Ray Lankester, in his book Nature and Man, deals with the states of man and nature. In this book, he shows the similarities between them and explains why their union was so important for the whole human race. When discussing Darwinism, he questions its epistemological foundations and criticizes the stage-stage theory of evolution. Ray Lankester concludes by giving us a glimpse into the future of humanity and our planet: "It seems to me that this marvelous endowment would be (...) all turned to good account if we did not allow ourselves to be easily led astray by ideas of a possible future...we should rather insist on increasing our knowledge within due limits, anxious not so much to extend its scope as to increase our capacity for dealing with problems as they arise". (shrink)

This paper uses the friendship and collaboration of Edwin Ray Lankester , zoologist, and Herbert George Wells , novelist and journalist, to challenge the current interpretation of late Victorian concern over degeneration as essentially an intellectual movement with little influence in contemporary debates over social and political problems. Degeneration theory provided for Lankester and Wells the basis both for a personal bond and for an active programme of social and educational reform. I trace the construction of Lankester’s (...) account of degeneration, initially as empirical ‘fact’ and later as ideologically inflected theory, and the reciprocal relationship between this theory and his critique of the British university system. I use Wells’s Outline of history to illustrate the profound influence of Lankester’s degenerationist worldview on Wells’s scientific and socio-political thought. Lankester’s synthesis of his theory and his critique led the two men to reject eugenics as an unscientific and ideologically incompatible solution to the problem of national deterioration. Instead, they campaigned for the reform of scientific education as a means of keeping mankind from physical, intellectual and cultural degeneration. (shrink)

The term ‘homology’ is persistently polysemous, defying the expectation that extensive scientific research should yield semantic stability. A common response has been to seek a unification of various prominent definitions. This paper proposes an alternative strategy, based on the insight that scientific concepts function as tools for research: When analyzing various conceptualizations of homology, we should preserve those distinguishing features that support particular research goals. We illustrate the fruitfulness of our strategy by application to two cases. First, we revisit E. (...) Ray Lankester’s celebrated (1870) evolutionary reappraisal of homology and argue that his analysis has been distorted by assimilation to modern agendas. His ‘homogeny’ does not mean the same thing as modern evolutionary ‘homology,’ and his ‘homoplasy’ is no mere antonym. Instead, Lankester uses both new terms to pose a question that remains strikingly relevant—how do mechanistic and historical causes of morphological resemblance interact? Second, we examine the puzzle of avian digit homology, which exemplifies disciplinary differences in homology conceptualization and assessment. Recent progress has been fueled by the development of new tools within the relevant disciplines (paleontology and developmental biology) and especially by increasing interdisciplinary cooperation. Conceptual unification has played very little role in this work, which instead seeks concrete evolutionary scenarios that integrate all the available evidence. Together these cases indicate the complex relationship between concepts and other tools in homology research. (shrink)

The Plymouth Laboratory of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom (1884) was founded in 1888. In addition to conducting morphological and other biological research, the founders of the laboratory aimed at promoting research in experimental zoology which will be used in this paper as a synonym for e. g. experimental embryology, comparative physiology or general physiology. This dream was not fully realized until 1920. The Great War and its immediate aftermath had a positive impact on the development of (...) the Plymouth Laboratory. The war greatly upset the operation of the Zoological Station in Naples and the ensuing crisis in its operations was closely related to the establishment of the physiological department in Plymouth in 1920. Two other key factors in the Plymouth story were the establishment of the Development Fund in 1909, which began contributing funds to the Plymouth Laboratory in 1912, and the patronage of the Cambridge zoologist George P. Bidder (1863-1954). This paper will focus on the combined influence of the Development Fund and Bidder on the development of the Plymouth Laboratory from around 1902 through the early 1920s, and the important role the laboratory played in promoting experimental zoology in Britain in the 1920s. (shrink)

Maximization theory, which is borrowed from economics, provides techniques for predicing the behavior of animals - including humans. A theoretical behavioral space is constructed in which each point represents a given combination of various behavioral alternatives. With two alternatives - behavior A and behavior B - each point within the space represents a certain amount of time spent performing behavior A and a certain amount of time spent performing behavior B. A particular environmental situation can be described as a constraint (...) on available points (a circumscribed area) within the space. Maximization theory assumes that animals always choose the available point with the highest numerical value. The task of maximization theory is to assign to points in the behavioral space values that remain constant across various environmental situations; as those situations change, the point actually chosen is always the one with the highest assigned value. (shrink)

