Richerson et al. argue that relatively large culturalFSTvalues provide evidence for group structure and therefore scope for group selection. However, recent research on spatial patterns of cultural variation demonstrates that, as in the genetic case, apparent group structure can be a consequence of geographic clines, not group barriers. Such a pattern limits the scope for cultural group selection.

Reputation monitoring and the punishment of cheats are thought to be crucial to the viability and maintenance of human cooperation in large groups of non-kin. However, since the cost of policing moral norms must fall to those in the group, policing is itself a public good subject to exploitation by free riders. Recently, it has been suggested that belief in supernatural monitoring and punishment may discourage individuals from violating established moral norms and so facilitate human cooperation. Here we use cross-cultural (...) survey data from a global sample of 87 countries to show that beliefs about two related sources of supernatural monitoring and punishment — God and the afterlife —independently predict respondents' assessment of the justifiability of a range of moral transgressions. This relationship holds even after controlling for frequency of religious participation, country of origin, religious denomination and level of education. As well as corroborating experimental work, our findings suggest that, across cultural and religious backgrounds, beliefs about the permissibility of moral transgressions are tied to beliefs about supernatural monitoring and punishment, supporting arguments that these beliefs may be important promoters of cooperation in human groups. (shrink)

In Big Gods, Norenzayan (2013) presents the most comprehensive treatment yet of the Big Gods question. The book is a commendable attempt to synthesize the rapidly growing body of survey and experimental research on prosocial effects of religious primes together with cross-cultural data on the distribution of Big Gods. There are, however, a number of problems with the current cross-cultural evidence that weaken support for a causal link between big societies and certain types of Big Gods. Here we attempt to (...) clarify these problems and, in so doing, correct any potential misinterpretation of the cross-cultural findings, provide new insight into the processes generating the patterns observed, and flag directions for future research. (shrink)

Opponents of cosmopolitanism often dismiss the position on the grounds that cosmopolitan proposals are completely unrealistic and that they fly in the face of our human nature. We have deep psychological needs that are satisfied by national identification and so all cosmopolitan projects are doomed, or so it is argued. In this essay we examine the psychological grounds claimed to support the importance of nationalism to our wellbeing. We argue that the alleged human needs that nationalism is said to satisfy (...) are: (i) either more complex than initially one might think or (ii) do not necessarily provide very strong grounds for the theses advocated by nationalists or (iii) can be well met in alternate ways than through national identification. Moreover, commitment to cosmopolitanism is not antithetical to meeting these needs: rather, more cosmopolitan worldviews can do quite well in meeting the needs of interest. Moreover, we argue that since nationalism is a fluid and socially constructed phenomenon, quite open to the influence of other factors, the current evidence suggests that central aspects of cosmopolitanism are quite feasible and realistic. (shrink)

This paper explores the interface between users and producers of translational science through three case studies. It argues that effective TS requires a breakdown between user and producer roles: users become producers and producers become users. In making this claim, we challenge conventional understandings of TS as well as linear models of innovation. Policy-makers and funders increasingly expect TS and its associated socioeconomic benefits to occur when funding scientific research. We argue that a better understanding of the hybridity between users (...) and producers in TS is essential to encouraging effective TS activities. In arguing for broader understandings of the hybrid roles of user/producers in TS we rely on empirical observations made during our four-year study of three translational pathways here labeled clinical, commercial, and civic. These pathways were identified in a large-scale network of scientists investigating the pathogenomics of innate immunity (i.e. “the PI.2 network”.. (shrink)

