New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Interview with Jesse Prinz

Here is an excellent interview with Jesse Prinz (H/T Markus Schlosser) on the themes of his new book, Beyond Human Nature (which I still haven’t gotten around to reading). The main idea of the book is that experience and culture, as opposed to genetic and biology, play a much larger role in determining our behavior than is often thought. Some excerpts:

“If we are interested in differences in intelligence, the thing we should be interested in is learning and culture.”

“Brazilians are super-nice.” 

I find myself agreeing with pretty much everything that Prinz says in the interview (including the bit about Brazilians…), which is not so surprising, given that, like him, I am very much of a ‘nurture-culture’ person on the nature-nurture dimension. (A bit of self-promotion: here is a recent paper of mine, "A dialogical account of deductive reasoning as a case study for how culture shapes cognition", forthcoming in the Journal of Cognition and Culture.)  But more importantly, to my mind he manages to set up the debate in a very subtle and informative way, so I very much recommend the interview to anyone interested in this debate. (Btw, I’ve posted on my enthusiasm for his work before.)

folk metaethics: does moral realism motivate us to act more morally, and if so, why?

In the 1980s, Ruse wrote a series of important papers that revived evolutionary ethics. The debate on the implications of evolved moral intuitions for ethics remains very active up to today (see e.g., this conference that I'll be attending in a couple of hours, at least if the British railway system isn't disrupted by half an inch of snow!). Contemporary evolutionary ethics can build on a wealth of research, for instance, in the cognitive neuroscience of morality, developmental psychology, and the study of altruism in animals. But the metaethics of the folk remains a relatively understudied area. Are people intuitive moral realists? If so, what is the connection between metaethics and behavior?

Ruse hypothesized that humans are intuitive moral realists, and that this metaethical intuition has an evolved function: "human beings function better if they are deceived by their genes into thinking that there is a disinterested objective morality binding upon them, which all should obey" (Ruse & Wilson, 1986, 179). Ruse thought that if everyone thought that morality was subjective, that it was merely a matter of taste or convention, our social systems would collapse. Intuitive moral realism was thus a key component in human altruistic behavior, held together by moral beliefs, which in turn were cemented by intuitive moral realism. As Ruse wrote later on: "Substantive morality stays in place as an effective illusion because we think that it is no illusion but the real thing" (Ruse, 2010, 310).

When Ruse first formulated this hypothesis, it was by no means clear that humans were intuitive moral realists. Also, it was not clear to what extent an intuitive moral realism, if anything, helped us to act more morally. In the meantime, there is some empirical work on this, which I'll discuss briefly below the fold.

The Modus Ponens-Modus Tollens asymmetry and non-monotonic logics

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

A well-known phenomenon in the empirical study of human reasoning is the so-called Modus Ponens-Modus Tollens asymmetry. In reasoning experiments, participants almost invariably ‘do well’ with MP (or at least something that looks like MP – see below), but the rate for MT success drops considerably (from almost 100% for MP to around 70% for MT – Schroyens and Schaeken 2003). As a result, any theory purporting to describe human reasoning accurately must account for this asymmetry. Now, given that for classical logic (and other non-classical systems) MP and MT are equally valid, plain vanilla classical logic fails rather miserably in this respect.

As noted by Oaksford and Chater (‘Probability logic and the Modus Ponens-Modus Tollens asymmetry in conditional inference’, in this 2008 book), some theories of human reasoning (mental rules, mental models) explain the asymmetry at what is known as the algorithmic level (a terminology proposed by Marr (1982)) – that is, in terms of the mental process that (purportedly) implement deductive reasoning in a human mind. So according to these theories, performing MT is harder than performing MP (for a variety of reasons), which is why reasoners, while still trying to reason deductively, have difficulties with MT. Other theorists defend that participants are not in fact trying to reason deductively at all, so the asymmetry is not related to some presumed competence-performance gap. (Marr’s term to refer to the general goal of the processes, rather than the processes themselves, is ‘computational level’ – the terminology is somewhat unnatural, but it has now become standard.) Oaksford and Chater are among those favoring an analysis at the computational level, in their case proposing a Bayesian, probabilistic account of human reasoning as a normative theory not only explaining but also justifying the asymmetry.