The intractable mind-body problem, which involves accounting for freedom as well as conscious experience, is created by the assumption that the brain is comprised of insentient things. Chalmers is right, accordingly, to suggest that we take experience as fundamental. Given this starting-point, the hard problem is twofold: to see sufficient reason to adopt this long-despised approach, and to develop a plausible theory based on it. We have several reasons, I suggest, to reject the notion of ‘vacuous actuality’ and to adopt, (...) instead, the view that all true individuals have experience and spontaneity. After suggesting criteria for an acceptable theory, chief among which are ‘hard-core common-sense notions’, I point out why dualism and materialism have been unable to fulfil these criteria. The strength of dualism has been its organizational duality, the strength of materialism its rejection of ontological dualism. I suggest that panexperientialist physicalism, by allowing for ‘compound individuals’ and thereby a ‘nondualistic interactionism’ that combines these strengths, can provide a theory that overcomes the problems of materialist physicalism. (shrink)

Since the introduction and widespread adoption of chemical herbicides, “weed management” has become almost synonymous with “herbicide management.” Over-reliance on herbicides and herbicide-resistant crops has given rise to herbicide resistant weeds. Integrated weed management (IWM) identifies three strategies for weed management— biological-cultural, chemical-technological, mechanical-physical—and recommends combining all three to mitigate herbicide resistance. However, adoption of IWM has stalled, and research to understand the adoption of IWM practices has focused on single stakeholder groups, especially farmers. In contrast, decisions about weed management (...) often occur within a social ecosystem where multiple stakeholder groups co-create knowledge and practices. To more holistically investigate perceptions and decision-making related to herbicide resistant weed management, we conducted 23 in-depth interviews in combination with Q methodology with farmers and public-/private-sector agricultural professionals in the state of Georgia (U.S.). Our investigation focused on the management of an increasingly herbicide resistant weed, Palmer amaranth, which enabled broader conversations about agricultural systems, farmer livelihoods, and sustainability. Factor and thematic analyses allowed us to identify and characterize two distinct typologies: one primarily valued agronomic efficiency and relied upon chemical-technological management practices, while the other valued diversifying weed management strategies as the pathway to agronomic and economic success. Typologies diverged substantially in attitudes toward the three weed management strategies, the role of technology, and systems management generally. These two viewpoints have implications for how we understand underlying stakeholder motivations and choices around weed management strategies, both of which are crucial in promoting and supporting farmer use of diverse, ecologically-sound, weed management strategies. (shrink)

Since the late 2000s trans pregnancy has received increasing public and academic attention, and stories of the ‘pregnant man’ have become a media staple. Existing research has critiqued such spectacularization and the supposed tension between maleness, masculinity, and pregnancy that underpins it. Extending that work, this article draws on interview data from an international study of trans reproductive practices and analyzes participants' experiences of being, and expecting themselves to be, perceived in public space not as spectacularly ‘pregnant men’, but as (...) fat men. As a starting point we take the experience of one participant whose heavily pregnant participation in a five-kilometer race prompted the question: ‘Why is the chubby guy running?’ Using Judith Butler's concept of the cultural intelligibility of gender, we ask why the question asked was not: ‘Why is the pregnant guy running?’ We further consider the degree to which pregnant trans people manage their unintelligibility within the matrix of pregnancy, fatness, and trans/gender and how this reveals the limits of gender intelligibility itself. (shrink)

Nine leading scholars explore some of the most important minds behind the new political economy of the American Founding and engage with the foundational work of Ralph Lerner. In his 1979 article, "Commerce and Character: The Anglo-American as New-Model Man," Ralph Lerner argued that the American Founders and the political theorists of the commercial republic were charting a new basis for society that broke with the "old order," which was "preoccupied with intangible goods to an extent we now hardly ever (...) see. The king had his glory, the nobles their honor, the Christians their salvation, the citizens of pagan antiquity their ambition to outdo others in serving the public good." By contrast, the commercial republic was a regime based on the belief that human behavior is best understood as driven by physical wants and tangible goods. A government grounded on this understanding of humanity would be a more stable system and thus more conducive to human flourishing. Lerner's article thus interpreted the Founding as a revolution in political philosophy that must be understood against the backdrop of the Enlightenment. Commerce and Character brings together nine distinguished scholars who explore individual Enlightenment or American thinkers who made important philosophical or political contributions to the new political economy of modern republicanism. Each contributor uses Lerner's essay as the jumping-off point, and at the end, Lerner provides a detailed response to each of his interlocutors where he carefully examines each chapter and reconsiders his arguments a half century later. (shrink)

Spanning forty years of Ray's career, these essays, for the first time collected in one volume, present the filmmaker's reflections on the art and craft of the cinematic medium and include his thoughts on sentimentalism, mass culture, ...