Cooperation for the public good is vulnerable to exploitation by free-riders because it always pays individuals to exploit the social contract for their own benefit. This problem can be resolved if free-riders are punished, but punishment is itself a public good subject to free-riding. The fear of supernatural punishment hypothesis (FSPH) proposes that belief in supernatural punishment might offer a solution to this problem by deflecting the cost of punishment onto supernatural forces and thereby incentivizing cooperation. FSPH is supported empirically (...) by ethnographic data, but this work has so far focused on (1) institutional cooperative traits which may not reflect individual choices on how to behave in everyday social interactions and (2) threat of punishment from all-powerful moralizing high gods rather than other agents capable of supernatural punishment. Here, we consider the FSPH using variables which are linked to individual interaction and expand the number of variables measuring belief in different forms of supernatural punishment. Our findings do not fit these more general FSPH predictions. We suggest there may be something special about the link between moralizing high gods and institutional enforcement of cooperation that is not captured by these other variables. (shrink)

Before COVID-19, dementia singing groups and choirs flourished, providing activity, cognitive stimulation, and social support for thousands of people with dementia in the UK. Interactive music provides one of the most effective psychosocial interventions for people with dementia; it can allay agitation and promote wellbeing. Since COVID-19 has halted the delivery of in-person musical activities, it is important for the welfare of people with dementia and their carers to investigate what alternatives to live music making exist, how these alternatives are (...) delivered and how their accessibility can be expanded. This community case study examines recent practice in online music-making in response to COVID-19 restrictions for people with dementia and their supporters, focusing on a UK context. It documents current opportunities for digital music making, and assesses the barriers and facilitators to their delivery and accessibility. Online searches of video streaming sites and social media documented what music activities were available. Expert practitioners and providers collaborated on this study and supplied input about the sessions they had been delivering, the technological challenges and solutions they had found, and the responses of the participants. Recommendations for best practice were developed and refined in consultation with these collaborators. Over 50 examples of online music activities were identified. In addition to the challenges of digital inclusion and accessibility for some older people, delivering live music online has unique challenges due to audio latency and sound quality. It is necessary to adapt the session to the technology's limitations rather than expect to overcome these challenges. The recommendations highlight the importance of accessibility, digital safety and wellbeing of participants. They also suggest ways to optimize the quality of their musical experience. The pandemic has prompted innovative approaches to deliver activities and interventions in a digital format, and people with dementia and their carers have adapted rapidly. While online music is meeting a clear current need for social connection and cognitive stimulation, it also offers some advantages which remain relevant after COVID-19 restrictions are relaxed. The recommendations of this study are intended to be useful to musicians, dementia care practitioners, and researchers during the pandemic and beyond. (shrink)

We suggest there is somewhat more potential than Christiansen & Chater (C&C) allow for genetic adaptations specific to language. Our uniquely cooperative social system requires sophisticated language skills. Learning and performance of some culturally transmitted elements in animals is genetically based, and we give examples of features of human language that evolve slowly enough that genetic adaptations to them may arise.

Doug Walton, who died in January 2020, was a prolific author whose work in informal logic and argumentation had a profound influence on Artificial Intelligence, including Artificial Intelligence and Law. He was also very interested in interdisciplinary work, and a frequent and generous collaborator. In this paper seven leading researchers in AI and Law, all past programme chairs of the International Conference on AI and Law who have worked with him, describe his influence on their work.

We welcome Norenzayan et al.’s claim that the prosocial effects of beliefs in supernatural agents extend beyond Big Gods. To date, however, supporting evidence has focused on the Abrahamic Big God, making generalisations difficult. We discuss a recent study that highlights the need for clarity about the causal path by which supernatural beliefs affect the evolution of big societies.

Continuous sedation until death (CSD), the act of reducing or removing the consciousness of an incurably ill patient until death, often provokes medical–ethical discussions in the opinion sections of medical and nursing journals. Some argue that CSD is morally equivalent to physician-assisted death (PAD), that it is a form of “slow euthanasia.” A qualitative thematic content analysis of opinion pieces was conducted to describe and classify arguments that support or reject a moral difference between CSD and PAD. Arguments pro and (...) contra a moral difference refer basically to the same ambiguous themes, namely intention, proportionality, withholding artificial nutrition and hydration, and removing consciousness. This demonstrates that the debate is first and foremost a semantic rather than a factual dispute, focusing on the normative framework of CSD. Given the prevalent ambiguity, the debate on CSD appears to be a classical symbolic struggle for moral authority. (shrink)

