Keuze van artikelen uit het werk van de Vlaamse filosoof over wetenschap, milieu, en medische en biologische ethiek.

The evolutionary claim that the function of self-awareness lies, at least in part, in the benefits of theory of mind (TOM) regained attention in light of current findings in cognitive neuroscience, including mirror neuron research. Although certain non-human primates most likely possess mirror self-recognition skills, we claim that they lack the introspective abilities that are crucial for human-like TOM. Primate research on TOM skills such as emotional recognition, seeing versus knowing and ignorance versus knowing are discussed. Based upon current findings (...) in cognitive neuroscience, we provide evidence in favor of an introspection-based simulation theory account of human mindreading. (shrink)

Recent advances in the technology of creating chimeras have evoked controversy in policy debates. At centre of controversy is the fear that a substantial contribution of human cells or genes in crucial areas of the animal’s body may at some point render the animal more humanlike than any other animals we know today. Authors who have commented on or contributed to policy debates specify that chimeras which would be too humanlike would have an altered moral status and threaten our notion (...) of ‘human dignity’. This setting offers a productive opportunity to test the notion of human dignity and to emphasize some of its weaknesses as an ethical tool. Limiting chimerism experiments on the basis of whether or not it undermines or challenges human dignity implies a clear demarcation of those characteristics which are typically, and importantly, human. Evidence of our evolutionary ties and behavioral similarities with other animals seem to annul all attempts to define the uniquely human properties to which human dignity may be attributed. Hence, it has been suggested that the particular moral status associated with humans cannot be explained for beyond an intuitive basis. In what follows, we will argue that the difficulties inherent in the notion of human dignity lie not in the impossibility to acquire a list of properties which are unique to humans, but rather in the difficulty to demonstrate the moral relevance of these properties, and particularly the relevance of their being human. We offer an alternative interpretation of the concept of dignity which is not necessarily related to being human. (shrink)

This paper offers an epistemological discussion of self-validating belief systems and the recurrence of ?epistemic defense mechanisms? and ?immunizing strategies? across widely different domains of knowledge. We challenge the idea that typical ?weird? belief systems are inherently fragile, and we argue that, instead, they exhibit a surprising degree of resilience in the face of adverse evidence and criticism. Borrowing from the psychological research on belief perseverance, rationalization and motivated reasoning, we argue that the human mind is particularly susceptible to belief (...) systems that are structurally self-validating. On this cognitive-psychological basis, we construct an epidemiology of beliefs, arguing that the apparent convenience of escape clauses and other defensive ?tactics? used by believers may well derive not from conscious deliberation on their part, but from more subtle mechanisms of cultural selection. (shrink)

An immunizing strategy is an argument brought forward in support of a belief system, though independent from that belief system, which makes it more or less invulnerable to rational argumentation and/or empirical evidence. By contrast, an epistemic defense mechanism is defined as a structural feature of a belief system which has the same effect of deflecting arguments and evidence. We discuss the remarkable recurrence of certain patterns of immunizing strategies and defense mechanisms in pseudoscience and other belief systems. Five different (...) types will be distinguished and analyzed, with examples drawn from widely different domains. The difference between immunizing strategies and defense mechanisms is analyzed, and their epistemological status is discussed. Our classification sheds new light on the various ways in which belief systems may achieve invulnerability against empirical evidence and rational criticism, and we propose our analysis as part of an explanation of these belief systems’ enduring appeal and tenacity. (shrink)

Pseudoscience spreads through communicative and inferential processes that make people vulnerable to weird beliefs. However, the fact that pseudoscientific beliefs are unsubstantiated and have no basis in reality does not mean that the people who hold them have no reasons for doing so. We propose that, reasons play a central role in the diffusion of pseudoscience. On the basis of cultural epidemiology and the interactionist theory of reasoning, we will here analyse the structure and the function of reasons in the (...) propagation of pseudoscience. We conclude by discussing the implications of our approach for the understanding of human irrationality. (shrink)

