the foundation of a moderate naturalism in epistemology, providing statements about heuristics we should use in a given situation. Unlike axiomatic rationality, ecological rationality can explain less-is-more effects, formalize when one should move from ‘is’ to ‘ought,’ and be evaluated by goals beyond coherence, such as predictive accuracy, frugality, and efficiency. Ecological rationality can be seen as a formalization of means–end instrumentalist rationality, based on Herbert Simon’s insight that rational behavior is a function of the mind and its environment. (shrink)

The degree of success in creating quality care for people suffering from dementia is limited despite extensive research. This article describes Healthcare providers’ experience with the ethical challenges and possibilities in the relationship with patients suffering from dementia and its impact on quality care. The material is based on qualitative, in-depth individual narrative interviews with 12 professional Healthcare providers from two different nursing homes. The transcribed interview texts were subjected to a phenomenological–hermeneutical interpretation. To provide quality care to patients with (...) dementia, the Healthcare providers emphasized the importance of sensing and understanding the patients’ emotional and bodily expressions through sentient attentiveness and recognition of the patient as a person. They also described reciprocity of expressions in the relationship where the patient recognized them both as persons and Healthcare providers. The analyses of the findings are, inter alia, discussed in light of Løgstrup’s relational philosophy of ethics. (shrink)

In this volume the author tackles this problem in a rigorous analysis which begins with the general dynamics of living systems and leads the reader step-by-step ...

Unlike behaviorism, cognitive psychology relies on mental concepts to explain behavior. Yet mental processes are not directly observable and multiple explanations are possible, which poses a challenge for finding a useful framework. In this article, I distinguish three new frameworks for explanations that emerged after the cognitive revolution. The first is called tools‐to‐theories: Psychologists' new tools for data analysis, such as computers and statistics, are turned into theories of mind. The second proposes as‐if theories: Expected utility theory and Bayesian statistics (...) are turned into theories of mind, describing an optimal solution of a problem but not its psychological process. The third studies the adaptive toolbox (formal models of heuristics) that describes mental processes in situations of uncertainty where an optimal solution is unknown. Depending on which framework researchers choose, they will model behavior in either situations of risk or of uncertainty, and construct models of cognitive processes or not. The frameworks also determine what questions are asked and what kind of data are generated. What all three frameworks have in common, however, is a clear preference for formal models rather than explanations by general dichotomies or mere verbal concepts. The frameworks have considerable potential to inform each other and to generate points of integration. (shrink)

The paper shows why and how an empirical study of fast-and-frugal heuristics can provide norms of good reasoning, and thus how (and how far) rationality can be naturalized. We explain the heuristics that humans often rely on in solving problems, for example, choosing investment strategies or apartments, placing bets in sports, or making library searches. We then show that heuristics can lead to judgments that are as accurate as or even more accurate than strategies that use more information and computation, (...) including optimization methods. A standard way to defend the use of heuristics is by reference to accuracy-effort trade-offs. We take a different route, emphasizing ecological rationality (the relationship between cognitive heuristics and environment), and argue that in uncertain environments, more information and computation are not always better (the “less-can-be-more” doctrine). The resulting naturalism about rationality is thus normative because it not only describes what heuristics people use, but also in which specific environments one should rely on a heuristic in order to make better inferences. While we desist from claiming that the scope of ecological rationality is unlimited, we think it is of wide practical use. (shrink)

Heuristics are efficient cognitive processes that ignore information. In contrast to the widely held view that less processing reduces accuracy, the study of heuristics shows that less information, computation, and time can in fact improve accuracy. We review the major progress made so far: the discovery of less-is-more effects; the study of the ecological rationality of heuristics, which examines in which environments a given strategy succeeds or fails, and why; an advancement from vague labels to computational models of heuristics; the (...) development of a systematic theory of heuristics that identifies their building blocks and the evolved capacities they exploit, and views the cognitive system as relying on an “adaptive toolbox;” and the development of an empirical methodology that accounts for individual differences, conducts competitive tests, and has provided evidence for people’s adaptive use of heuristics. Homo heuristicus has a biased mind and ignores part of the available information, yet a biased mind can handle uncertainty more efficiently and robustly than an unbiased mind relying on more resource-intensive and general-purpose processing strategies. (shrink)