This book emphasizes the role of semantics as a bridge between the theory of language and the theories of other cognitive capacities such as visual perception...

Semantic Structures is a large-scale study of conceptual structure and its lexical and syntactic expression in English that builds on the theory of Conceptual...

Examining one of the fundamental issues in cognitive psychology: How does our conscious experience come to be the way it is?

This theoretical paper examines the context-sensitivity of the impact of cultural norms on prejudice regulation. Granting the importance of understanding intergroup dynamics in cultural-ecological contexts, we focus on the peculiarities of the French diversity approach. Indeed, the major cultural norm, the Laïcité is declined today in two main variants: The Historic Laïcité, a longstanding egalitarian norm coexisting with its amended form: The New Laïcité, an assimilationist norm. In fact, these co-encapsulated Laïcité variants constitute a fruitful ground to cast light on (...) the processes underlying prejudice regulation. Indeed, it is documented that the assimilationist New Laïcité is linked to higher levels of prejudice as compared to the egalitarian Historic Laïcité. To this day, research mainly explored interindividual determinants of Laïcité endorsements and specified how these endorsements shape prejudice. Crucially, this “indirect-endorsement path” does not account for the more straightforward causal relationship between Laïcité and prejudice. Moreover, recent experimental evidence suggests that the normative salience of both Laïcité norms shape intergroup attitudes beyond personal endorsement. Therefore, in this contribution, we complement previous work by investigating the possible socio-cognitive processes driving this “direct-contextual path.” In doing so, we seek to bridge the gap of causality by investigating how the Laïcité norms can set the stage for specific regulatory strategies. Our reasoning derives from an application of the Justification-Suppression Model bolstered by classical work on mental control, modern racism and diversity ideology. From this, we sketch out the operative functioning of two distinct regulation processes: one that prevents prejudicial attitudes but which can have unexpected consequences on stereotyping within the Historic Laïcité context and one that helps realize prejudice within the New Laïcité context. From this analysis, we discuss the consequences for intergroup relations within and beyond the French context. In particular, we outline the importance of an adequate framing of egalitarian ideologies so that they achieve their goal to foster harmonious intergroup relations. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that economic and social progress in developing countries since the Second World War has been faster than in any comparable period in history. There have been large improvements in incomes, in literacy, in health and in life expectancy. Hundreds of millions have been taken out of a grinding poverty to which in earlier eras they would have been consigned. Yet there still remain over one billion people, almost a fifth of the world’s population, in absolute poverty (...) – that is to say, living on less than one US dollar a day and suffering from undernourishment and much else. The incidence of absolute poverty has certainly fallen; but because of rising population, the total number of poor people has not changed very much. 2 Global income inequality may or may not have increased. What is certain is that the income gaps in the world economy remain enormous. International aid has helped to reduce the incidence of poverty – through additions to physical investment, enhancement of human capital, transfer of technology, support for economic and political reform, and food and other relief in situations of humanitarian crisis. But it has not had the impact it could have had. This of course is not the only reason why extreme poverty has persisted on such a large scale: there are a number of other reasons internal and external to the developing countries, including the relatively slow growth of the world economy. One cause of aid having fallen well short of its poverty reducing potential has been its low volume relative to what many countries could have effectively absorbed, and relative to what on moral grounds the developed countries should have provided. I will come back to this later. The other issue, which I will initially focus on, is whether – and if so, how – aid could have been used more effectively. (shrink)

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and (...) many properties of words. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky’s recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is “perfect,” non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for.. (shrink)

The science of linguistics is made accessible by the author of Consciousness and the Computational Mind, who demonstrates evidence for an innate Universal Grammar that provides the building blocks for all human languages.