Following Darwin, many comparative psychologists assume that the human mind is a kind of ape mind, differing only in degree from the extant apes – we call this the mental continuity assumption. However, the continuity principle in evolutionary theory does not posit continuity between extant closely related species, but between extant species and their extinct ancestors. Thus, it is possible that some human cognitive capacities have no parallels in extant apes, but that they emerged in extinct hominid species after the (...) human-chimpanzee divergence. Our examination of the case of social cognition from an archaeological and comparative psychological perspective suggests that the human brain is not simply an enlarged chimpanzee brain. Instead, natural selection seems to have favoured a different social cognition in both species. (shrink)

The impact of science on ethics forms since long the subject of intense debate. Although there is a growing consensus that science can describe morality and explain its evolutionary origins, there is less consensus about the ability of science to provide input to the normative domain of ethics. Whereas defenders of a scientific normative ethics appeal to naturalism, its critics either see the naturalistic fallacy committed or argue that the relevance of science to normative ethics remains undemonstrated. In this paper, (...) we argue that current scientific normative ethicists commit no fallacy, that criticisms of scientific ethics contradict each other, and that scientific insights are relevant to normative inquiries by informing ethics about the options open to the ethical debate. Moreover, when conceiving normative ethics as being a nonfoundational ethics, science can be used to evaluate every possible norm. This stands in contrast to foundational ethics in which some norms remain beyond scientific inquiry. Finally, we state that a difference in conception of normative ethics underlies the disagreement between proponents and opponents of a scientific ethics. Our argument is based on and preceded by a reconsideration of the notions naturalistic fallacy and foundational ethics. This argument differs from previous work in scientific ethics: whereas before the philosophical project of naturalizing the normative has been stressed, here we focus on concrete consequences of biological findings for normative decisions or on the day-to-day normative relevance of these scientific insights. (shrink)

The trolley problem, first described by Foot (1967) and Thomson (The Monist, 59, 204–217, 1976), is one of the most famous and influential thought experiments in deontological ethics. The general story is that a runaway trolley is threatening the lives of five people. Doing nothing will result in the death of those persons, but acting in order to save those persons would unavoidably result in the death of another, sixth person. It appears that, depending on the situation, we have different (...) moral judgments about the permissibility of action. We will review and systematize all the proposals in the literature of the past 35 years that have attempted to grasp our moral intuitions in a simple deontological principle. In particular, seventeen proposals will be classified: six algorithmic, seven psychological, and four other invalid accounts. This review and classification sheds light on some subtle differences and clarify a few issues. (shrink)

In recent controversies about Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC), the principle of methodological naturalism (MN) has played an important role. In this paper, an often neglected distinction is made between two different conceptions of MN, each with its respective rationale and with a different view on the proper role of MN in science. According to one popular conception, MN is a self-imposed or intrinsic limitation of science, which means that science is simply not equipped to deal with claims of the supernatural (...) (Intrinsic MN or IMN). Alternatively, we will defend MN as a provisory and empirically grounded attitude of scientists, which is justified in virtue of the consistent success of naturalistic explanations and the lack of success of supernatural explanations in the history of science (Provisory MN or PMN). Science does have a bearing on supernatural hypotheses, and its verdict is uniformly negative. We will discuss five arguments that have been proposed in support of IMN: the argument from the definition of science, the argument from lawful regularity, the science stopper argument, the argument from procedural necessity, and the testability argument. We conclude that IMN, because of its philosophical flaws, proves to be an ill-advised strategy to counter the claims of IDC. Evolutionary scientists are on firmer ground if they discard supernatural explanations on purely evidential grounds, instead of ruling them out by philosophical fiat. (shrink)

Individual differences in moral views are often explained as the downstream effect of ideological commitments, such as political orientation and religiosity. Recent studies in the U.S. suggest that moral views about recreational drug use are also influenced by attitudes toward sex and that this relationship cannot be explained by ideological commitments. In this study, we investigate student samples from Belgium, The Netherlands, and Japan. We find that, in all samples, sexual attitudes are strongly related to views about recreational drug use, (...) even after controlling for various ideological variables. We discuss our results in light of reproductive strategies as determinants of moral views. (shrink)