We provide a retrospective of 25 years of the International Conference on AI and Law, which was first held in 1987. Fifty papers have been selected from the thirteen conferences and each of them is described in a short subsection individually written by one of the 24 authors. These subsections attempt to place the paper discussed in the context of the development of AI and Law, while often offering some personal reactions and reflections. As a whole, the subsections build into (...) a history of the last quarter century of the field, and provide some insights into where it has come from, where it is now, and where it might go. (shrink)

How do we go about understanding the "classic texts" of sociological theory? This paper begins by reviewing the historicist position of Jones, with its foundations in the work of Quentin Skinner and other historians of political theory. This position then is criticized from the standpoint of the neo-Deweyan pragmatism of Richard Rorty. Specifically, Rorty's pragmatism encourages us to revise Skinner's and Jones's historicism on three specific points: the acceptance of treatments of classical texts that are undeniably anachronistic but nonetheless (...) unobjectionable; the restriction of Skinner's notion of an agent's "privileged access" to his or her intentions; and the adoption of a view of the history of sociological theory as a succession of vocabularies-a view that encourages a new kind of dialogue between historians of sociological theory and theorists themselves. The last point is articulated in a concrete example of the interpretation of one of Durkheim's most characteristic arguments. The conclusion again stresses the benefits to be derived from viewing sociological theory-both past and present-from this pragmatist perspective. (shrink)

Work on 'can' in Action Theory is dichotomized into two styles of analysis: (1) what I call the indeterministic analysis, whereby for x to be able to do A means that there is no obstacle to x's doing A, and (2) the hypothetical analysis, which asserts that x is able to do A if and only if x will do A if x tries (wants, wills, chooses, etc.). This paper explores the general hypothesis that 'can' is two-ways ambiguous, that a (...) sense of opportunity corresponds to (1) and a sense of ability to something after the pattern of (2), and that a general concept of 'can' of the kind often sought after by action theorists requires a certain kind of integration of both concepts into a unified definition. The two previous most well-worked-out attempts to lay out a program along these lines, those of Sellars and Chisholm, are analyzed in detail in the hope of smoothing out some of the technical differences to provide foundations for further work of this type. An attempt is made to integrate the program with some recent developments in the concept of ability in the social sciences. The applicability of this work to some very vexing and significant problems in the social sciences is suggested. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to make a bundle theory of objects consistentwith a temporal parts theory of object persistence. To that end,I propose that such bundles are made up of tropes includingthe co-instantiation relation.

This issue includes a number of papers on reproductive ethics, broadly construed. In a recent book, Anja Karnein proposed that embryos created in vitro should be offered up for adoption before being discarded or used in research;1 here Timothy Murphy offers a critical response . Elsewhere, Tak Chan and Stark & Delatycki debate the role of medical professionals in providing parentage determination. Chan argues that doctors are obliged to provide parentage tests when this is requested by parents, provided there is (...) a low risk that the child will be abandoned . Stark & Delatycki discuss some difficulties raised by the ‘risk of abandonment’ condition . Finally, papers by Kate Greasley and David Lang discuss the controversy surrounding the criminal prosecution of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell. Greasley criticises the way in which some commentators capitalised on horror at Gosnell's extreme practices to advance more general anti-abortion objectives . Lang argues, against Greasley, that the dominant pro-life response to the case was neither self-contradictory nor intellectually dishonest .The issue is dominated, however, by discussions of ‘bioenhancement’ – the use of biomedical technologies to augment human capacities. A common criticism of bioenhancements is that they are anti-social: though they may benefit the user, they will have a negative effect on society-at-large. Such concerns are perhaps well placed in relation to the most obvious contemporary examples of bioenhancement: doping in sport, aesthetic medicine, and the use of stimulants to enhance examination performance. However, two varieties of bioenhancement discussed in this issue might be thought to have more positive social effects.David Shaw discusses the possible use of cognitive enhancing drugs to improve health outcomes in disadvantaged segments of society . Such enhancements might be thought to have desirable social …. (shrink)

