In response to the dozen essays published here, which relate my 1964 paper on “The Nature of Belief Systems in the Mass Publics” to normative requirements of democratic theory, I note, inter alia, a major misinterpretation of my old argument, as well as needed revisions of that argument in the light of intervening data. Then I address the degree to which there may be some long‐term secular change in the parameters that I originally laid out. In the final section, I (...) provide a case study of public understanding of factual trends in federal tax policy in recent decades which seems commendably veridical on average. The preferences of the public thereon add up to a remarkably clear popular mandate. But this mandate seems to disappear rather magically in the voting booth, probably due to a combination of limited contextual information on the public side, and considerable skill on the elite side in manipulating apparent political realities. (shrink)

The following represents excerpts from a transcription of the informal discussion that ensued after Stephen Pope and Philip Hefner delivered the preceding papers at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C., 20 February 2000. These excerpts are presented with a minimum of editing, to preserve the extemporaneous, informal, oral character of the conversation. The excerpts end with a fragmentary comment by E. O. Wilson, conveying the spirit of the actual conversation, which (...) was halted when the allotted time had elapsed and the sense of the group was that areas had been opened up for further conversation that could not be continued at this meeting. (shrink)

Erratum In the Review Historical Individualism by Sascha Talmor, which appeared in Vol. 7 No. 6, 1986, p. 661, line 2, Maurice Mauss should read Marcel Mauss. The editors and publishers apologise for this error.

The goal of this thesis is to model some of the cognitive structures and processes involve d in how people decide what to say in purposeful conversation. The main concern is to show how a speaker's knowledge of his/her hearer influences what s/he says. Utterances in such dialogues, where speakers can be presumed to be speaking for reasons, can best be viewed as the performance of "speech acts" (e.g., requesting). By modeling the process of deciding what to say as one (...) of problem-solving, we show that the same mechanisms used to plan non-linguistic actions are applicable to planning of speech acts. The methodology of this research employs a computer program that integrates beliefs, goals, problem-solving, and reasoning, with the use of language. The program does this by planning speech acts when it determines that to achieve its situational goals, it needs to influence someone else's behavior. The system is able to plan request speech actrions to influence its user's goals, and inform speech acts to influence his/her beliefs. In addition, it is shown that speech acts can be used to achieve subgoals of other such acts. For instance, in addition to requesting that the user perform some action, the system can also decide to supply him/her with information necessary to performing that action -- information that it believes s/he does not already have. Our model is extendable to the more general problem of planning multiparty speech acts -- ones where actions requested by the speaker involve acts to be performed by parties other than the hearer. [MORE]. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:American Journal of Philology 125.2 (2004) 279-283 [Access article in PDF] J. N. Adams, Mark Janse, and Simon Swain, eds. Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Word. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. x + 483 pp. Cloth, $98. There are some issues, and bilingualism is one of them, that have been mainstays in the scholarly dialogue of classicists and historical linguists for centuries. This interest has (...) been fueled in part by the frequent references to Greek/Latin bilingualism in the ancient record, especially in connection with what Adams (Bilingualism and the Latin Language, 9) calls "élite bilinguals," i.e., upper-class Romans who were skilled in Greek. For example, Quintilian (1.1.12) says: "a sermone Graeco puerum incipere malo, quia Latinum, qui pluribus in usu est, vel nobis nolentibus perbibet." Cicero (Verr. 4.127), attacking Verres for his lack of cultivation, has the following harsh words: "tum epigramma Graecum pernobile incisum est in basi, quod iste eruditus homo et Graeculus, qui haec subtiliter iudicat, qui solus intellegit, si unam litteram Graecam scisset, certe non sustulisset." There is a notable passage in Gellius (17.17.1; commentary by Skutsch, The Annals of Q. Ennius, Oxford 1975, 749-50) in which he affirms the proficiency of Ennius in Greek, Latin and Oscan, and that of the famed king Mithridates, who was said to be fluent in twenty-five different languages ("Quintus Ennius tria corda habere sese dicebat, quod loqui Graece et Osce et Latine sciret. Mithridates autem... quinque et viginti gentium quas sub dicione habuit linguas percalluit").But as is the case with many everyday commonsense notions, bilingualism is far more complex, and far more interesting, than has been thought previously. Bilingual societies have to some extent been unappreciated and have certainly been underanalyzed by scholars of the ancient world. The reasons are obvious but merit restatement: although bilingualism in ancient societies was an everyday fact of life, most of them did not have "language policies" governing the use of languages in particular social settings and therefore offer no scholarly or administrative discourse on the matter. Furthermore, the study of ancient bilingualism depends crucially on the existence of certain kinds of (bilingual) materials, a knowledge of the languages in question (not only Greek and Latin), and on subtle sociolinguistic notions, which are generally not in the repertoire of the literary or historical scholar, or the historical linguist.But this is all beginning to change, as scholars of antiquity begin to discover the features—psychological, sociological, and linguistic—that defined bilingual societies. Work has appeared recently by Indo-Europeanists conversant in dialectology and sociolinguistic principles: see, for example, Neumann and [End Page 279] Untermann, Die Sprachen im Römischen Reich der Kaiserzeit (Cologne 1980); Campanile, Cardona, and Lazzeroni, eds., Bilinguismo e biculturalismo nel mondo antico (Pisa 1988); and Dunkel, "Remarks on Code-Switching in Cicero's Letters to Atticus" (Museum Helveticum 57, 2000). There is also work by classical philologists who have applied the methods and approaches of sociolinguistics, such as Flobert, e.g., "Les grafittes de La Graufesenque; Un témoinage sur le gallo-latin sous Néron," in Iliescu and Marxgut, eds., Latin vulgaire-latin tardif iii (Tübingen 1992), and in this volume; and Biville, e.g., "Compétence bilingue latino-grecque et manipulations interlinguistiques," in La Koiné grecque antique, vol. 3 (Nancy 1998), also in this volume; and especially the recent massive volume by Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge 2003).The volume under review results from a conference held at the University of Reading in 1998. There are fifteen chapters, including a useful introductory essay by the editors. The introductory chapter is an important one for the classicist, since it contains discussion and explanation of many technical concepts that are central to the study of bilingual individuals and societies. The book contains two methodological essays in the introduction (D. L. Langslow, "Approaching Bilingualism in Corpus Languages"; and K. Versteegh, "Dead or Alive? The Status of the Standard Language"); four chapters on Greek-Latin bilingualism (F. Biville, "The Graeco-Romans and Graeco-Latin: A... (shrink)

