People recognize faces of their own race more accurately than faces of other races. The “contact” hypothesis suggests that this “other‐race effect” occurs as a result of the greater experience we have with own‐ versus other‐race faces. The computational mechanisms that may underlie different versions of the contact hypothesis were explored in this study. We replicated the other‐race effect with human participants and evaluated four classes of computational face recognition algorithms for the presence of an other‐race (...) effect. Consistent with the predictions of a developmental contact hypothesis, “experience‐based models” demonstrated an other‐race effect only when the representational system was developed through experience that warped the perceptual space in a way that was sensitive to the overall structure of the model's experience with faces of different races. When the model's representation relied on a feature set optimized to encode the information in the learned faces, experience‐based algorithms recognized minority‐race faces more accurately than majority‐race faces. The results suggest a developmental learning process that warps the perceptual space to enhance the encoding of distinctions relevant for own‐race faces. This feature space limits the quality of face representations for other‐race faces. (shrink)

There are many social psychological theories regarding the nature of prejudice, but only one major theory of prejudice reduction: under the right circumstances, prejudice between groups will be reduced with increased contact. On the one hand, the contact hypothesis has a range of empirical support and has been a major force in social change. On the other hand, there are practical and ethical obstacles to any large-scale controlled test of the hypothesis in which relevant variables can (...) be manipulated. Here we construct a spatialized model that tests the core hypothesis in a large array of game-theoretic agents. Robust results offer a new kind of support for the contact hypothesis: results in simulation do accord with a hypothesis of reduced prejudice with increased contact. The spatialized game-theoretic model also suggests a deeper explanation for at least some of the social psychological phenomena at issue. (shrink)

We apply spatialized game theory and multi-agent computational modeling as philosophical tools: (1) for assessing the primary social psychological hypothesis regarding prejudice reduction, and (2) for pursuing a deeper understanding of the basic mechanisms of prejudice reduction.

접촉 가설은 집단 간 편견을 감소시키기 위해 가장 포괄적으로 연구되어 온 대표적인 이론적 틀 가운데 하나다. 접촉 가설에 의하면, 접촉은 외집단에 대한 지식을 고양시켜 주고, 외집단 접촉에 대한 불안감을 감소시키며, 공감과 역할채택 능력을 제고하여 줌으로써 편견 감소에 기여한다. 그럼에도 불구하고, 접촉 가설 자체에 대한 국내의 연구는 매우 미진하다. 이에 이 글에서는 접촉 가설의 개념과 발전 과정을 살펴보고, 접촉 가설에 근거한 도덕 교과에서의 반편견 교수 방법을 탐색하였다. 이 글에서는 접촉 가설에 근거한 도덕 교과에서의 반편견 교수 방법으로서 협동학습의 활용, 문화 동화물의 활용, (...) 대리 경험의 확대, 다문화 봉사학습 기회 제공, 다양한 사회적 기능 훈련 실시 등 다섯 가지 방안을 제시하고 그것을 정당화하였다. 다문화 사회에서 도덕 교사는 수업을 통해 학생들에게 다양한 직접적 혹은 간접적 접촉의 기회를 제공하거나 혹은 접촉에 필요한 사회적 기능들을 체계적ㆍ지속적으로 훈련시킴으로써 학생들의 편견 감소 및 집단 간 관계 개선을 위한 다문화 역량 제고에 기여해야 한다. (shrink)

"The Contact Between Minds: A Metaphysical Hypothesis" by Cecil Delisle Burns is a thought-provoking book that explores the fascinating concept of mind-to-mind communication. Burns, a respected philosopher, delves into the realms of metaphysics to propose a hypothesis that challenges conventional notions of communication and the boundaries of human consciousness. With meticulous reasoning and deep philosophical inquiry, Burns presents his ideas on how minds may connect and exchange information beyond the limitations of traditional communication channels. This book invites (...) readers to contemplate the mysteries of the human mind and opens up new possibilities for understanding the interconnectedness of consciousness. (shrink)

The contact hypothesis has dominated work on prejudice reduction and is often described as one of the most successful theories within social psychology. The hypothesis has nevertheless been criticized for not being applicable in real life situations due to unobtainable conditions for direct contact. Several indirect contact suggestions have been developed to solve this “application challenge.” Here, we suggest a hybrid strategy of both direct and indirect contact. Based on the second-person method developed in (...) social psychology and cognition, we suggest working with an engagement strategy as a hybrid hypothesis. We expand on this suggestion through an engagement-based intervention, where we implement the strategy in a theater performance and investigate the effects on prejudicial attitudes toward people with physical disabilities. Based on the results we reformulate our initial engagement strategy into the Enact hypothesis. To deal with the application challenge, this hybrid hypothesis posits two necessary conditions for prejudice reduction. Interventions should: work with engagement to reduce prejudice, and focus on the second-order level of attitudes formation. Here the aim of the prejudice reduction is not attitude correction, but instead the nuancing of attitudes. (shrink)

(This version was submitted to Behavioral and Brain Science. A revised version was published by Biological Theory) Estimates of autism’s incidence increased 5-10 fold in ten years, an increase which cannot be genetic. Though many mutations are associated with autism, no mutation seems directly to cause autism. We need to find the direct cause. Complexity science provides a new paradigm - confirmed in biology by extensive hard data. Both the body and the personality are complex dynamic systems which spontaneously self-organize (...) from simple dynamic systems. Autism may therefore be caused by the failure of a simple dynamic system. We know that infants who cannot track their mother’s face often become autistic, that eye-contact initiates intersubjectivity which is blocked in autism, and that the infant-mother pair seems designed to promote eye-contact, as does the eye’s appearance. This author earlier proposed that failure of eye-contact might directly cause autism and that early non-maternal childcare, including television/video, would therefore be statistically linked to autism. Waldman et al. (2008; 2006) recently proved that autism is strongly linked to precipitation (indoor activity) and to the introduction of cable. The most plausible explanation? Early exposure to television/video is linked to autism. Furthermore a normal developmental cascade (blocked in autism) has been deciphered: (a) Infant-mother eye-contact triggers increased maternal attention. (b) Early maternal attention permanently increases not only baseline vasopressin but also that oxytocin release which is triggered by subsequent maternal attention. (c) Vasopressin and oxytocin promote face recognition, gazing-at-the-eyes, emotion recognition, and social bonding. The eye-contact hypothesis suggests a clinical study addressing prevention: recruit prospective parents who agree to curtail television/video/computer/wi-fi in their families; measure autism’s incidence in their children. (shrink)