The phylogeny and ontogeny of deductive reasoning

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

In a recent paper, the eminent psychologist of reasoning P. Johnson-Laird says the following:

[T]he claim that naïve individuals can make deductions is controversial, because some logicians and some psychologists argue to the contrary (e.g., Oaksford & Chater, 2007). These arguments, however, make it much harder to understand how human beings were able to devise logic and mathematics if they were incapable of deductive reasoning beforehand.

This last claim strikes me as very odd, or at the very least as poorly formulated. (To be clear, I side with those, such as Oaksford and Chater, who think that deductive reasoning must be learned to be mastered and competently practiced by reasoners.) It looks like a doubtful inference to the best explanation: humans have in fact devised logic and mathematics, which are crucially based on the deductive method, so they must have been capable of deductive reasoning before that. Something like: birds had to have fully formed wings before they could fly – hum, I don’t think so… Instead, the wing analogy suggests that there must be some precursors to deductive reasoning skills in untrained reasoners, but the phylogeny of the deductive method (and to be clear, I’m speaking of cultural evolution here) would have been a gradual, self-feeding process.

Kids as super-witnesses: Storing raw and uninterpreted data in memory may carry testimonial advantages

[Cross-posting from Psychology Today]

The U.S. legal system gives preference to adult testimony in court cases. In 2002 Thomas Junta was accused of killing a man in a Massachusetts hockey rink quarrell in 2000. Thomas’ son 12-year-old Quinlan Junta was a key defense witness for his father but his testimony did not convince the jury. Thomas was found guilty and sentenced to 6 to 10 years in state prison.

The magical number seven, plus 67,883: The extreme limits of memory retrieval and how to get there

[Cross-posting from Psychology Today]

In his famous paper entitled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" cognitive psychologist George A. Miller of Princeton University argued that our working memory, our ability to hold information in our minds for a few seconds, is limited to 9 items. That's fewer items than the items of a regular out of town American phone number. In light of this you might wonder what to say about cases of people with extreme memory abilities. Chao Lu holds the Guinness world record in reciting Pi, a record dating back to 2005. Lu recalled 67,890 digits of Pi in 24 hours and 4 minutes with an error at the 67,891st digit, saying it was a 5, when it was actually a 0. How is it possible to retrieve this quantity of information accurately through working memory? Is it magic? After talking to several people working in memory sports, we found out that it's not.

Kahneman on System 1 and System 2 as 'fictitious characters'

Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow is making quite a splash (the other day, I saw at Bristol airport that it is currently at the top of the bestseller list for non-fiction -- naturally, it still can’t compete with Fifty Shades of Gray). I haven’t read it yet, but people whose opinion I hold in high esteem tell me that it has been successful in striking the difficult balance between being accessible to a wider audience and scientifically accurate (for the most part at least) at the same time. The book summarizes research on cognitive and reasoning biases of the last decades, a research program in which Kahneman himself has been a major player. The conceptual cornerstone of the book is the (still) popular distinction between System 1 and System 2, the two systems which allegedly run in parallel underpinning all our cognitive processes, and which often conflict with each other. 

Now, as I’ve stated a few times before (here for example), I am no fan of System 1/System 2 talk at all (not even of weaker versions, the so-called dual-process theories of cognition), even though I agree that the empirical findings on cognitive biases should be taken very seriously. (I also agree that there is something to the idea of debiasing as suppressing automatic processes.) So I was curious to see how Kahneman himself introduces the System 1/System 2 distinction, and took a quick look at the book (my husband was reading it during our holiday of a few weeks ago, after having gotten it from me as a birthday present – that’s what you get for having a nerdy wife). The first thing that struck me is that, on footnote 20, he lists some of the pioneers of dual-system theories, including Jonathan Evans, Steve Sloman and Keith Stanovich, and adds: “I borrow the terms System 1 and System 2 from early writings of Stanovich and West that greatly influenced my thinking” (he refers to their 2000 BBS article on individual differences in reasoning). But what is puzzling is that Stanovich himself now overtly rejects the conceptualization of the distinction in terms of systems, which unduly suggests reified entities, and now uses the process terminology instead (same with Jonathan Evans).

But perhaps most striking is what Kahneman says in the conclusion of the book:

Suppes on neuroscience as foundations of mathematics

(OK, so it looks like I’m over-posting a bit today… Just one more!)