Welch :263–279, 2017) has recently proposed two possible explanations for why the field of evolutionary biology is plagued by a steady stream of claims that it needs urgent reform. It is either seriously deficient and incapable of incorporating ideas that are new, relevant and plausible or it is not seriously deficient at all but is prone to attracting discontent and to the championing of ideas that are not very relevant, plausible and/or not really new. He argues for the second explanation. (...) This paper presents a twofold critique of his analysis: firstly, the main calls for reform do not concern the field of evolutionary biology in general but rather, or more specifically, the modern evolutionary synthesis. Secondly, and most importantly, these calls are not only inspired by the factors, enumerated by Welch, but are also, and even primarily, motivated by four problematic characteristics of the modern synthesis. This point is illustrated through a short analysis of the latest reform challenge to the modern synthesis, the so-called extended evolutionary synthesis. We conclude with the suggestion that the modern synthesis should be amended, rather than replaced. (shrink)

The leading Intelligent Design theorist William Dembski (Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2002) argued that the first No Free Lunch theorem, first formulated by Wolpert and Macready (IEEE Trans Evol Comput 1: 67–82, 1997), renders Darwinian evolution impossible. In response, Dembski’s critics pointed out that the theorem is irrelevant to biological evolution. Meester (Biol Phil 24: 461–472, 2009) agrees with this conclusion, but still thinks that the theorem does apply to simulations of evolutionary processes. According to Meester, the theorem shows (...) that simulations of Darwinian evolution, as these are typically set in advance by the programmer, are teleological and therefore non-Darwinian. Therefore, Meester argues, they are useless in showing how complex adaptations arise in the universe. Meester uses the term teleological inconsistently, however, and we argue that, no matter how we interpret the term, a Darwinian algorithm does not become non-Darwinian by simulation. We show that the NFL theorem is entirely irrelevant to this argument, and conclude that it does not pose a threat to the relevance of simulations of biological evolution. (shrink)

Traditionally, Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) is largely identified with his analysis of the structure of scientific revolutions. Here, we contribute to a minority tradition in the Kuhn literature by interpreting the history of evolutionary biology through the prism of the entire historical developmental model of sciences that he elaborates in The Structure. This research not only reveals a certain match between this model and the history of evolutionary biology but, more importantly, also sheds new light (...) on several episodes in that history, and particularly on the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), the construction of the modern evolutionary synthesis, the chronic discontent with it, and the latest expression of that discontent, called the extended evolutionary synthesis. Lastly, we also explain why this kind of analysis hasn’t been done before. (shrink)

Although classical evolutionary theory, i.e., population genetics and the Modern Synthesis, was already implicitly ‘gene-centred’, the organism was, in practice, still generally regarded as the individual unit of which a population is composed. The gene-centred approach to evolution only reached a logical conclusion with the advent of the gene-selectionist or gene’s eye view in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas classical evolutionary theory can only work with (genotypically represented) fitness differences between individual organisms, gene-selectionism is capable of working with fitness differences (...) among genes within the same organism and genome. Here, we explore the explanatory potential of ‘intra-organismic’ and ‘intra-genomic’ gene-selectionism, i.e., of a behavioural-ecological ‘gene’s eye view’ on genetic, genomic and organismal evolution. First, we give a general outline of the framework and how it complements the—to some extent—still ‘organism-centred’ approach of classical evolutionary theory. Secondly, we give a more in-depth assessment of its explanatory potential for biological evolution, i.e., for Darwin’s ‘common descent with modification’ or, more specifically, for ‘historical continuity or homology with modular evolutionary change’ as it has been studied by evolutionary developmental biology (evo-devo) during the last few decades. In contrast with classical evolutionary theory, evo-devo focuses on ‘within-organism’ developmental processes. Given the capacity of gene-selectionism to adopt an intra-organismal gene’s eye view, we outline the relevance of the latter model for evo-devo. Overall, we aim for the conceptual integration between the gene’s eye view on the one hand, and more organism-centred evolutionary models (both classical evolutionary theory and evo-devo) on the other. (shrink)