Realism about the external, natural world is an overarching empirical hypothesis. The method of hypothetical realism rejects as an excessive concession to the skeptic these two assumptions of constructivist intuitionism: first, that everything real must be exhaustively inspectable; and second, that our beliefs are to be justified to the point of certainty. We prefer to say that nothing is ever known directly; that all of our contact with the world is mediated by thoughts, words, and percepts construed as (...) signs having referents distinct from themselves. We organize these signs into meaningful and possibly true hypotheses as we speculate--in practice, science and metaphysics--about a world we have not made. (shrink)

Previous research has found that news coverage on immigration is often biased in negative ways and that it inspires the formation of negative attitudes towards immigrants. However, academic research about this link between news consumption and attitudes towards immigrants among adolescents remains limited. The current study aims to test this association from a media-exposure and intergroup-contact perspective using survey data from 875 adolescents in Flanders, Belgium. The findings show that only television news consumption, thus no other types of news (...) consumption, was associated with adolescents’ attitudes towards immigrants. Intergroup contact within the friend group, outside the school context, was linked to more positive attitudes. This study nuances earlier findings that news consumption predicts attitudes towards immigrants. Implications for future research are discussed. (shrink)

Mounting evidence shows that nature contact is associated with affective benefits. However, the psychological mechanisms responsible for these effects are not well understood. In this study, we examined whether more time spent in nature was associated with higher levels of positive affect in general, and lower levels of negative affect and rumination in general. We also conducted a cross-sectional mediation analysis to examine whether rumination mediated the association of nature contact with affect. Participants reported their average time spent (...) in nature each week, as well as their general levels of positive and negative affect, and the degree to which they typically engaged in rumination in daily life. We then used structural equation modeling to test our hypotheses. Our results support the hypothesis that nature contact is associated with general levels of affect, and that rumination mediates this association for negative affect, and marginally mediates this association for positive affect. (shrink)

Despite decades of research on the reconstruction of proto-Korean-Japanese (pKJ), some scholars still reject a genetic relationship. This study addresses their doubts in a new way, interpreting comparative linguistic data within a context of material and cultural evidence, much of which has come to light only in recent years. The weaknesses of the reconstruction, according to J. Marshall Unger, are due to the early date at which pKJ split apart and to lexical material that the pre-Korean and pre-Japanese branches later (...) borrowed from different languages to their north and south, respectively. Unger shows that certain Old Japanese words must have been borrowed from Korean from the fourth century C.E., only a few centuries after the completion of the Yayoi migrations, which brought wet-field rice cultivation to Kyushu from southern Korea. That leaves too short an interval for the growth of two distinct languages by the time they resumed active contact. Hence, concludes Unger, the original separation occurred on the peninsula much earlier, prior to reliance on paddy rice and the rise of metallurgy. Non-Korean elements in ancient peninsular place names were vestiges of pre-Yayoi Japanese language, according to Unger, who questions the assumption that Korean developed exclusively from the language of Silla. He argues instead that the rulers of Koguryo, Paekche, and Silla all spoke varieties of Old Korean, which became the common language of the peninsula as their kingdoms overwhelmed its older culture and vied for dominance. Was the separation so early as to vitiate the hypothesis of a common source language? Unger responds that, while assuming non-relationship obviates difficulties of pKJ reconstruction, it fares worse than the genetic hypothesis in relation to non-linguistic findings, and fails to explain a significant number of grammatical as well as lexical similarities. Though improving the reconstruction of pKJ will be challenging, he argues, the theory of genetic relationship is still the better working hypothesis. The Role of Contact in the Origins of the Japanese and Korean Languages shows how an interdisciplinary approach can shed light on a difficult case in which the separation of two languages lies close to the time horizon of the comparative method. (shrink)

Image-making is a nearly universal human behavior, yet the visual strategies and conventions to represent things in pictures vary greatly over time and space. In particular, pictorial styles can differ in their degree of figurativeness, varying from intersubjectively recognizable representations of things to very stylized and abstract forms. Are there any patterns to this variability, and what might its ecological causes be? Experimental studies have shown that demography and the structure of interaction of cultural groups can play a key role: (...) the greater the degree of contact with other groups, the more recognizable and less abstract are the representations. Here we test this hypothesis on a real-world dataset for the first time. We constructed a balanced database of Indigenous Australian rock art motifs from both isolated and contact Aboriginal groups (those often in contact with other groups). We then ran a survey asking participants to judge the recognizability of the motifs and to provide interpretations. Results show that motifs from contact Aboriginal groups were more likely to be judged as inter-subjectively recognizable and also elicited more convergent descriptions than motifs from isolated groups. This is consistent with the idea that intergroup contact is likely to be an important factor in the cultural evolution of pictorial representation. We discuss the implications of these findings for the archaeology and anthropology of art, and the parallels with language evolution. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Hypothesis Concerning the Character of Islamic ArtAsli GocerWhy Islamic art has the distinctive features it has continues to generate clashing explanations. The Islamic visual treasury has no figural images, for instance, and three-dimensional sculpture or large scale oil painting, but instead contains miniatures, vegetal ornaments, arabesque surface patterns, and complex geometrical designs. To account for the phenomena the following radically opposing theories have been offered: the influence (...) of Judaism, the Quranic prohibition against making images, 1 Islamic resentment of the glory of Byzantine icons, 2 logocentricism of classical Islam, 3 the spiritual dimension of Islam, 4 tacit Islamic assertion of “otherness,” 5 and contingency of history. 6 The merits of these theories have been roundly discussed in the literature, and so I will not repeat the task here. I will insist that none of these theories offer a coherent explanation for all arts, but my presumption is that such an explanation is possible. In nonvisual arts the Muslim prefers simple tunes over that of the symphony, for instance, whirling dervishes over the ballet, and lyric poetry over dramatic literature. In my view what explains the common characteristic of all these arts is a certain kind of Islamic attitude informed by a certain philosophical outlook. Although it would be hasty to suggest the existence of a monolithic [End Page 683] Islamic art, it would be equally rash to deny some striking commonalities among its diverse examples. 7The following observation by a Muslim scholar is notable in this regard: “Whether in the great courtyard of the Delhi Mosque or the Qarawiyyin in Fez, one feels oneself within the same artistic and spiritual universe despite all the local variations in material, structural techniques, and the like.” 8 Some cite geometry as what mediates that feeling to the observer despite the cultural divergences in style. 9 Even those who have given up the search for the universal or the spiritual in Islamic art cannot help but see in it the classical ideal of beauty. 10 It is this classical heritage that in fact holds one of the important keys to the puzzle at hand. In particular I shall claim that Islamic art is the living image of what Plato has in mind for art in a theocratic state. Clearly, to refer to Plato and art in the same breath invites trouble. As is well enough known, giving a general interpretation of Plato’s views on the nature of art is a very complex endeavor. 11 Even in the face of grave difficulties in textual exegesis, however, there is sufficient evidence that Plato has some settled views on art. Those pertinent to our discussion here involve two claims, that beauty and goodness are divine and that all human endeavor (including artistic creation) must imitate the divine. 12 Although Platonic strain in Islam has been noted in other areas, its persistent legacy has been overlooked in art. 13 I shall argue that the Platonic influence on Islamic thought can be traced not only to political philosophy 14 and geometry, 15 as it has been commonly accepted, but also aesthetics. 16 A philosophical explanation of the Islamic attitude toward art may therefore be derivable from the Platonic axiom that god is the paradigm of beauty, which is the cosmological principle of [End Page 684] order and harmony; and as all created things, art, too, must reflect the divine paradigm.Before defending this ahistorical hypothesis on the character of Islamic art so reviled in recent literature, a few caveats are in order. “Islamic art” contains redundant terms. Strictly speaking all art in Islam is “Islamic,” because for the Muslim art is a crucial point of contact with the divine. That art should direct the mind to the divine is also Plato’s view. 17 Second, the categories that have traditionally been used to describe Islamic art such as “aniconic” and “nonrepresentational” are unhelpful for the problem at hand. 18 When it comes to the issue of iconography in Islamic arts, there is no consensus, for Islamicists are notably divided on the semiotic dimension of the Islamic visual language. The question of whether the geometric surface pattern is essentially iconography, for instance, is yet... (shrink)