Between today and tomorrow, the workshop ‘Groundedness in Semantics and Beyond’ is taking place at MCMP in Munich, co-organized with the the ERC project Plurals, Predicates, and Paradox led by Øystein Linnebo. The workshop’s program seems excellent across the board, but the opening talk is what really caught my attention: Patrick Suppes on ‘A neuroscience perspective on the foundations of mathematics’. The abstract:

I mainly ask and partially answer three questions. First, what is a number? Second, how does the brain process numbers? Third, what are the brain processes by which mathematicians discover new theorems about numbers? Of course, these three questions generalize immediately to mathematical objects and processes of a more general nature. Typical examples are abstract groups, high dimensional spaces or probability structures. But my emphasis is not on these mathematical structures as such, but how we think about them. For the grounding of mathematics, I argue that understanding how we think about mathematics and discover new results is as important as foundations of mathematics in the traditional sense.

Evolution is Smarter Than You Think!

Evolution is a lot more subtle than it is given credit for. In 1987, Patricia Churchland, expressed a rather common take when she wrote “The principle chore of nervous systems is to get the body part where they should be in order that the organism may survive.” (Whoa! Survival?! Isn’t reproduction the fundamental variable?) A tale of solitary organisms fleeing predators, finding scarce food, and pouncing on potential mates. No time for thought and reflection: “Truth, whatever that is, definitely takes the hindmost.” Rarely is it noted (even by Churchland herself) that in the short space between those two sentences, she wrote “a fancier style of representing is advantageous so long as it is geared to the organism’s way of life and enhances the organism’s chances of survival.” A salutary turn, but then a reversion to that emphasis on survival. No thought that believing the truth can lead to speaking the truth, which, given a social “way of life” might be behaviour with positive evolutionary consequences.

In 1993, Alvin Plantinga seized on Churchland in an attempt to show that the theory of evolution is incompatible with naturalism. That is pretty cheeky, don’t you think? Could he be right?

Religious beliefs: Matter of fact or of preference?

[this is cross-posted from the Cognition & Culture blog] In the public sphere, religious beliefs are often considered to be a matter of private sentiment or preference, not as matters of fact. While this may be helpful for the maintenance of a pluralistic society, religious individuals often regard their beliefs as true in an objective sense. Attempts to incorporate fictionalism into religious practice, such as the Anglican Sea of Faith, have met only with limited success. There is thus a tension between the large diversity of religious beliefs, which prompt a more subjectivist understanding, and the appraisal by individual religious believers, who seem to have a more fact-like understanding. How do we intuitively conceptualize religious beliefs?

A savant with acquired synesthesia

When I reported on our case of a savant with acquired synesthesia, I promised to mention when our first study was out. You can find it here. A copy of the paper is available here.

The different meanings of 'experimental philosophy'

Over the last week, there have been quite a few blog posts prompted by Tim Williamson’s recent critique of experimental philosophy in his review of J. Alexander’s Experimental Philosophy. In particular, at NewAPPS Eric Schliesser and Berit Brogaard shared some of their views on the debate. Here, however, I want to discuss a post by Eric Schwitzgebel at Splintered Mind, as I think he identifies an important and overlooked component of the whole debate. Eric puts forward the distinction between X-Phi in a narrow and in a wide sense. The narrow conception can be thus described:

Most of the work canonically identified as "experimental philosophy" surveys ordinary people's judgments (or "intuitions") about philosophical concepts, and it does so by soliciting people's responses to questions about hypothetical scenarios.

The wide conception is more difficult to define, and Eric basically offers a definition by exclusion:

In this broad sense, philosophers who do empirical work aimed at addressing traditionally philosophical questions are also experimental philosophers, even if they don't survey people about their intuitions.

Thoughts on evolutionary debunking arguments against religious belief

[Xposted at Problogion] I've just re-read Paul Griffiths' and John Wilkins' inspiring paper on evolutionary debunking arguments (EDAs) for religion (it is a very influential paper on cognitive science of religion and evolutionary debunking, despite its not having appeared in print yet) for a chapter of a monograph I'm writing. Using Guy Kahane's debunking genealogical framework, they argue that natural selection is an off-track process, i.e., one that does not track truth: it produces beliefs in a manner that is insensitive to the truth those beliefs. From this, they conclude that the beliefs that are the outputs of evolved systems are unjustified.