The topic of the democratic public's limited competence has preoccupied students of democracy for centuries. Anecdotal concerns about the problem reached their peak of sophistication in the writings of Walter Lippmann and Joseph Schumpeter. Not until Philip E. Converse's “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics” did statistical research overwhelmingly confirm the worst fears of such democratic skeptics. Subsequent work has tended to confirm Converse's picture of a tiny stratum of well‐informed ideological elites whose passionate political (...) debates find little echo, or even awareness, in the mass public. While a great deal of attention has been devoted to “saving” democratic legitimacy from such findings, the Converse‐inspired work of John Zaller (1992) shows how fruitful Converse's basic ideas can be not only in analyzing real‐world political events, but in pulling together and stimulating new lines of research into what moves the “creative synthesizers” of belief systems; into the factors that affect the small numbers of people who grasp such systems and attempt to transmit them to the public; and into the long‐term psychological or cultural sources of the predispositions with which members of the mass public confront the resulting political messages. (shrink)

Recent work in cognitive neuroscience on the child's Theory of Mind (ToM) has pursued the idea that the ability to metarepresent mental states depends on a domain-specific cognitive subystem implemented in specific neural circuitry: a Theory of Mind Module. We argue that the interaction of several domain-general mechanisms and lower-level domain-specific mechanisms accounts for the flexibility and sophistication of behavior, which has been taken to be evidence for a domain-specific ToM module. This finding is of more general interest since it (...) suggests a parsimonious cognitive architecture can account for apparent domain specificity. We argue for such an architecture in two stages. First, on conceptual grounds, contrasting the case of language with ToM, and second, by showing that recent evidence in the form of fMRI and lesion studies supports the more parsimonious hypothesis. 1. Theory of Mind, Metarepresentation, and Modularity2. Developmental Components of ToM3. The Analogy with Modularity of Language4. Dissociations without Modules5. The Evidence from Neuroscience6. Conclusion. (shrink)