Becoming a crime victim is often associated with the development of psychological distress symptoms. In turn, these symptoms have been found to be related to a decrease in perceived social support by the victim. From a uses and gratifications point of view, the increase in distress and the decrease in perceived social support could well affect a victim’s television use. Furthermore, the compensation hypothesis proposes that people with little social contact use mass media to compensate for social isolation. (...) It could therefore be hypothesized that increased use of television for reasons of companionship is related to higher levels of psychological distress and lower levels of perceived social support. The present study used a structural equation model to test this hypothesis. The sample consisted of 212 Flemish victims of crime. The results confirm the proposed relationships and hypotheses. Directions for future research are discussed. (shrink)

The challenge of intercultural relations has become an important issue in many societies. In spite of the claimed value of intercultural diversity, successful outcomes as predicted by the contact hypothesis are but one possibility; on occasions intercultural contact leads to intolerance and hostility. Research has documented that one key mediator of contact is perspective taking. Differences in perspective are significant in shaping perceptions of contact and reactions to it. The ability to take the perspective of (...) the other and to understand it in its own terms is a necessary condition for successful intergroup outcomes. This paper sheds light on the processes involved in intercultural perspective taking by elaborating the notion of the point of view based on social representations theory. The point of view provides a theory of social positioning that can analyse cultural encounters between social actors, and identify the conditions for positive relations. Insights are drawn from a study of public views on the relative merits of science and religion, following a documentary by Richard Dawkins in which it was suggested that religion is a source of evil. The findings demonstrate that the point of view may be categorised according to a three-way taxonomy according to the extent to which it is open to another perspective. A point of view may be monological—closed to another's perspective entirely, dialogical—open to the possibility of another perspective while maintaining some percepts as unchallengeable, or metalogical—open to another's perspective based on the other's frame of reference. (shrink)

Many works of science fiction, for example those of David Brin, Larry Niven, and Poul Anderson, assume that our galaxy is populated by many intelligent alien species that we will eventually contact for cooperation, competition, or perhaps combat. Isaac Asimov, on the other hand, assumed in his Foundation Series that humanity would spread out into the empty galaxy and colonize it without encountering other intelligent species.

This article argues that Karl Jaspers’s account of the rise of the Axial Age phenomenon is deficient owing to his failure to consider the natural law as a plausible cause for its development. The Axial Age concept—which precedes Jaspers, who nevertheless popularized it—claims that widely separated civilizations from the Ancient Greeks and Hebrews to the Persian, Hindu, Buddhist, and Confucian cultures all began to display sophisticated political and moral development from 800–200 BC, without any known contact. Jaspers regarded its (...) rise as a mystery. However, given ancient legal codes containing moral precepts long predating this period, the natural law hypothesis serves as the most plausible explanation of this ‘mystery’ of mankind’s dawning moral awareness. (shrink)

This article attempts to show why an experimental hypothesis is plausible and merits testing; in brief, the hypothesis is that autism begins with a failure in early learning and that changing the environment of early learning would dramatically change its incidence. Strong statistical evidence supporting this hypothesis has been published by Waldman et al., but to date this evidence has largely been ignored, perhaps because it challenges prevalent beliefs about autism. This article also suggests that the current (...) epidemic of autism is serious enough, and intellectually mysterious enough, to merit attention from a wider community of brain scientists: New ideas are needed. A confirmation of this article’s hypothesis would have interesting implications for brain science. (shrink)

Women's experiences with sexual harassment were analyzed with three types of variables: occupational and workplace sex ratios, organizational policies and procedures for dealing with sexual harassment problems, and women's cultural status. Regression analyses revealed that extent of contact with men was a key predictor of incidence of harassment, number of different types of harrassment, sexual comments, sexual categorical remarks, and sexual materials. Gender predominance was a significant predictor of physical threats and sexual materials. Informational methods were less successful than (...) proactive methods in reducing incidents of sexual harassment. The analyses support two generalizations. The “contact hypothesis” tested and verified by Gutek and her colleagues provides a substantive understanding of our findings on workplace and occupational numerical predominance. Second, organizations that take a variety of steps to address sexual harassment are more apt to be successful in curtailing the problem than those relying mainly on “get out the word” techniques. (shrink)

People's opinions toward polygamy were examined in a study of 1369 adults who were current or former members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Questions addressed several areas: polygamy and the law, respondents' perceptions of polygamous women, the potential link between legalizing gay marriage and legalizing polygamy, polygamists' reliance on social welfare programs, and the ability of teens raised in polygamy to leave that lifestyle. Consistent with the contact hypothesis, multiple regression analyses showed that people (...) who knew a polygamist held more favorable opinions of polygamy. Polygamists, men, infrequent church attenders, and older people also tended to hold more favorable opinions of polygamy. Educational attainment showed weak associations with opinions, while marital status failed to predict opinions toward polygamy. (shrink)