• Causal premise.S's belief that p is explained by X 
• Epistemic premise. X is an off-track process 
• Therefore, S's belief that p is unjustified 

When we apply this argument in a generalized manner, where X stands for "natural selection", this looks like a bad strategy for the naturalist - ultimately, it leads to self-defeat in a Plantingesque manner that most proponents of EDAs would like to avoid. G&W's position is more subtle: they don't want to treat truth-tracking and fitness-tracking as competing explanations, instead, they argue that fitness-tracking and truth-tracking operate at different explanatory levels. In many cases, tracking truth *is* the best way of tracking fitness, especially given (1) that cognition is costly (brains consume a lot of energy), (2) your beliefs influence how you will behave, (3) your behavior influences your fitness. They propose "Milvian bridges", which link truth-tracking and fitness-tracking, in order to salvage commonsense and scientific beliefs.

Plato, political affect, and lullabies

One of the most interesting moves in 4EA cognitive science has been the attention paid to infant development studies. Among others, special attention has been paid to the work on "primary intersubjectivity" by Colwyn Trevarthen, Andrew Meltzoff, and Daniel Stern. (References to other important researchers would be welcome in comments.)

• Meltzoff's work on neonatal facial imitation is used here in an article by Shaun Gallagher and Meltzoff in discussing an infantile body schema (which makes individuation a process of modulating a relation rather than breaking free of a fusion with the mother).
• Stern's recent Forms of Vitality has some concise descriptions of "affective attunement," in which a caretaker matches the affective dynamics of the infant, but in another modality (e.g., voice rather than gesture), so that there is no mere imitation, but a "signature" indicating the matching of internal states (41; 113).
• But it's Trevarthen's interest in "musicality," in the rhythmic interaction of caretaker and infant, that makes the connection with Plato, specifically with his discussion of law, custom, and the skill of nurses in administering lullabies in the Laws. (The Athenian's assumption that slave women do child-rearing for citizens explains [in addition to my interest in Hrdy's Mothers and Others -- see Catarina on "allomothers"] why I'm using "caretaker" rather than "mother.")

What do we mean with "sweet"?

The word "sweet" has connotations of sugariness, kitsch and even blandness. Comparing this to the word as it was used in the past, that can't have been its original meaning. For instance, the author of psalm 119 writes (about the divine law) "How sweet are your words to my taste sweeter than honey to my mouth!" Yet the psalmist writes a bit further on "My flesh trembles in fear of you; I stand in awe of your laws." So not sweetness in the Hello Kitty sense. Perhaps we've lost the meaning of the word sweet by eating to much sweet stuff, especially food in which refined sugar is used. As Shakespeare said "…sweets grown common lose their dear delight."

Why don't we see Richard Dawkins in a tortilla? The puzzle of religious pareidolia

The phenomenon of pareidolia has fascinated me for some time. Pareidolia is the collective terminology to denote interpretation of sensory perception (usually vision or hearing) of meaningless stimuli in terms of something meaningful. The paradigm examples are faces in the clouds, the man in the moon, hearing words in music that is played backwards. The neural and evolutionary mechanisms for pareidolia are getting better understood. Understanding language and seeing faces are subserved by specialized neural mechanisms. According to Stewart Guthrie (1993, Faces in the clouds) they are good examples of the dictum that it's better to be safe than sorry. Better to have a false positive (seeing a face, viz a social agent where there is none) than a false negative (failing to see a social agent where there is one). This would plausible explain why many instances of pareidolia are faces. However, I find it intriguing that many pareidolia are religious, and I haven't yet come across a satisfying explanation for this.

Philosophy of mind without citations to the experimental literature

This is a very critical review of a recent book by Paul Churchland. I can't say if it is fair or not, although to me it read as if the reviewers were rightly annoyed at the lack of attention to opposing views ("While his book has many virtues, it is unfortunate that he repeatedly fails to do justice to his opponents' views."). But I was struck by the last paragraph:

A final striking fact about Churchland's book is that it seems almost wholly divorced from empirical psychology. Remarkably, indeed, in a book that advances a theory of the mind that is supposed to be empirically supported, Churchland provides only around thirty scientific references, just a third of which date from the twenty-first century, and many of which are computational rather than experimental in nature. One would like to think that he chose to provide only a judicious selection so as not to overwhelm his audience with references. But since he ignores a great many results that appear inconsistent with his main theses, we fear that the paucity of references requires a different explanation. Indeed, Churchland ignores almost entirely the extensive work in developmental and experimental psychology, in neuroscience, and in studies of comparative cognition that have been conducted by cognitive scientists, especially over the last twenty years. And it is precisely once we examine the theories supported by empirical phenomena of these psychological sorts that past and present arguments for nativism and for LOT (appropriately understood) begin to emerge.

