How does cultural knowledge shape the development of human minds and, conversely, what kind of species-specific social-cognitive mechanisms have evolved to support the intergenerational reproduction of cultural knowledge? We critically examine current theories proposing a human-specific drive to identify with and imitate conspecifics as the evolutionary mechanism underlying cultural learning. We summarize new data demonstrating the selective interpretive nature of imitative learning in 14-month-olds and argue that the predictive scope of existing imitative learning models is either too broad or too (...) narrow to account for these findings. We outline our alternative theory of a human-specific adaptation for ‘pedagogy’, a communicative system of mutual design specialized for the fast and efficient transfer of new and relevant cultural knowledge from knowledgeable to ignorant conspecifics. We show the central role that innately specified ostensive-communicative triggering cues and learner-directed manner of knowledge manifestations play in constraining and guiding selective imitation of relevant cultural knowledge that is both new and cognitively opaque to the naive learner. (shrink)

Tomasello et al.'s two prerequisites, we argue, are not sufficient to explain the emergence of Joint Collaboration. An adequate account must include the human-specific capacity to communicate relevant information (that may have initially evolved to ensure efficient cultural learning). This, together with understanding intentional actions, does provide sufficient preconditions for Joint Collaboration without the need to postulate a primary human motive to share others' psychological states.

The authors present an ambitious attempt to outline the gradual evolution of the cognitive foundations of ostensive communication. We focus on three problematic aspects of the distinction between expression and communication: ambiguity in the distinction's central principle of “complementary mechanisms,” inconsistencies in the application of the distinction across taxa, and the dismissal of mentalizing in nonhuman primates.

There is no room for pragmatic expectations about communicative interactions in core cognition. Spelke takes the combinatorial power of the human language faculty to overcome the limits of core cognition. The question is: Why should the combinatorial power of the human language faculty support infants' pragmatic expectations not merely about speech, but also about nonverbal communicative interactions?

Barresi & Moore fail to provide a satisfactory account for the development of social understanding because of (1) their ambiguous characterization of the relationship between the intentional schema and shared intentional activities, (2) their underestimation of the representational capacities of infants, and (3) their overreliance on the simulationist assumption that understanding others is tantamount to sharing their experience.

Two experiments investigated whether infants represent goal‐directed actions of others in a way that allows them to draw inferences to unobserved states of affairs (such as unseen goal states or occluded obstacles). We measured looking times to assess violation of infants' expectations upon perceiving either a change in the actions of computer‐animated figures or in the context of such actions. The first experiment tested whether infants would attribute a goal to an action that they had not seen completed. The second (...) experiment tested whether infants would infer from an observed action the presence of an occluded object that functions as an obstacle. The looking time patterns of 12‐month‐olds indicated that they were able to make both types of inferences, while 9‐month‐olds failed in both tasks. These results demonstrate that, by the end of the first year of life, infants use the principle of rational action not only for the interpretation and prediction of goal‐directed actions, but also for making productive inferences about unseen aspects of their context. We discuss the underlying mechanisms that may be involved in the developmental change from 9 to 12 months of age in the ability to infer hypothetical (unseen) states of affairs in teleological action representations. (shrink)

We contrast two positions concerning the initial domain of actions that infants interpret as goal-directed. The 'narrow scope' view holds that goal-attribution in 6- and 9-month-olds is restricted to highly familiar actions (such as grasping) (). The cue-based approach of the infant's 'teleological stance' (), however, predicts that if the cues of equifinal variation of action and a salient action effect are present, young infants can attribute goals to a 'wide scope' of entities including unfamiliar human actions and actions of (...) novel objects lacking human features. It is argued that previous failures to show goal-attribution to unfamiliar actions were due to the absence of these cues. We report a modified replication of showing that when a salient action-effect is presented, even young infants can attribute a goal to an unfamiliar manual action. This study together with other recent experiments reviewed support the 'wide scope' approach indicating that if the cues of goal-directedness are present even 6-month-olds attribute goals to unfamiliar actions. (shrink)

We argue for a relevance-guided learning mechanism to account for both innovative reproduction and faithful imitation by focusing on the role of communication in knowledge transmission. Unlike bifocal stance theory, this mechanism does not require a strict divide between instrumental and ritual-like actions, and the goals they respectively fulfill (material vs. social/affiliative), to account for flexibility in action interpretation and reproduction.