In this paper I remark on Tanesini’s (2021) account of intellectual humility and servility as attitudes, with a focus on how this proposal intersects with the psychology literature on intellectual humility. I begin by discussing the implications this may have for empirical measures of intellectual humility, including concerns that some current measures seem to do a better job of capturing dispositional limitations-owning than virtuous intellectual humility. Additionally, I raise concerns that excluding interpersonal features and a motivation to learn from conceptualizations (...) of intellectual humility risk vicious manifestations of intellectual humility. Finally, I build on Tanesini’s (2021) ameliorative proposal centered on affirming one’s values by offering some specific strategies drawn from several psychology theories. These include Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Social Learning Theory, and the Social Contact Hypothesis. (shrink)

In an earlier study by Nair,1 undergraduate national servicemen were interviewed regarding their perceptions on their conscript experience and nation-building. The present study examines the congruent perceptions of military commanders in the context of social psychological theory and research. Twenty senior military commanders were selected to represent a cross-section of formations and appointments in the army. They were individually interviewed with particular reference to their recall of policies, procedures and practices in conscript service that might have a bearing on nation- (...) building. Verbatim transcriptions of each interview were scrutinized and responses coded and tallied. There was clear identification of the unifying effect of common barracks and training regimes across economic, ethnic and religious differences. The findings provide converging evidence for the presence of the psychological effects of superordinate goals,2 the minimal group paradigm, 3 and the contact hypothesis,4 serving to build a cohesive nation. There were also recurrent and converging attributions of the military experience resulting in national servicemen with the qualities of discipline, responsibility, team spiritedness and physical fitness. It was perceived that these acquired positive qualities were carried over to civilian life and characterized the Singapore workforce. (shrink)

Talk of ‘robustness’ remains vague, despite the fact that it is clearly an important parameter in evaluating models in general and game-theoretic results in particular. Here we want to make it a bit less vague by offering a graphic measure for a particular kind of robustness— ‘matrix robustness’— using a three dimensional display of the universe of 2 x 2 game theory. In a display of this form, familiar games such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Stag Hunt, Chicken and Deadlock appear (...) as volumes, making comparison easy regarding the extent of different game-theoretic effects. We illustrate such a comparison in robustness between the triumph of Tit for Tat in a spatialized environment (Grim 1995, Grim, Mar, and St. Denis 1998) and a spatialized modeling of the Contact Hypothesis regarding prejudice reduction (Grim, et. al 2005a, 2005b). The geometrical representation of relative robustness also offers a possibility for links between geometrical theorems and results regarding robustness in game theory. (shrink)

The powerful role that teachers can play in our development is the focus Binyamin, Jayusi, and Tamir’s chapter in this volume. They argue that teachers, in particular teachers that don’t share the same background as their students, can help counter the increasing polarization that characterizes our current era. In these critical notes I raise three challenges to their proposal. First, by exploring the mechanisms of polarization I demonstrate that polarization is not a problem unique to thick diversity or thick multiculturalism. (...) Second, the central premise of the authors’ proposal rests on the ability of greater contact to reduce prejudice. The contact hypothesis, however, has numerous backlash effects and unintended consequences that can increase prejudice rather than reduce prejudice. These backlash effects and unintended consequences raise serious doubts for the success of placing minority teachers in majority classrooms to reduce prejudice. Third, I raise concerns about how the proposal tokenizes minority teachers, the use of instrumental rationales for diversity, and the politics of deference and being-in-the-room privilege that also go unaddressed in their proposal. (shrink)

Robustness has long been recognized as an important parameter for evaluating game-theoretic results, but talk of ‘robustness’ generally remains vague. What we offer here is a graphic measure for a particular kind of robustness (‘matrix robustness’), using a three-dimensional display of the universe of 2 × 2 game theory. In such a measure specific games appear as specific volumes (Prisoner’s Dilemma, Stag Hunt, etc.), allowing a graphic image of the extent of particular game-theoretic effects in terms of those games. The (...) measure also allows for an easy comparison between different effects in terms of matrix robustness. Here we use the measure to compare the robustness of Tit for Tat’s well-known success in spatialized games (Axelrod, R. (1984). The evolution of cooperation . New York: Basic Books; Grim, P. et al. (1998). The philosophical computer: Exploratory essays in philosophical computer modeling . Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press) with the robustness of a recent game-theoretic model of the contact hypothesis regarding prejudice reduction (Grim et al. 2005. Public Affairs Quarterly, 19 , 95–125). (shrink)

This article is a rebuttal to Robert G. Cavin and Carlos A. Colombetti’s article, “Assessing the Resurrection Hypothesis: Problems with Craig’s Inference to the Best Explanation,” which argues that the Standard Model of current particle physics entails that non-physical things (like a supernatural God or a supernaturally resurrected body) can have no causal contact with the physical universe. As such, they argue that William Lane Craig’s resurrection hypothesis is not only incompatible with the notion of Jesus physically (...) appearing to the disciples, but the resurrection hypothesis is significantly limited in both its explanatory scope and explanatory power. This article seeks to demonstrate why their use of the Standard Model does not logically entail a rejection of the physical resurrection of Jesus when considering the scope and limitations of science itself. (shrink)

Drawing on findings from the study of prejudice and prejudice reduction, we identify a number of mechanisms through which religious communities may influence the intergroup attitudes of their members. We hypothesize that religious participation could in principle either reduce or promote prejudice with respect to any given target group. A religious community’s influence on intergroup attitudes will depend upon the specific beliefs, attitudes, and practices found within the community, as well as on interactions between the religious community and the larger (...) social environment in which it is embedded. Basing our proposals on findings from the literature on prejudice formation and prejudice reduction allows us to outline useful directions for future studies of religion and prejudice. (shrink)

This paper investigates the claim that immigrants have a moral duty to integrate. I argue that socially excluded immigrant minorities have a moral permission to form enclaves, which means that they have at most only limited duties to integrate. Positively, I argue that enclaves can play an important role in supporting the self-respect of socially excluded immigrants. Negatively, I argue social exclusion makes the putative duty to integrate—when it conflicts with enclave formation—unreasonably burdensome. I also argue that even if integration (...) is a genuine duty, it cannot be permissibly enforced as a social expectation vis-à-vis socially excluded immigrants because members of dominant social groups lack standing to blame socially excluded immigrants for failing to integrate. My argument is pessimistic because it recognizes that integration may nonetheless play an important role in tackling relational inequality. Social exclusion thus means that immigrant minorities have only limited duties to integrate, but it also makes integration particularly valuable. (shrink)