The Empire of Chance tells how quantitative ideas of chance transformed the natural and social sciences, as well as daily life over the last three centuries. A continuous narrative connects the earliest application of probability and statistics in gambling and insurance to the most recent forays into law, medicine, polling and baseball. Separate chapters explore the theoretical and methodological impact in biology, physics and psychology. Themes recur - determinism, inference, causality, free will, evidence, the shifting meaning of probability - but (...) in dramatically different disciplinary and historical contexts. In contrast to the literature on the mathematical development of probability and statistics, this book centres on how these technical innovations remade our conceptions of nature, mind and society. Written by an interdisciplinary team of historians and philosophers, this readable, lucid account keeps technical material to an absolute minimum. It is aimed not only at specialists in the history and philosophy of science, but also at the general reader and scholars in other disciplines. (shrink)

Schutz’s references to literature and arts in his theoretical works are manifold. But literature and theory are both a certain kind of a finite province of meaning, that means they are not easily accessible from the paramount reality of everyday life. Now there is another kind of referring to literature: metaphorizing it. Using it, as may be said with Lakoff and Johnson, to understand and to experience one kind of thing in terms of another. Literally metapherein means “to carry over”. (...) Metaphorizing in this view is then a specific kind of border-crossing between different provinces of meaning. That poses two questions: 1. What means finiteness of those provinces of meaning, what kind of border crossings are possible? What is the ground for metaphorizing meaning? 2. Could this concept used for founding a theory of the constitution of the societal and of society, that overcomes the dichotomy of structure/agency? These questions will be answered with one example in view: Schutz’ report to Kaufmann of his first visit of Husserl describing his experience as feeling like Wilhelm Meister at the Society of the Tower. In a first step this metaphor is presented together with some crumbs of metaphor theory. In a second step these crumbs will be connected to Husserl’s concept of experience. After developing a short overview over Schutz’ “finite provinces of meaning,” the relation of experience, metaphors to the intersubjectivity of these provinces in their dependence from writing and printing is discussed. (shrink)

This article presents a systematic literature review documenting how technical investigations have been adapted in value sensitive design (VSD) studies from 1996 to 2023. We present a systematic review, including theoretical and applied studies that either discuss or conduct technical investigations in VSD. This systematic review contributes to the VSD community when seeking to further refine the methodological framework for carrying out technical investigations in VSD.

This volume summarizes the ethical, social and cultural contexts of interfacing brains and computers. It is intended for the interdisciplinary community of BCI stakeholders. Insofar, engineers, neuroscientists, psychologists, physicians, care-givers and also users and their relatives are concerned. For about the last twenty years brain-computer-interfaces (BCIs) have been investigated with increasing intensity and have in principle shown their potential to be useful tools in diagnostics, rehabilitation and assistive technology. The central promise of BCI technology is enabling severely impaired people in (...) mobility, grasping, communication, and entertainment. Successful applications are for instance communication devices enabling locked-in patients in staying in contact with their environment, or prostheses enabling paralysed people in reaching and grasping. In addition to this, it serves as an introduction to the whole field of BCI for any interested reader. (shrink)

What is the nature of moral behavior? According to the study of bounded rationality, it results not from character traits or rational deliberation alone, but from the interplay between mind and environment. In this view, moral behavior is based on pragmatic social heuristics rather than moral rules or maximization principles. These social heuristics are not good or bad per se, but solely in relation to the environments in which they are used. This has methodological implications for the study of morality: (...) Behavior needs to be studied in social groups as well as in isolation, in natural environments as well as in labs. It also has implications for moral policy: Only by accepting the fact that behavior is a function of both mind and environmental structures can realistic prescriptive means of achieving moral goals be developed. (shrink)

Can the general public learn to deal with risk and uncertainty, or do authorities need to steer people’s choices in the right direction? Libertarian paternalists argue that results from psychological research show that our reasoning is systematically flawed and that we are hardly educable because our cognitive biases resemble stable visual illusions. For that reason, they maintain, authorities who know what is best for us need to step in and steer our behavior with the help of “nudges.” Nudges are nothing (...) new, but justifying them on the basis of a latent irrationality is. In this article, I analyze the scientific evidence presented for such a justification. It suffers from narrow logical norms, that is, a misunderstanding of the nature of rational thinking, and from a confirmation bias, that is, selective reporting of research. These two flaws focus the blame on individuals’ minds rather than on external causes, such as industries that spend billions to nudge people into unhealthy behavior. I conclude that the claim that we are hardly educable lacks evidence and forecloses the true alternative to nudging: teaching people to become risk savvy. (shrink)