Now I doubt I have a firm grip on the computational vs experimental distinction here. (Is the former a simulation with a Bayesian networks and the latter work on real humans and other animals?) Either way, this paragraph made me wonder: does a book entitled How the Physical Brain Captures a Landscape of Abstract Universals,  have to cite experimental literature?

Weekly Philo of Economics: More Critical Reflections on the Cognitive Reflection Test measure

Last week Catarina did a critical post on a widely cited 2005 article by Shane Frederick that was  published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. (In what follow I assume that readers are familiar either with Catarina's post or with The Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT).) Now it is worth mentioning that "Articles appearing in the journal are normally solicited by the editors and associate editors." [Full disclosure: once I tried to have this article "solicited" there!] I mention this because when I shared my interest in the piece with some of my usual 'informants' from economics, one of them (who shall remain anonymous) immediately shut back and reminded me that (a) Frederick is not a trained economist (he is a decision-scientist trained at CMU) and (b) that the refereeing at JEP is (shall we say) non-standard. The special provenance of this paper is reflected in its stated purpose: to explore "the possibility that general intelligence or various more specific cognitive abilities are important causal determinants of decision making. To provoke interest in this neglected topic," (25-26). It is, thus, a good proxy for the kind of ideology that excites certain incrowd social scientists. (I return to this at the end of the post.)

Now, Frederick argues that "CRT scores are predictive of the types of choices that feature prominently in tests of decision-making theories, like expected utility theory and prospect theory." (26) But as Nobel Laureate (Economics), the experimental economist, Vernon Smith, pointed out to me the "decision-making theories" that Frederick is exploring are all about isolated individuals. They are not about decision making understood as social psychology (of the sort that he and I associate with Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments).  Smith's philosophically sophisticated fellow experimentalist at Chapman, Bart Wilson remarked, that Frederick's approach simply ignores how "distributed knowledge [is] built into our institutions, both formal and informal, which are smarter than any single mind;" If such a focus on institutions were included "then exploring human cognitive difference in economics could prove fruitful."

Brain-teasers and dual-process theories of reasoning

(I’ve been through a ridiculously busy period of work-related traveling and thus scarce blogging, and in the next four weeks I’m supposed to be on holiday, so again scarce blogging. But there is still one topic I really want to discuss before the summer break, so here it is.)

Here are a couple of brain-teasers for your amusement on this Monday morning/afternoon (depending on your time zone):

(1) A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?  _____ cents

(2) If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets?  _____ minutes

(3) In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake?  _____ days

(Answers below the fold.)

Interview with Keith Stenning in The Reasoner

(Cross-posted at M-Phi)

The latest issue of The Reasoner is out, and among other interesting features, it has an interview with the cognitive scientist Keith Stenning, conducted by me. Keith is (in my opinion) the sharpest, most interesting researcher currently working on reasoning, so everyone should be thoroughly familiar with his work! He has two fairly recent can't-miss books, Seeing Reason and (with Michiel van Lambalgen) Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science. In the interview, he talks about the status of cognitive science and psychology as disciplines, his interdisciplinary professional trajectory, and his recent collaboration with Michiel van Lambalgen tracking down the inherent component of defeasibility in human reasoning.

Do check it out if reasoning is one of your hobby horses!

How do animals understand their names?

My husband and I are making revision on a paper that mentions, at some point, briefly, Leibniz. We read the paper aloud to see if it sounds alright. As I am reading, our cat, who happens to be called Leibniz (photo), comes expectantly into the house from the garden. But what, if anything, does he understand by his own name? He also recognizes other designators, such as "cat" (in English and Dutch).

Are we now worse at verbal recall, and if so, why?

An acquaintance of mine in Oxford, who is a Catholic priest, is learning the psalter by heart. There are 150 psalms altogether. This has proven to be a challenging task (note that he also has an academic day job, next to duties as a priest, so he can't devote himself to the task full-time). Some psalms are catchy or short, others have interesting and striking metaphors, express recognizable emotions ranging from deep despair to hopeful optimism, and the very best (or most well-known) combine these elements, such as psalm 23 and psalm 42. But other psalms are harder to remember (think of psalm 119, for instance [this psalm has an acrostic structure that helps recall a bit, but still, it's very long...). In all, my acquaintance expects that the memorization process will take him years. When he has finally mastered all psalms "I will know as much as a 15-year-old boy in 1st century Israel". It seems that we are today a lot worse at accurate recall of verbal information (stories, songs, etc) than people in the past. An exquisite verbal memory was required to orally transmit long narrations like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Actors in Elizabethan times needed to learn about 70 different roles in one year time. If it is true that we are worse at verbal recall, why would this be so?