Darwin had a hypothesis about descent with modification, and a Spencerian view of the evolution as selfish conflict. Biology remains marked by the dualism today. Many, inside the discipline and out, suppose that taking an evolutionary perspective just is to seek the secret selfishness that “explains” a successful form of life. Nowhere is this view of evolution more entrenched than in the theory specialists call Sexual Selection, a theory on the evolution of everything that differentiates the sexes. Darwin thought (...) the conspicuous sexual differences among animals are adaptations to female choice. Down to our day the biology of sexual selection confirms his melodramatic cliches: Males are passionate, armed, and ornamented, females coy and drab, conflict inevitable and ubiquitous. Roughgarden, a professor of biology at Stanford, dismisses sexual selection as “pure ideology.” “A huge body of scientific theory is incorrect.” All the parts that overlook the evolution of real cooperation, meaning not the coincidence of selfish interests, but coordinated collaboration. The evidence of such cooperation between the sexes is diverse, cumulative, and much underappreciated. Roughgarden also takes friendship and pleasure seriously. Intimate contact keeps animals coordinated, and mutual pleasure makes cooperation self-policing, without the punishing algorithms postulated by Evolutionary Psychology. Her book is a serious work of science. She argues that “sexual selection can never be demonstrated once studies are sufficiently thorough,” and shows that this whole area of evolutionary biology “is not settled science, is in considerable flux, and is not ready for export.” If you research any field affected by the claims of Sexual Selection, Evolutionary Psychology, or the Selfish Gene, you may want to study this book. (shrink)

Humans have been using fire for hundreds of millennia, creating an ancestral expansion toward the nocturnal niche. The new adaptive challenges faced at night were recurrent enough to amplify existing psychological variation in our species. Night-time is dangerous and mysterious, so it selects for individuals with higher tendencies for paranoia, risk-taking, and sociability. During night-time, individuals are generally tired and show decreased self-control and increased impulsive behaviors. The lower visibility during night-time favors the partial concealment of identity and opens more (...) opportunities for disinhibition of self-interested behaviors. Indeed, individuals with an evening-oriented chronotype are more paranoid, risk-taking, extraverted, impulsive, promiscuous, and have higher antisocial personality traits. However, under some circumstances, such as respiratory pandemics, the psychobehavioral traits favored by the nocturnal niche might be counter-productive, increasing contagion rates of a disease that can evade the behavioral immune system because its disease cues are often nonexistent or mild. The eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis presented here suggests that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the evening-oriented psychobehavioral profile can have collectively harmful consequences: there is a clash of core tendencies between the nocturnal chronotype and the recent viral transmission-mitigating safety guidelines and rules. The pandemic safety protocols disrupt much normal social activity, particularly at night when making new social contacts is desired. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is contagious even in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, which enables it to mostly evade our evolved contagious disease avoidance mechanisms. A growing body of research has indirectly shown that individual traits interfering with social distancing and anti-contagion measures are related to those of the nocturnal chronotype. Indeed, some of the social contexts that have been identified as superspreading events occur at night, such as in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Furthermore, nocturnal environmental conditions favor the survival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus much longer than daytime conditions. We compare the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis with other factors related to non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, namely sex, age, and life history. Although there is not yet a direct link between the nocturnal chronotype and non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, security measures and future empirical research should take this crucial evolutionary mismatch and adaptive metaproblem into account, and focus on how to avoid nocturnal individuals becoming superspreaders, offering secure alternatives for nocturnal social activities. (shrink)

Different anesthetics are known to modulate different types of membrane-bound receptors. Their common mechanism of action is expected to alter the mechanism for consciousness. Consciousness is hypothesized as the integral of all the units of internal sensations induced by reactivation of inter-postsynaptic membrane functional LINKs during mechanisms that lead to oscillating potentials. The thermodynamics of the spontaneous lateral curvature of lipid membranes induced by lipophilic anesthetics can lead to the formation of non-specific inter-postsynaptic membrane functional LINKs by different mechanisms. These (...) include direct membrane contact by excluding the inter-membrane hydrophilic region and readily reversible partial membrane hemifusion. The constant reorganization of the lipid membranes at the lateral edges of the postsynaptic terminals (dendritic spines) resulting from AMPA receptor-subunit vesicle exocytosis and endocytosis can favor the effect of anesthetic molecules on lipid membranes at this location. Induction of a large number of non-specific LINKs can alter the conformation of the integral of the units of internal sensations that maintain consciousness. Anesthetic requirement is reduced in the presence of dopamine that causes enlargement of dendritic spines. Externally applied pressure can transduce from the middle ear through the perilymph, cerebrospinal fluid, and the recently discovered glymphatic pathway to the extracellular matrix space, and finally to the paravenular space. The pressure gradient reduce solubility and displace anesthetic molecules from the membranes into the paravenular space, explaining the pressure reversal of anesthesia. Changes in membrane composition and the conversion of membrane hemifusion to fusion due to defects in the checkpoint mechanisms can lead to cytoplasmic content mixing between neurons and cause neurodegenerative changes. The common mechanism of anesthetics presented here can operate along with the known specific actions of different anesthetics. (shrink)

Traditional empiricist analyses of the source of scientific objectivity were based on two guiding themes: that a claim can be objective only if it is tested against some independent touchstone, and that observation provides that touchstone. The issue of objectivity arises here only for beliefs that are formulated as propositions or sets of propositions, and the standard view demands that objective beliefs make claims about entities that exist independently of those beliefs, and whose properties can be determined and compared with (...) the content of the beliefs under examination. In addition, it is demanded that the means of acquiring information about the entities in question be logically independent of the beliefs being tested. For example, if the belief that my typewriter has forty-five keys is to be objective, the typewriter must, in some sense, exist independently of any of my beliefs about it, and, although as a practical matter I might not check how many keys the typewriter has unless I happened to be testing some hypothesis, the procedure for determining the number of keys must not presuppose any of my beliefs about the number of keys. These demands hold whether we take such entities as my typewriter to be material objects that exist completely independently of our awareness of them and with which we somehow make contact through impressions, Machian elements, sense-data, or sensations. For even among those empiricists who hold that we ultimately perceive only our own sensations, it is still maintained that our beliefs in no way determine what sensations will occur at a given time. (shrink)