Evidence-based recommendations for lifestyles to promote healthy cognitive aging root in reductionistic studies of mostly physical measurable factors with large effect sizes. In contrast, most people consider factors like autonomy, purpose, social participation and engagement, etc. as central to a high quality of life in old age. Evidence for a direct causal impact of these factors on healthy cognitive aging is still limited, albeit not absent. Ultimately, however, individual lifestyle is a complex composite of variables relating to both body and (...) mind as well as to receiving input and generating output. The physical interventions are tied to the more subjective and mind-related aspects of lifestyle and wellbeing in the idea of the “embodied mind,” which states that the mind is shaped by and requires the body. The causality is reciprocal and the process is dynamic, critically requiring movement: the “embodied mind” is a “embodied mind in motion.” Hiking, playing musical instruments, dancing and yoga are examples of body–mind activities that assign depth, purpose, meaning, social embedding, etc. to long-term beneficial physical “activities” and increase quality of life not only as delayed gratification. The present motivational power of embodied activities allows benefiting from the side-effects of late-life resilience. The concept offers an access point for unraveling the mechanistic complexity of lifestyle-based prevention, including their neurobiological foundations. (shrink)

Friedrich Nietzsche has emerged as one of the most important and influential modern philosophers. For several decades, the book series Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung (MTNF) has set the agenda in a rapidly growing and changing field of Nietzsche scholarship. The scope of the series is interdisciplinary and international in orientation reflects the entire spectrum of research on Nietzsche, from philosophy to literary studies and political theory. The series publishes monographs and edited volumes that undergo a strict peer-review process. The (...) book series is led by an international team of editors, whose work represents the full range of current Nietzsche scholarship. (shrink)

What counts as human rationality: reasoning processes that embody content-independent formal theories, such as propositional logic, or reasoning processes that are well designed for solving important adaptive problems? Most theories of human reasoning have been based on content-independent formal rationality, whereas adaptive reasoning, ecological or evolutionary, has been little explored. We elaborate and test an evolutionary approach, Cosmides' social contract theory, using the Wason selection task. In the first part, we disentangle the theoretical concept of a “social contract” from that (...) of a “cheater-detection algorithm”. We demonstrate that the fact that a rule is perceived as a social contract — or a conditional permission or obligation, as Cheng and Holyoak proposed — is not sufficient to elicit Cosmides' striking results, which we replicated. The crucial issue is not semantic, but pragmatic: whether a person is cued into the perspective of a party who can be cheated. In the second part, we distinguish between social contracts with bilateral and unilateral cheating options. Perspective change in contracts with bilateral cheating options turns P & not-Q responses into not-P & Q responses. The results strongly support social contract theory, contradict availability theory, and cannot be accounted for by pragmatic reasoning schema theory, which lacks the pragmatic concepts of perspectives and cheating detection. (shrink)

A certain generalization of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics beyond operator algebras is considered. The approach is based on the concept of conditional probability and the interpretation of the Lüders-von Neumann quantum measurement as a probability conditionalization rule. A major result shows that the operator algebras must be replaced by order-unit spaces with some specific properties in the generalized approach, and it is analyzed under which conditions these order-unit spaces become Jordan algebras. An application of this result provides a (...) characterization of the projection lattices in operator algebras. (shrink)

The contrast between the two approaches alluded to in the title has gained a certain prominence in our own day. With the knowledge of hindsight it will be of interest therefore to study its incidence in an earlier period, in the writings of Whewell and Mill, Which may thus yield added significance for a later generation. Right at the start there is a difficulty. Not all inductivists agree on their principles, or their interpretation of the logic of scientific reasoning, and (...) the same is true of deductivism, and the differences can therefore be discussed only in connection with individual writers. When this is done, we do find moreover some considerable variations in the treatment of their respective doctrines by the members of each of our two schools. To define these differences, we need a finer structure of elements of classification, indicative of criteria for the acceptance of scientific hypotheses. (shrink)