In this paper some lessons are learned regarding how to extend and deepen the theory of Macagno on assessing dialectical relevance by using the notion of argument distance. An argument is defined as dialectically relevant if it is an appropriate move in a multiagent dialogue exchange. Three examples are studied where a criticism of relevance is made against an argument, and the problem posed is how a response to this type of criticism should be judged to be justified or not, (...) based on the evidence. Based on these examples, an algorithm is presented that helps the user to determine argument distance in a given case as a means of helping to judge whether a criticism that an argument is not relevant is justified or not. (shrink)

This book represents the first full-length study of the aesthetics of the appreciation of wine. It introduces and argues for the validity and significance of several new concepts: competency, project, and aesthetic practices. Using these concepts -- together with analyses borrowed from cognitive science, sensory science, Husserlian phenomenology and hermeneutics -- the case is made that wine can be a proper and indeed significant object of aesthetic attention. The implications of this are pursued in three ways: First, within the culture (...) of wine, with a sustained treatment of important concepts such as terroir; second, within philosophical aesthetics. The latter results in a position termed 'contextual aesthetics' that sees aesthetic acts as always situated within cultural practices, and given meaning thereby. The third implication is for the cultural and aesthetic value accorded to the various senses, and the kinds of underlying issues that might have led to, and might now lead away from, these values. (shrink)

Volume 25, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 92-97.

This article examines inequality from a framework of justice that attends to the socially situated nature of market activity, including exchange. I argue that accounts of unsituated exchange—accounts of market exchange that abstract from social situations, such as philosopher Robert Nozick’s influential libertarian account of justice—overlook various factors that contribute to growing economic inequality in contemporary society. Analyses of market exchange must incorporate the role of “third parties” who play a role in shaping and/or who are affected by economic transactions. (...) The involvement of these additional parties, including the government and future generations, is not interference but, instead, an integral part of the economic and moral accounting of exchange. An approach to justice and inequality which embeds exchange within multiple dimensions of economy and society is needed; the latter part of this article traces such a socially situated approach. (shrink)

Continuing the investigations of X. Yu and others, we study the role of set existence axioms in classical Lebesgue measure theory. We show that pairwise disjoint countable additivity for open sets of reals is provable in RCA0. We show that several well-known measure-theoretic propositions including the Vitali Covering Theorem are equivalent to WWKL over RCA0.

This chapter contains sections titled: A Method of Inquiry Doubt, Intuition, and Certainty Peirce's Reconstruction of the “method for guiding one's reason” A Transformed Ontology.

Preparatory Principles is not a linear text in the conventional sense, but consists of a series of short passages on a variety of topics, whose themes are summarised in marginal headings. The material constitutes a philosophical commonplace book, compiled by Bentham in the mid-1770s, in which he worked out the foundational ideas for his new science of legislation. He then drew on this material when composing such works as A Fragment on Government and An Introduction to the Principles of Morals (...) and Legislation. Inspired by such figures as John Locke and Claude Adrien Helvetius, Bentham developed an original ontological and epistemological basis for legal terminology, with the aim of replacing the traditional terminology of English law with that of universal jurisprudence. The work that dominates the text, in that Bentham returns to it time and time again in order to offer criticism of it, is William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. While unorganized and fragmentary, the material in Preparatory Principles constitutes a remarkable record of the evolving ideas of a major legal philosopher at a formative stage of his career. (shrink)

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.

(Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 2007) > Another look at Bar-On, Horisk and Lycan’s criticism of deflationism. I claim that their argument turns on a simple confusion about definitions and thereby fails to establish that deflationism somehow requires meaning to be explained in terms of truth conditions.

A characterisation of a type of weak-operator continuous linear functional on certain linear subsets of B, where H is a Hilbert space, is derived within Bishop-style constructive mathematics.