Krifka (The origin of topic/comment structure, of predication, and of focusation in asymmetric bimanual coordination, 2006, Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS): Working Papers of SFB 632 08: 61–96, 2007b) suggests that asymmetric bimanual coordination and ultimately the evolution of lateralization in humans may be the cognitive basis of linguistic topic-comment structure and foreground-background structures in general. As asymmetric bimanual constructions abound in sign languages and are also found in their possible precursors, cospeech gesture and homesign, sign languages may serve (...) as a test ground for the hypothesis. Asymmetric bimanual constructions are indeed used for differentiating foreground and background in sign languages, but some of these constructions are derived from indexical gestures, not manipulation, i.e., they draw on visual attention. Signed topics may be marked by nonmanual features derived from signals of visual attention, and the defining feature of signed topics is eye contact with the addressee, needed to establish a communicative common ground. There, thus, seems to be not one embodied origin of topic-comment structures, but several. Finally, signed topic-comment structure demonstrates how attention shifts in the course of the entire structure, thereby explaining how topics can be described alternately as foreground (e.g., Talmy, Attention phenomena, Oxford University Press, 2007: 265) and background (Jacobs, Linguistics 39: 641–681, 2001). (shrink)

When conceived as an empirical claim, it is natural to wonder how one might test the hypothesis of multiple realization. I consider general issues of testability, show how they apply specifically to the hypothesis of multiple realization, and propose an auxiliary assumption that, I argue, must be conjoined to the hypothesis of multiple realization to ensure its testability. I argue further that Bechtel and Mundale go astray because they fail to appreciate the need for this auxiliary assumption. (...) †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 5185 Helen C. White Hall, 600 North Park Street, Madison, WI 53706; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

PYRRHONIAN BUDDHISM: AN IMAGINATIVE RECONSTRUCTION -/- Author: -/- Adrian Kuzminski 279 Donlon Road Fly Creek, NY 13337 USA -/- Description of Pyrrhonian Buddhism: -/- The ancient Greek sceptic philosopher, Pyrrho of Elis, accompanied Alexander the Great to India, where he had contacts with Indian sages, so-called naked philosophers (gymnosophists), among whom were very probably Buddhist mendicants, or sramanas. My work, entitled Pyrrhonian Buddhism, takes seriously the hypothesis that Pyrrho’s contact with early Buddhists was the occasion of his rethinking, (...) in a Greek philosophical idiom, of what he experienced in those encounters. This has major implications for our understanding of both Buddhism and Pyrrhonism. -/- Pyrrho’s rethinking of Buddhism, I argue, enabled him to introduce into Greek philosophy and culture several key Buddhist notions. These include the primacy and interdependence of immediate phenomenal experience (which the Buddhists called dependent origination), the suspension of judgment about beliefs lacking phenomenal verification (reflecting the scepticism of the Buddha about ‘unanswered’ or ‘metaphysical’ questions), and the promise of personal enlightenment said to follow such suspension, which Pyrrho called ataraxia, and the Buddhists called bodhi. -/- Pyrrho, like Socrates, wrote nothing, but the movement he founded—Pyrrhonism--became an important tradition in Western philosophy. When the texts of later Pyrrhonian philosophers, particularly Sextus Empiricus, were redicovered during the Renaissance, they sparked a reexamination of the foundations of knowledge, thereby helping to prompt the modern scientific revolution. -/- The notion that early Buddhism played a pivotal role in the birth of ancient Greek Pyrrhonian philosophy remains provocative, but has found increasing support in recent years. An earlier work of mine, Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism (Lexington Books, 2008), was, as far as I know, the first book-length comparison of the common features of the two traditions. My current work, Pyrrhonian Buddhism, seeks to broaden and deepen this comparison. It argues that ancient Greek Pyrrhonism is best understood as a fully developed but hitherto largely unrecognized Western version of Buddhism. -/- The Introduction reviews our current understanding of Pyrrhonism in light of recent scholarship on ancient Greek-Indian cultural exchanges, and outlines the methodology I employ. -/- Part I of the book offers re-readings of the classic Pyrrhonian texts, with parallels to Buddhism in mind, including Diogenes Laertius (Chapter One), Sextus Empiricus (Chapter Two) and Timon and Aulus Gellius (Chapter Three). -/- Part II enlists the rubric of the Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma to illuminate the fundamental points of comparison between early Buddhism and ancient Pyrrhonism. -/- The First Turning (Chapter Four) centers on the Buddhist insistence on the dependent origination of the objects of immediate consciousness, which can also be found in the understanding of immediate experience expressed in the phenomenalistic atomism of the Pyrrhonists. The Second Turning (Chapter Five), as posed by the ‘unanswered questions’ of the Buddha and the ‘emptiness’ of the Madhyamaka, finds its Pyrrhonian correlation in the suspension of judgment over ‘indeterminate’ beliefs. And the Third Turning (Chapter Six), reported as bodhi in Buddhism and ataraxia in Pyrrhonism, is shown in both traditions to follow liberation from suffering and existential angst, caused by what the Buddhists call our attachments and the Pyrrhonists call our beliefs. -/- Other Writers/Commentators: -/- Aspects of the Pyrrhonian/Buddhism question have been addressed by Edward Conze, Everard Flintoff, Thomas McEvilley, Jay Garfield, Mathew Neale, Ethan Mills, Christopher Beckwith, and Robin Brons, among other recent writers. The book-length studies on the issue (since my earlier work) are by Beckwith (Greek Buddha) and Neal (Madhyamaka and Pyrrhonism). Other writers/scholars with relevant expertise include C. W. Huntington, Jr., Charles Goodman, Stephen Batchelor, Dan Lusthaus, Rupert Gethin, and Mark Siderits. -/- . (shrink)

As is well known, Roman Ingarden and Edith Stein had a deep intellectual relationship and friendship, which began during their stay in Göttingen and Freiburg. The time spent together during this period and the correspondence that they maintained over the following years allowed them to be in close contact with their respective philosophies and to influence each other. This article aims at illustrating the affinities between Ingarden’s description of soul in § 78 of Controversy over the Existence of the (...) World and the analysis of soul and psyche developed by Stein between 1916 and 1922. Furthermore, it aims at presenting the hypothesis that this analysis influenced the formal anthropology elaborated by the Polish philosopher many years later. Both the depiction of the soul as a personal nucleus that manifests itself in human lived experiences and the description of this manifestation through the notion of “force” are theoretical elements that are essential in Ingarden’s mature ontology of man and that already played a crucial role in Stein’s early writings. Both thinkers, within several years of one another, elaborated an anthropological view that does not have the life of consciousness as a primary guideline, but that brings to light the ontological relevance of the unitary psychic source of human dispositions, of human character, and of consciousness itself. (shrink)