Although classical evolutionary theory, i.e., population genetics and the Modern Synthesis, was already implicitly ‘gene-centred’, the organism was, in practice, still generally regarded as the individual unit of which a population is composed. The gene-centred approach to evolution only reached a logical conclusion with the advent of the gene-selectionist or gene’s eye view in the 1960s and 1970s. Whereas classical evolutionary theory can only work with fitness differences between individual organisms, gene-selectionism is capable of working with fitness differences among genes (...) within the same organism and genome. Here, we explore the explanatory potential of ‘intra-organismic’ and ‘intra-genomic’ gene-selectionism, i.e., of a behavioural-ecological ‘gene’s eye view’ on genetic, genomic and organismal evolution. First, we give a general outline of the framework and how it complements the—to some extent—still ‘organism-centred’ approach of classical evolutionary theory. Secondly, we give a more in-depth assessment of its explanatory potential for biological evolution, i.e., for Darwin’s ‘common descent with modification’ or, more specifically, for ‘historical continuity or homology with modular evolutionary change’ as it has been studied by evolutionary developmental biology during the last few decades. In contrast with classical evolutionary theory, evo-devo focuses on ‘within-organism’ developmental processes. Given the capacity of gene-selectionism to adopt an intra-organismal gene’s eye view, we outline the relevance of the latter model for evo-devo. Overall, we aim for the conceptual integration between the gene’s eye view on the one hand, and more organism-centred evolutionary models on the other. (shrink)

First the ‘Weismann barrier’ and later on Francis Crick’s ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology nourished the gene-centric paradigm of life, i.e., the conception of the gene/genome as a ‘central source’ from which hereditary specificity unidirectionally flows or radiates into cellular biochemistry and development. Today, due to advances in molecular genetics and epigenetics, such as the discovery of complex post-genomic and epigenetic processes in which genes are causally integrated, many theorists argue that a gene-centric conception of the organism has become problematic. (...) Here, we first explore the causal implications of the following two central dogma-related issues: (1) widespread reverse transcription—arguing for an extension from ‘DNA-genome’ to RNA-encompassing ‘NA-genome’ and, thus, from traditional DNA-centrism to a broader ‘NA-centrism’; and (2) the absence of a mechanism of reverse translation—arguing for the ‘structural primacy’ of NA-sequence over protein in cellular biochemistry. Secondly, we explore whether this latter conclusion can be extended to a ‘functional primacy’ of NA-sequence over protein in cellular biochemistry, which would imply a limited kind of ‘gene/NA-centrism’ confined to the subcellular level of NA/protein-based biochemistry. Finally, we explore the conditions—and their (non)fulfilment—for a more generalised form of gene-centrism extendable to higher levels of biological organisation. We conclude that the higher we go in the biological hierarchy, the more dubious gene-centric claims become. (shrink)

In this paper we present two compatible hypotheses to explain interest in celebrity gossip. The Learning Hypothesis explains interest in celebrity gossip as a by-product of an evolved mechanism useful for acquiring fitness-relevant survival information. The Parasocial Hypothesis sees celebrity gossip as a diversion of this mechanism, which leads individuals to misperceive celebrities as people who are part of their social network. Using two preliminary studies, we tested our predictions. In a survey with 838 respondents and in-depth interviews with 103 (...) individuals, we investigated how interest in celebrity gossip was related to several dimensions of the participants’ social lives. In support of the Learning Hypothesis, age proved to be a strong predictor of interest in celebrities. In partial support of the Parasocial Hypothesis, media exposure, but not social isolation, was a strong predictor of interest in celebrities. The preliminary results support both theories, indicate that across our life span celebrities move from being teachers to being friends, and open up a list of future research opportunities. (shrink)

Gesprekken tussen filosoof en ecoloog Johan Braeckman en moraalfilosoof Dirk Verhofstadt over de evolutietheorie van Darwin, religie, irrationalieit, humanisme en atheïsme."--Publisher information.