Despite its origins in explorations of the political and institutional history that had become unfashionable in History departments, the Political Science subfield of American Political Development has drifted toward the “history‐from‐below” view against which it was originally a reaction. Perhaps this is a normal tendency in democratic cultures that ground their legitimacy on the will of the people. But it may also be due to a failure of APD scholars to appreciate that even in a democratic country such as the (...) United States, the state may acquire autonomy from the public will because of the vast scope of state activity, and the restricted ability of the people to monitor, understand, and control that activity. Philip E. Converse's signal contribution to the public‐opinion literature can thus be the starting point for a revision of American political history with an eye to the autonomy that political elites may gain from public ignorance of their actions. (shrink)

I here discuss an argument frequently dismissed as a fallacy – the slippery slope or camel's nose. The argument has three forms – analogical, argumentative, and prudential. None of these provides a deductive guarantee, but all can provide considerations capable of influencing the intellect. Our evaluation of such arguments reflects our background social and evaluative assumptions.

Historical analysis and policy making often require counterfactual thought experiments that isolate hypothesized causes from a vast array of historical possibilities. However, a core precept of Jervis's “systems thinking” is that causes are so interconnected that the historian can only with great difficulty imagine causation by subtracting all variables but one. Prediction, according to Jervis, is even more problematic: The more sensitive an event is to initial conditions (e.g., butterfly effects), the harder it is to derive accurate forecasts. Nevertheless, if (...) awareness of system effects can help forecasters better calibrate their probability estimates of whether or not certain events will come to pass, systems thinkers who are pessimistic about prediction are diluting their confidence too much. The challenge is a meta-cognitive one: thinking systematically about when to engage in systems thinking; and weighing the costs and benefits of using simple or complex heuristics in policy environments that can shift suddenly from quiescence to turbulence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 119-122 [Access article in PDF] The Lotus Sutra and Process Philosophy Philip E.Devenish Rissho Kosei-kai In 1994, Rissho Kosei-kai began to sponsor an annual summer conference to which international scholars were invited to discuss and explore the Lotus Sutra. Some of the earlier conferences focused on themes such as "The Lotus Sutra and Ethics" and "The Lotus Sutra and Social Responsibility." These conferences have (...) encouraged a more widespread understanding of the Lotus Sutra among Western scholars and, as a result, a greater exposure to the Lotus Sutra on the part of students in the universities where these scholars teach. An additional feature of the conferences is the exposure of these scholars to Rissho Kosei-kai as a significant religious organization in modern Japan.This year's conference involved eleven scholars, six from the United States and five from Japan. It was held at Bandaiso, Rissho Kosei-kai's retreat center, about four hours north ofTokyo by bus. Its theme was"The Lotus Sutra andProcess Thought." Process thought is a kind of philosophical thinking developed primarily in America over the last century that shares certain features with the basic point of view expressed in the Lotus Sutra.The Lotus Sutra is not primarily a philosophical or theological text, but rather a religious one. It focuses less on analyzing reality than on coming to terms with it, responding to it, and also on changing it. However, a religious text always presupposes concepts and ideas that it employs in order to express its intuitions about what is important in life. Professor Gene Reeves, the organizer of this and the previous conferences in the series, has shown in his writings that Lotus Sutra Buddhism shares with process thought several basic commitments. One is to what he calls "a philosophy of integration" of teachings and practices, of people with nature, and of wisdom, compassion, and practice. Another is their shared "philosophy of becoming," according to which everything that exists depends on the basic process of causal relations, which makes it possible for anything at all to exist. Lotus Sutra Buddhism and process philosophy also agree that all individual realities exhibit a basic character of creativity and that creativity characterizes ultimate reality, whether this is understood in some sense as "the Buddha" or as "God." Moreover, both movements teach the possibility of religious salvation for all people as well as an ethics grounded in universal respect and compassion.Many of the participants in the conference expressed their conviction that process [End Page 119] thought, as it is developed particularly in the writings of the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Charles Hartshorne (b. 1897), and John Dewey (1859-1952), provides an especially clear and rich articulation of these themes and that Lotus Sutra Buddhists have much to gain from the study of this philosophy. At the same time, there was equally deep appreciation for the type of Lotus Sutra Buddhism given social and religious expression in Rissho Kosei-kai and, in particular, for its stress on the practice of "appropriate" or "skillful" means (upaya).Professor Joseph Grange, of the University of Southern Maine, drew attention to the overall consonance of the Lotus Sutra and Whitehead's later writings in overcoming dualism in thought and life. Professor Steve Odin, of the University of Hawai'i, discussed the ways both Lotus Sutra Buddhism and Whitehead formulate an interrelational vision of reality wherein each event is a microcosmic reflection of a macrocosmic whole, especially in the doctrine of the Lotus Sutra tradition of ichinen sanzen, or "three thousand realms in one thought." The present author, an independent scholar, focused on the convergence of the two movements of thought in the religious and ethical notions of peace and compassion.Professor Yoshitaka Goh, of the Japan Biblical Seminary, stressed the specifically historical character of human salvation, in which the past shapes the possibilities for our lives in the present. Professor Warren Frisina, from Hofstra University, New York, analyzed the relations between knowledge and action in the Lotus Sutra and the thought of John Dewey, showing that each... (shrink)