How does international financial aid affect the cooperative behavior of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs)? Can NGOs, while turning global, preserve peer connections with local actors and be engaged in local issues? The civil society literature contains competing perspectives on and reports of how international financial aid may restructure local civic networks. Some scholars argue that international support comes at the expense of local integration as inclusion in global networks takes local NGOs out of the local context, while others find evidence (...) that organizations do not have to face “a forced choice”, and may well be integrated both globally and locally. Drawing on this scholarship, we examine two hypotheses on how transnational funding influences cooperation patterns among NGOs. The hierarchy argument states that public entities tend to cooperate with internationally funded NGOs as external contact signals quality and trustworthiness. The segregation argument, on the contrary, suggests financial homophily according to which organizations are more likely to choose peers similar in sources of funding. To test these hypotheses, we apply Exponential Random Graph Models to the data on cooperation among 221 Kazakhstani NGOs. Results support the segregation hypothesis implying that NGOs are likely to have a bias towards similarly funded peers. (shrink)

Mainstream epistemology has typically taken for granted a traditional picture of the metaphysics of mind, according to which cognitive processes (e.g. memory storage and retrieval) play out entirely within the bounds of the skull and skin. But this simple ‘intracranial’ picture is falling in- creasingly out of step with contemporary thinking in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Likewise, though, proponents of active exter- nalist approaches to the mind—e.g. the hypothesis of extended cognitition (HEC)—have proceeded by and large (...) without asking what epistemological ramifications should arise once cognition is understood as criss-crossing the bounds of brain and world. This paper aims to motivate a puzzle that arises only once these two strands of thinking are brought in contact with one another. In particular, we want to first highlight a kind of con- dition of epistemological adequacy that should be accepted by proponents of extended cognition; once this condition is motivated, the remainder of the paper demonstrates how attempts to satisfy this condition seem to inevitably devolve into a novel kind of epistemic circularity. At the end of the day, proponents of extended cognition have a novel epistemological puzzle on their hands. (shrink)

The ability of dance to address social isolation is argued, but there is a lack of both evidence of such an effect and interventions designed for the purpose. An interdisciplinary research team at University of Calgary partnered with Kaeja d’Dance to pilot test the effects of an intervention designed to facilitate embodied social connections among older adults. Within a mixed methods study design, pre and post behavioral tests and qualitative surveys about experiences of the body and connecting were administered to (...) thirteen participants along with test instruments of loneliness and body appreciation. In the short-term, no significant changes were found on quantitative tests. Exploratory analysis revealed intervention improvements on individual body appreciation questions only. This indication of change was strongly supported by converging qualitative data and identified as relating to: increased connection through task-based collaboration, increased awareness of interpersonal boundaries, and a shift to experiencing the body as responsive. These indications of increased relational capacity were deemed likely to cause further impact in the long term. Examining this possibility and the subsequently arisen factor of COVID-19 risks and restrictions, test instruments were administered again to 10 participants 4 and 5 months after the intervention. A significant increase in loneliness was found. Despite this negative impact of COVID-19 isolation, several positive intervention changes remained detectable and some continued to increase over time. Seventy percent of the participants, who made new social contacts during the intervention and later sought continued contact, improved significantly across all body appreciation measures over the full study. The qualitative data from the last two time-points revealed both consistent values and new, negative changes. While these preliminary findings speak to the durability of intervention changes, they also identify areas of urgent priority to help older adults restore embodied relational capacity that has declined during COVID-19. Within the limitations of a small-sample pilot study, converging mixed methods results support the hypothesis that dance interventions designed for the purpose can positively affect the social inclusion of older adults. Although we recommend further study, these promising results also indicate that dance interventions can help older adults recover from pandemic isolation. (shrink)

The so‐called problem of irrelevant conjunction has been seen as a serious challenge for theories of confirmation. It involves the consequences of conjoining irrelevant statements to a hypothesis that is confirmed by some piece of evidence. Following Hawthorne and Fitelson, we reconstruct the problem with reference to Bayesian confirmation theory. Then we extend it to the case of conjoining irrelevant statements to a hypothesis that is dis confirmed by some piece of evidence. As a consequence, we obtain and (...) formally present a novel and more troublesome problem of irrelevant conjunction. We conclude by indicating a possible solution based on a measure‐sensitive approach and by critically discussing a major alternative way to address the problem. *Received December 2008; revised August 2009. †To contact the authors, please write to: Department of Philosophy, University of Turin, via Sant'Ottavio 20, 10124 Turin, Italy; e‐mail: [email protected] ; [email protected] or [email protected]. (shrink)

Many philosophers deny that happiness can be equated with pleasurable experiences. Nozick introduced an experience machine thought experiment to support the idea that happiness requires pleasurable experiences that are “in contact with reality.” In this thought experiment, people can choose to plug into a machine that induces exclusively pleasurable experiences. We test Nozick’s hypothesis that people will reject this offer. We also contrast Nozick’s experience machine scenario with scenarios that are less artificial, and offer options which are less (...) invasive or disruptive than being connected to a machine, specifically scenarios in which people are offered an experience pill or a pill that improves overall functioning. (shrink)