Scientific knowledge does not supplant earlier intuitions

I've just finished reading McCauley's Why religion is natural and science is not (2011, OUP), a book I already bought at the eastern APA last year, but only now gotten round to reading. See this video for a 2-minute summary of the book (book trailer). McCauley makes an interesting case for the "naturalness" of religion and the "unnaturalness" of science. He uses "natural" (or, more specifically, "maturationally natural'') in a fairly restrictive sense, namely as those properties of human thought that arise early in development, without explicit instruction. Examples include speaking a natural language, walking, and chewing. 

McCauley thinks science is not natural. Science provides us with concepts and world views that are contrary to our everyday knowledge and experience. For instance, the heliocentric model of the Earth orbiting Sun contradicts our visual observation of the Sun moving across the sky; particle physics is at odds with our intuitive understanding of solid objects. Scientific modes of explanation and ways of thinking are also contrary to our maturationally natural capacities. For example, the empirical sciences have, over time, appealed less and less to agents as causes, and more to impersonal causes to explain events. A recent paper by Shtulman and Valcarcel, in press in Cognition supports the unnaturalness of science thesis.

iPads and the Toddler's Brain

Just now on NPR, there was a discussion about toddlers and iPads that could have really used a Heideggerian intervention.  The issue was, more or less, what is happening when you give a 2 year old an iPad and they get completely absorbed for 5 hours straight?  Is this good for them or not?  And does it help them to learn what they need to learn in order to mature into smart, productive kids and adults?  NPR seems to love this stuff; there’s a shorter article on the same topic here. 

A range of experts was consulted, most of whom said that we don’t have enough (empirical) research to answer these questions yet, but that we shouldn’t panic – we just need to make sure that kids get a balance of screen time and face-to-face interaction with other people.  But the question that started the whole discussion was a father’s question about what is going on for his son when he “zones out” in front of the iPad.  This question remained unaddressed, as far as I could tell from my own zoning in and out of the radio discussion.  But isn’t this basically a matter of Benommenheit, or captivation, literally “being taken,” being absorbed in an object to the point where everything else fades away. 

Fanon’s Brain

My friend Barbara said the other day, “There are so many books I would like to have on my shelf.  But no one has written them yet!”  One of the books I would like to have on my shelf is about Frantz Fanon, activist models of decentralized political organization, and 4E cognitive science models of the brain as a distributed network.  If you want to write this book, here are a few quotes from The Wretched of the Earth to get you started.  If it’s already been written and I just haven’t found it yet, please post the title, and I will fill that spot on my shelf.

“The meeting of the local cell or the committee meeting is a liturgical act.  It is a privileged opportunity for the individual to listen and speak.  At every meeting the brain multiplies the association of ideas and the eye discovers a wider human panorama” (136).

“Let us reexamine the question of cerebral reality, the brain mass of humanity in its entirety whose affinities must be increased, whose connections must be diversified and whose communications must be humanized again” (237-8).

“No, it is not a question of back to nature.  It is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it.  The notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from himself and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him” (238).

Is non-monotonicity a symptom?

This post is a follow-up on Catarina's excellent post "non-monotonicity is a fever".  I want to defend one interpretation of Van Benthem's comment that Catarina says "always puzzled" her: "Many observations in terms of structural rules address mere symptoms of some more basic underlying phenomenon. For instance, non-monotonicity is like ‘fever’: it does not tell you which disease causes it."  I have not read the relevant book, so this may not be what he had in mind, but I think it is right.