Why are some patients with Parkinson's disease unhappy about the outcome of deep brain stimulation (DBS)? Meccaci and Haselager (2014) attempt to answer this question by analyzing the seminal case...

Presents a contemporary version of the natural law tradition as a valid approach to ethical problems.

Raising the war on political correctness to a new and higher intellectual level, Philip Devine sheds fresh light on the whole question of cultural standards and the fashionable notion of multiculturalism. While acknowledging the diversity of ways of life and the differing belief systems that arise from and justify those ways of life, the author attacks the current exploitation of diversity to justify a militantly intolerant relativism. His wide-ranging and erudite work connects cultural issues to our real-world existence as (...) biological and historical beings, pulling together ideas of bioethics, education, and the structure and purpose of families. This work will be of interest to those fighting the culture wars across the humanities and social and behavioral sciences. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Social‐scientific data, such as those found in Philip E. Converse's 1964 essay, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” have led some to question whether basic assumptions about democratic legitimacy are unfounded. However, by another set of criteria, we have the “democracy” that was intended by the Framers—namely, a liberal representative system that avoids strong civic engagement by the citizenry. At its deepest level, the American system has been designed to ensure elite influence over the main (...) ambitions of American policy: the expansion of public and private power. When social scientists accumulate findings of civic disengagement and ignorance, it is wrongly supposed to be an indictment of the citizenry; rather, those findings should be understood as the expected result of a certain set of commitments throughout American political history, of which civic apathy and ignorance are the desired outcomes. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe proportion of the American electorate that is “constrained” by ideology has risen dramatically since Philip E. Converse suggested, in the early 1960s, that ideology is the province of only a small fraction of the mass public. In part, the rise of ideological voters has been obscured by the tendency of scholars after Converse to equate them with those who use terms referring to ideological concepts, such as liberal and conservative, in open-ended interviews. These “concept ideologues,” however, (...) are not the only members of the public whose political opinions show evidence of ideological constraint. There is also a growing segment of the public, the “policy ideologues,” who take positions on three or more policy issues but do not happen to mention ideological concepts. Policy ideologues prove to be as politically knowledgeable as concept ideologues; their attitudes are nearly as constrained across issues and over time; and their policy stances usually “make sense” as liberal or conservative—not surprisingly, as they are almost as willing as concept ideologues to label themselves ideologically, when asked. By 2012, the portion of the public consisting of concept and policy ideologues had reached 42 percent. It declined to 38 percent in 2016, but was still a far cry from the 12 percent of the electorate whom Converse identified as ideologues or near ideologues as of 1956. (shrink)

Heuristics are necessary but far from sufficient explanations for moral judgment. This commentary stresses: (a) the need to complement cold, cognitive-economizing functionalist accounts with hot, value-expressive, social-identity-affirming accounts; and (b) the importance of conducting reflective-equilibrium thought and laboratory experiments that explore the permeability of the boundaries people place on the “thinkable.”.

I defend the coherence of Theistic Evolutionism, though I do not present any direct argument for either theism or (broadly Darwinian) evolution. I distinguish between evolution as a scientific theory, however well established, and evolutionism as a religion or ideology. I argue that the confusion between the two senses of evolutionism is bad for both biology and religion, and conclude by suggesting that, in Irving Kristol's words, 'our goal should be to have biology and evolution taught in a way that (...) points to what we don't know as well as what we know'. (shrink)