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic people have endured potentially stressful challenges which have influenced behaviors such as eating. This pilot study examined the effectiveness of two brief interventions aimed to help individuals deal with food cravings and associated emotional experiences. Participants were 165 individuals residing in United Kingdom, Finland, Philippines, Spain, Italy, Brazil, North America, South Korea, and China. The study was implemented remotely, thus without any contact with researchers, and involved two groups. Group one participants were (...) requested to use daily diaries for seven consecutive days to assess the frequency of experience of their food cravings, frequency of giving in to cravings, and difficulty resisting cravings, as well as emotional states associated with their cravings. In addition to completing daily food diaries, participants in group two were asked to engage in mindful eating practice and forming implementation intentions. Participants assessed their perceived changes in eating, wellbeing, and health at the beginning and end of the intervention. Repeated measures MANOVAs indicated that participants experienced significantly less food cravings, as well as lower intensities of unpleasant states associated with cravings across time. In contrast to our hypothesis, the main effects of the group were not significant. Participants reported less eating and enhanced wellbeing at the end of the study. Our findings can be used to inform future remote interventions to manage food cravings and associated emotions and highlight the need for alternative solutions to increase participant engagement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Excited DeliriumThe Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of Police BrutalityKathryn Petrozzo (bio)In their timely and pressing piece, Arjun Byju and Phoebe Friesen explore the contentious diagnosis of excited delirium; a syndrome characterized by erratic, aggressive, and “delusional” behavior (2023). Overwhelmingly, this term is used when individuals come in contact with police and/or first responders. Although much attention has been given to debating whether or not this is a “real” diagnosis, the (...) authors want to shift the focus to examining the work that excited delirium is doing in the world, as well as the underlying beliefs guiding it that are perpetuating substantial harm. Drawing significantly on the work of Ian Hacking (1998, 2006) and Sherene Razack (2015), Byju and Friesen explore what kinds of people are being made up by the label of “excited delirium” and the subsequent dehumanization that perpetuates violence towards those in this grouping.Despite the lack of an agreed upon definition, excited delirium tends to frequently group together young Black men and other marginalized people of color, who have a psychiatric history, and those who have taken or are suspected to have taken drugs (Byju & Friezen, 2023). As this is “observed” when individuals come into contact with law enforcement and/or first responders, those who are presumed to be suffering from excited delirium are typically met with physical restraints (chokeholds, hogties, etc.), forced injections of sedatives, and/or taser guns. The violent reactions are often justified not only by this “diagnosis,” but the employment of racial stereotypes; notably, the notion that Black bodies as being less susceptible to pain. As the authors aptly put it:This kind of symptom language helps make up the novel category of a person who suffers from excited delirium: a crazed and inhumane monster, a golem that must be met with unrelenting and superordinate force, who is fated, regardless of interventions, to die a spontaneous death. This paradox, that those with excited delirium are supposedly both too strong and too weak, is at the core of the illness narrative.(2023)It is evident that this label is reinforcing the combination of two harmful stereotypes: the notion that those suffering from severe mental illness occupy a space that is “less than fully human,” and racist stereotyping of Black bodies “superseding human strength.” This perpetuates total dehumanization of the individual, where it is then justified to invoke brutal tactics, as well as signal [End Page 357] to the greater community this is how individuals with mental illnesses and/or belonging to a particular racial group (chiefly, Black men), should be treated. This is despite the fact that those suffering from mental illnesses are significantly more likely to be victims of violent crimes, Black Americans are 3.2 times more likely to be murdered by police, and convergence of these factors (being Black and living with a mental illness) increases likelihood of such fatal interactions (Schwartz & Jahn 2020; Shadravan, Edwards, & Vinson 2021; Stuart, 2003).Although I am in wholehearted support of their account, I take issue with the authors’ conceptualization of excited delirium as non-falsifiable, as well as the notion that diseases, generally, are falsifiable. In an attempt to further criticize the utilization of excited delirium, Byju and Friesen call upon Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion as a measure for what constitutes as scientific; arguing that excited delirium is not a legitimate scientific concept as it is impossible to falsify. First, I am not convinced that excited delirium is in principle non-falsifiable; as the way in which it’s conceptualized actually appears to be falsifiable. The authors point out that external factors, such as tasing and violent restraints, are clearly the causal explanation, which should in fact, lead one to reject the hypothesis of an excited delirium diagnosis. However, in practice, those who are seeking to exonerate the police/first responders responsible for these deaths, are not accepting this evidence leading them to reject the excited delirium diagnosis, but rather, are crafting an incorrect causal narrative. This is deeply problematic, but it does not necessarily render excited delirium as non-falsifiable. More broadly, I am concerned with the reliance on the falsifiability criterion, which has been widely criticized in the... (shrink)

Hud Hudson offers a fascinating examination of philosophical reasons to believe in hyperspace. He explores non-theistic reasons in the first chapter and theistic ones towards the end; in the intervening sections he inquires into a variety of puzzles in the metaphysics of material objects that are either generated by the hypothesis of hyperspace or else informed by it, with discussions of receptacles, boundaries, contact, occupation, and superluminal motion. Anyone engaged with contemporary metaphysics, and many philosophers of religion, will (...) find much to stimulate them here. (shrink)

Integrin‐mediated cell adhesion and subsequent cell spreading are essential for the growth and survival of many cell types. While integrin engagement is known to activate various signalling pathways, the role that cell spreading plays in the control of growth and survival is not clear. Using a novel technique, however, Chen et al.(1) demonstrate that the effect of cell spreading on growth and survival is not a consequence of increased area of contact with the extracellular matrix, supporting the hypothesis (...) that regulation through changes in cell tension and architecture play a key role. (shrink)

A cultural change occurred roughly 40,000 years ago. For the first time, there was evidence of belief in unseen agents and an afterlife. Before this time, humans did not show widespread evidence of being able to think about objects, persons, and other agents that they had not been in close contact with. I argue that one can explain this transition by appealing to a population increase resulting in greater exoteric (inter-group) communication. The increase in exoteric communication triggered the actualization (...) of a dormant potential for greater syntactic computational power; specifically it triggered syntactic movement. Syntactic movement, in turn, made possible variable binding, which crucially figures into cognition by description, a naturalistic analogue of Russell’s knowledge by description. Cognition by description made possible the ability to conceive of things one had never experienced, such as mythological beings, places only visited by the dead, and so forth. The Amazonian Pirahã provide some corroboration for this hypothesis, since they exhibit the combination of traits here attributed to Middle Paleolithic individuals, namely exclusively esoteric (intra-group) communication, evident lack of syntactic movement, and a limitation to knowledge (cognition) by acquaintance. (shrink)

Activists’ investigations of animal cruelty expose the public to suffering that they may otherwise be unaware of, via an increasingly broad-ranging media. This may result in ethical dilemmas and a wide range of emotions and reactions. Our hypothesis was that media broadcasts of cruelty to cattle in Indonesian abattoirs would result in an emotional response by the public that would drive their actions towards live animal export. A survey of the public in Australia was undertaken to investigate their reactions (...) and responses to. The most common immediate reaction was feeling pity for the cattle. Women were more likely than men to feel sad or angry. Most people discussed the media coverage with others afterwards but fewer than 10 % contacted politicians or wrote to newspapers. We conclude that the public were emotionally affected by the media coverage of cruelty to cattle but that this did not translate into significant behavioral change. We recommend that future broadcasts of animal cruelty should advise the public of contact details for counseling and that mental health support contacts, and information should be included on the websites of animal advocacy groups to acknowledge the disturbing effect animal cruelty exposes can have on the public. (shrink)

Goodman’s paradox gives rise to a cluster of problems, problems that are in need of different answers. I will discuss some variants of the grue hypothesis applied to the technological context. One conclusion in this paper is that there is room for rational decisions, and that solutions to the paradoxes in technology can be found in the practical choice situation. *Received April 2008. †To contact the author, please write to: Department of Medical and Health Sciences, Linköping University, SE‐581 (...) 83 Linköping, Sweden; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)