The book addresses the constitution of the high culture of modernity as an uneasy unity of the sciences, including philosophy, and the arts. Their internal dynamism and strain is established through, on the one hand, the relationship of the author - work - recipient, and, on the other, the respective roles of experts and the market.

I make three related proposals concerning the development of receptive communication in human infants. First, I propose that the presence of communicative intentions can be recognized in others' behaviour before the content of these intentions is accessed or inferred. Second, I claim that such recognition can be achieved by decoding specialized ostensive signals. Third, I argue on empirical bases that, by decoding ostensive signals, human infants are capable of recognizing communicative intentions addressed to them. Thus, learning about actual modes of (...) communication benefits from, and is guided by, infants' preparedness to detect infant-directed ostensive communication. (shrink)

In natural sciences, the most interesting and relevant questions are the so-called why-questions. There are several different approaches to why-questions and explanations in the literature, however, most of the literature deals with why-questions about particular events, such as ``Why did Adam eat the apple?''. Even the best known theory of explanation, Hempel's covering law model, is designed for explaining particular events. Here we only deal with purely theoretical why-questions about general phenomena of physics, for instance ``Why can no observer move (...) faster than light?'' or ``Why are Kepler's laws valid?''. Here we are not going to develop a whole new theory of why-questions in physics. We will just touch upon some ideas and examples relevant to our subject. (shrink)

György Lukács first published the original Hungarian language version of Soul and Form in 1910. It included eight of the ten essays later to be published in subsequent German, Italian, and English editions. This current centennial edition adds to the mix one additional Lukács essay, "On Poverty of Spirit", written at roughly the same time as the others and bearing a vital relationship to them. Finally, in this edition we have added to the Lukács material an important introductory essay by (...) Judith Butler, as well as a concluding essay, by Katie Terezakis, which draws out connections between the Lukácsian concept of form and its elaboration and critique in Lukács’s own work and in works of critical theory and philosophy up to the present. (shrink)

Many argued (Accardi and Fedullo, Pitowsky) that Kolmogorov's axioms of classical probability theory are incompatible with quantum probabilities, and that this is the reason for the violation of Bell's inequalities. Szabó showed that, in fact, these inequalities are not violated by the experimentally observed frequencies if we consider the real, “effective” frequencies. We prove in this work a theorem which generalizes this results: “effective” frequencies associated to quantum events always admit a Kolmogorovian representation, when these events are collected through different (...) experimental setups, the choice of which obeys a classical distribution. (shrink)

A Remark about the Analysis of the Illocutionary Act of Assertion. The starting point of this article is the Searleian analysis of the illocutionary act of assertion. I try to sketch an alternative interpretation of the illocutionary act of assertion based on the arguments brought forward by John R. Searle, Paul Grice, Rom Harré, Robert Brandom. This possible interpretation might help us raise some questions about the Searleian interpretation.

The Panama Papers (2016), Paradise Leaks (2017), and Pandora Papers (2021) have revealed the extensive practice of corporate tax avoidance. Yet, the tax behavior of companies claiming to be “socially responsible” has been less examined. This study examines the association between corporate social responsibility disclosure (CSRD) and tax avoidance, particularly in developing economies, focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). By analyzing data from 600 firm-year observations across 13 SSA countries using panel quantile regression, we found a negative relationship between CSRD, which (...) includes ethical, social, and environmental dimensions, and tax avoidance. This aligns with legitimacy theory, indicating that firms are increasingly adopting CSR transparency to meet societal expectations and gain stakeholder trust, avoiding socially irresponsible behaviors. Furthermore, the quality of national governance significantly moderates the CSRD–tax avoidance relationship, supporting the concept of institutional isomorphism. This evidence is valuable for professionals and policymakers and encourages further research to deepen and broaden these findings. (shrink)