Evolutionary scepticism holds that the evolutionary account of the origins of the human cognitive apparatus has sceptical implications for at least some of our beliefs. A common target of evolutionary scepticism is moral realism. Scientific realism, on the other hand, is much less frequently targeted, though the idea that evolutionary theory should make us distrustful of science is by no means absent from the literature. This line of thought has received unduly little attention. I propose to remedy this by advancing (...) what I will call an evolutionary sceptical challenge to scientific realism. I argue that, given standard evolutionary theory, our possession of sound innate metaphysical intuitions would have taken an epistemically problematic ‘lucky accident’. This, as I will show, entails that scientific realism is a self-undermining position. I discuss objections to my argument’s two premises, including ones that appeal to the success of the sciences and to the possibility that sound innate metaphysical intuitions evolved as an evolutionary ‘by-product’. I then draw out an advantage of my argument over a similar one recently put forward by Graber and Golemon. I finish by submitting that scientific realism, given the soundness of my argument, is faced with a new ‘Darwinian Dilemma’, and briefly address the significance of this for the debate between realists and anti-realists in the philosophy of science. (shrink)

In a recent number of Philosophy of Science, Mr. C. D. Hardie offers some interesting suggestions concerning the problem of other minds. In his view the fact that we feel certain of their existence constitutes a problem; and he wishes to find a rational justification for this certainty. “What grounds have I for believing in the existence of other minds?” he asks. He is attracted by the traditional argument from analogy, but finds it incomplete; for “any conclusion arrived at by (...) analogy and induction is at best only probable,” and “I am certain that other minds exist.” Again we find him remarking that “there is room for an account which makes our knowledge of them depend in some way on analogy... but which is such that we can be certain that other minds exist....”. (shrink)

Alfred Tarski’s work on truth has played such a central role in the discourse on truth that most coming to it for the first time have probably already heard a great deal about what is said there. Unfortunately, since the work is largely technical and Tarski was only tan- gentially philosophical, a certain incautious assimilation dominates many philosophical discussions of Tarski’s ideas, and so, examining Tarski on the concept of truth is in many ways an act of unlearning. -/- In (...) this paper I focus on those key ideas in Tarski’s work that have made a lasting impact on the philosophical discourse. These are the notions of T-sentence, Convention T, Tarskian truth definition, and Tarski’s general limiting theses on the expressibility and definability of truth. Though these ideas are in name familiar, we will seek in this essay to uncover and remove certain widespread misunderstandings of each. Tarski’s name also features prominently in discussions of the liar paradox, so we will take time out to explain Tarski’s connection to this ancient puzzle. (shrink)

Fabi and Goldberg raised important considerations regarding both research and funding priorities in the field of bioethics and, in particular, the field’s misalignment with social justice. W...

According to proponents of the face-value account, a beliefreport of the form ‘S believes that p’ is true just in case the agentbelieves a proposition referred to by the that-clause. As againstthis familiar view, I argue that there are cases of true beliefreports of the relevant form in which there is no proposition that thethat-clause, or the speaker using the that-clause, can plausibly betaken as referring to. Moreover, I argue that given the distinctiveway in which the face-value theory of belief-reports (...) fails, there ispressure to give up the metaphysical thesis that belief is apropositional attitude. I conclude by suggesting that we allownon-propositional entities to be amongst the relata of thebelief-relation, and make some speculative remarks concerning whatsuch entities might be like. (shrink)

The coverage of the book is tailored for any introductory course in ethics.

( http://philpapers.org/profile/112741 )"Let generation know to procure the love, the concept, knowledge and ideas with thoughts they are acquiring on versatile English Language, instead of making themselves to be felt dealing with only burden." -/- I too realize, -/- "Literature is not merely going through a book, It is the moment of definition of per feeling that : I am acquiring through an imagery.".

Presenting a landmark in linguistics and cognitive science, Ray Jackendoff proposes a new holistic theory of the relation between the sounds, structure, and meaning of language and their relation to mind and brain. Foundations of Language exhibits the most fundamental new thinking in linguistics since Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965—yet is readable, stylish, and accessible to a wide readership. Along the way it provides new insights on the evolution of language, thought, and communication.

Where much contemporary philosophy seeks to stave off the "threat" of nihilism by safeguarding the experience of meaning--characterized as the defining feature of human existence--from the Enlightenment logic of disenchantment, this book attempts to push nihilism to its ultimate conclusion by forging a link between revisionary naturalism in Anglo-American philosophy and anti-phenomenological realism in recent French philosophy. Contrary to an emerging "post-analytic" consensus which would bridge the analytic-continental divide by uniting Heidegger and Wittgenstein against the twin perils of scientism and (...) skepticism, this book short-circuits both traditions by plugging eliminative materialism directly into speculative realism. (shrink)