Weekly Philo of Economics: Smithian causal Reasoning within the Sympathetic Process

[This is part of a larger draft-paper on the significance of counterfactual causal reasoning in the Sympathetic Process in Adam Smith's philosophy that is meant as a correction to one-sided focus on the significance of affect in Smith.--ES] Consider the following passage in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS; the references are the so-called Glasgow edition):

There are some passions of which the expressions excite no sort of sympathy, but before we are acquainted with what gave occasion to them, serve rather to disgust and provoke us against them…. The general idea of good or bad fortune, therefore, creates some concern for the person who has met with it, but the general idea of provocation excites no sympathy with the anger of the man who has received it. Nature, it seems, teaches us to be more averse to enter into this passion, and, till informed of its cause, to be disposed rather to take part against it. Even our sympathy with the grief or joy of another, before we are informed of the cause of either, is always extremely imperfect (TMS 1.1.1.7-9, 11)

In context Smith’s claim that what we might label ‘instinctual sympathy’ only goes so far. In some contexts without knowledge of the causal circumstances that produce the passions in the agent concerned, the sympathetic process will always lead to what Smith calls “extremely imperfect" sympathy. It seems to follow from Smith’s account and his adopted terminology that there exists some (non-instinctual) sequence that leads to perfect, or at least much less imperfect sympathy. It can be described as follows: following (T0) (i) an intensely/passionately felt moral situation which is experienced or observed empirically, is as follows: (ii) by way of the imagination spectators and moral agents place themselves in each other situations, including (ii*) knowledge of (moral) causes that gave rise to the moral situation , and this involves (iii) a sympathetic mutual modulation (informed, perhaps, by observations about how the other is reacting), which, in turn, produces (iv) a conceived reflected passion within each participant in the sympathetic process and this (v) alters the intensity of the feelings of the participants in the process; after several rounds of this, perhaps, this produces (vi) fellow feeling (sympathy) among spectator and persons principally concerned.

Multi-scale political affect: securitization and racial anxiety in the Trayvon Martin case

Anxiety is classically distinguished from fear by its "free-floating" character; while fear has an object, anxiety is alertness without an object, a potentiality, a tendency toward fear.* Using a Simondonian image, anxiety is metastable and pre-individual, like a super-saturated liquid, needing only a slight disturbance to start its crystallization. We should note that Simondon's notion of individuation, imaged by crystallization, centers on the putting into connection of different orders of magnitude; I use the notion of "events as crystallizations" to investigate case studies in terms of political affect as connecting the social, somatic, and subjective scales.

Rich Benjamin's NYT piece on the Trayvon Martin case, "The Gated Community Mentality," puts some (small-scale "geo-political," if you will) orders of magnitude on the table, but suffers by not getting below the personal and subjective to the neural and affective. The term "mentality" in his title indicates that personal or psychological subjectivity is his lower bound.

A new round in the Pirahã controversy.

Daniel Everett, known for challenging Chomskian orthodoxy by claiming to have found a human language lacking recursion – the Pirahã language of the Amazon – has a new book out: Language: the Cultural Tool. Accordingly, there have been a number of articles on the new book and on the Pirahã controversy more generally. The Chronicle of Higher Ed article is long and resolutely anti-Chomsky and Chomskians, pro-Everett; the NYT article is more impartial. But both describe the bitter battles and the disturbing level of animosity among linguists on both ‘sides’. A comment in the NYT article by Ted Gibson, a cognitive science having conducted a data-analysis study on the Pirahã language relying on data other than Everett’s, is quite revealing:

But to Dr. Gibson, who said he does not find Dr. Everett’s cultural theory of language persuasive, such responses reflect the gap between theoretical linguists and data-driven cognitive scientists, not to mention the strangely calcified state of the recursion debate.

“Chomskians and non-Chomskians are weirdly illogical at times,” he said. “It’s like they just don’t want to have a cogent argument. They just want to contradict what the other guy is saying.”

Either way, it is to be hoped that the days of linguistic research being conducted exclusively from the armchair in air-conditioned offices will finally come to an end.

UPDATE: Kai von Fintel alerts me to the fact that my final comment above may be read as implying that there has not been much fieldwork-based research in linguistics in the last decades, under the influence of the Chomskian program. That's not what I meant at all: fortunately for us all, fieldwork-based linguistics continued to thrive throughout. What I meant is that it is to be hoped that the lack of attention for data-collection in the Chomskian program will no longer be seen as acceptable.

 

Extended cognition and gender balance

Now that Eric has (duly) highlighted a conference on extended cognition with a very bad gender balance (11 men, 0 women), for the sake of fairness I’d like to draw everyone’s attention to another conference in the same area/topic which does have a much better gender balance, the ‘Distributed cognition and distributed agency’ workshop, taking place at Macquarie University pretty much as we speak.