From the late seventeenth century on the idea of culture underwent a gradual transformation. Originally this concept referred essentially to the “refined” way of life of the ruling social elite. Popular culture, on the other hand, refers to the usually collective practices of groups of rural and urban workers taking the form of performance. They were not only excluded from refined culture, but it was regarded as completely unsuitable for them, potentially creating dangerous social aspirations. It is with the great (...) social transformation from feudal to bourgeois society that the idea of refined culture was replaced by that of “high culture” encompassing both the arts and the sciences: works claiming universal human significance. This “high culture” for a considerable time coexisted with the remnants of popular culture. It has been only due to the great technical advances that its true opposite, “mass culture” emerged, at the turn to twentieth century, claiming an empirical universality: being understandable and truly interesting to everyone. In economic respect, there is a competitive relation between high and mass culture. However, it is argued that there can be no cultural competition between them. For they posit differing and potentially co-existing receptive attitudes. The characterisation of this difference and the discussion of the seeming exceptions to the so-articulated conceptual scheme occupies the concluding part of this essay. (shrink)

Shahriar S. Afshar claimed that his 2007 modified version of the double-slit experiment violates complementarity. He makes two modifications to the standard double-slit experiment. First, he adds a wire grid that is placed in between the slits and the screen at locations of interference minima. The second modification is to place a converging lens just after the wire grid. The idea is that the wire grid implies the existence of interference minima, while the lens can simultaneously obtain which-way information. More (...) recently, Cramer argued that the experiment bolstered the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum mechanics. His argument scrutinizes Bohr’s complementarity in favor of TIQM. We analyze this experiment by simulation using the path integral formulation of quantum mechanics and find that it agrees with the wave-particle duality relation given by Englert, Greenberg and Yasin. We conclude that the use of Afshar’s experiment to provide a testbed for quantum mechanical interpretations is limited. (shrink)

Although the centrosome was first described over 100 years ago, we still know relatively little of the molecular mechanisms responsible for its functions. Recently, members of a novel family of centrosomal proteins have been identified in a wide variety of organisms. The transforming acidic coiled‐coil‐containing (TACC) proteins all appear to play important roles in cell division and cellular organisation in both embryonic and somatic systems. These closely related molecules have been implicated in microtubule stabilisation, acentrosomal spindle assembly, translational regulation, haematopoietic (...) development and cancer progression. In this review, I summarise what we already know of this protein family and will use the TACC proteins to illustrate the many facets that centrosomes have developed during the course of evolution. BioEssays 24:915–925, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

The Limits of the Formal Treatment of Language. Within the philosophy of language, there is a distinction between the natural language philosophers and the ideal language philosophers. The distinction is drawn based on the way these philosophers reflect on language and the world. Natural language philosophers stress the context-based feature of meaning, while the ideal language philosophers emphasize the context-free feature of meaning. In my study I want to show that that even within the formal study of language, in the (...) apparent absence of any context, the notions of valuation and interpretation help us to understand the meaning of sentences. (shrink)

It was seventy five years ago that the book, Holism and Evolution by Jan Christiaan Smuts was published. Although the book was very popular at the time, it has not been accepted by either the scientific or the philosophical community. Its complex message was truncated to the truism "the whole is more than the sum of its parts," which became the definition of holism, but ensured its rejection by the skeptic as a too general statement to be of practical value. (...) It is very unlikely that there was a sinister plot to sideline this important work. The simplest explanation is that Smuts' concepts, which suggest many of the later ideas of systems thinkers, were simply too far ahead of their time. Now however, at the dawn of the new millennium, the time is perfect to rediscover Smuts and to apply his ideas with a "holos consciousness" to the many burning issues that humanity faces. In this paper the main principles of Holism are explained. (shrink)

(1991). Different forms of causation in dynamical systems: Determinism, pattern generation, and information. World Futures: Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 221-237.

In a recent article “From Epistemology to Ontology,” Tihamer Margitay argues, in addition to other things, that the ontological arguments Polanyi provided for his ontological realism with respect to the levels of reality are insufficient. Although Margitay shows this correctly in the case of arguments from boundary conditions, his arguments are not that convincing against the unidentifyability thesis, the thesis that entity kinds on higher levels cannot be identified with descriptions given on lower levels. I argue that here Polányi relies (...) on a version of the multiple realizeability thesis and this argument can be reformulated in a stronger version against which the counterargument Margitay provides is insufficient. (shrink)