We propose a conceptual framework for analysing the relationship between social emancipation and alternative technology development. Key is the “functional autonomy” of the collective of users and developers of the technology vis-a-vis state and capital. We draw on previous empirical work about three hacker projects to substantiate the claim that the functional autonomy of hackers rests on three “pillars of autonomy”: technical skill, shared values, and collective memory. These three pillars sustain the autonomy of a community of hackers so that (...) it may successfully resist recuperation attempts by capital. We make this claim in contradistinction to looser constellations of users, citizen scientists, DIY hobbyists, etc., where the functional autonomy tends to be much weaker. Hence, in the latter case, we should expect the actors to be recuperated in short time. The emancipatory promises that they make in regard to their practices, and are often mirrored in the academic literature about user innovation, citizen science, etc., will then turn sour. From this observation, we develop a second-order reflection on the role of the scholar studying purportedly emancipatory technology projects. As against the popular “follow-the-actors” approach, we defend the continued need for scholarly critique. We do so with the caveat that critique must in part be conducted as self-critique. (shrink)

This book develops a view of logic as a theory of information-driven agency and intelligent interaction between many agents - with conversation, argumentation and games as guiding examples. It provides one uniform account of dynamic logics for acts of inference, observation, questions and communication, that can handle both update of knowledge and revision of beliefs. It then extends the dynamic style of analysis to include changing preferences and goals, temporal processes, group action and strategic interaction in games. Throughout, the book (...) develops a mathematical theory unifying all these systems, and positioning them at the interface of logic, philosophy, computer science and game theory. A series of further chapters explores repercussions of the 'dynamic stance' for these areas, as well as cognitive science. (shrink)

Despite their success in describing and predicting cognitive behavior, the plausibility of so-called ‘rational explanations’ is often contested on the grounds of computational intractability. Several cognitive scientists have argued that such intractability is an orthogonal pseudoproblem, however, since rational explanations account for the ‘why’ of cognition but are agnostic about the ‘how’. Their central premise is that humans do not actually perform the rational calculations posited by their models, but only act as if they do. Whether or not the problem (...) of intractability is solved by recourse to ‘as if’ explanations critically depends, inter alia, on the semantics of the ‘as if’ connective. We examine the five most sensible explications in the literature, and conclude that none of them circumvents the problem. As a result, rational ‘as if’ explanations must obey the minimal computational constraint of tractability. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article aspires to make two original contributions to the vast literature on Hobbes’s account of the nature and person of the commonwealth: (1) I provide the first systematic analysis of his changing conception of ‘person’; and (2) use it to show that those who claim that the Hobbesian commonwealth is created by personation by fiction misconstrue his theory of the state. Whereas Elements/de Cive advance a metaphysics-based distinction between individuals (‘natural persons’) and corporations (‘civil persons’), from Leviathan onwards (...) Hobbes contrasts individuals acting in their own name (‘natural persons’) with representatives (‘artificial persons’). These changes notwithstanding, Hobbes retains the same corporate conception of the state throughout. On the prevailing ‘fictionalist’ interpretation, the sovereign brings the commonwealth into existence by representing it. I argue, rather, that as an incorporation of natural persons, the commonwealth becomes one person through the authorized (i.e. non-fictitious) representation of each constituent member singly by one common representative (‘the sovereign’). (shrink)

Metaphysik i 100 [reproduction of Norwegian symbol for paragraphs], av J. S. Welhaven.--Innholdsgjennomgåelse, av E. A. Wyller.--Welhaven og filosofien, av A. H. Winsnes.--Welhavens estetikk, av A. Aarnes.--Welhaven-litteratur (p. 175-[176]).

This paper adds evidence structure to standard models of belief, in the form of families of sets of worlds. We show how these more fine-grained models support natural actions of “evidence management”, ranging from update with external new information to internal rearrangement. We show how this perspective leads to new richer languages for existing neighborhood semantics for modal logic. Our main results are relative completeness theorems for the resulting dynamic logic of evidence.

Enacting an AI system typically requires three iterative phases where AI engineers are in command: selection and preparation of the data, selection and configuration of algorithmic tools, and fine-tuning of the different parameters on the basis of intermediate results. Our main hypothesis is that these phases involve practices with ethical questions. This paper maps these ethical questions and proposes a way to address them in light of a neo-republican understanding of freedom, defined as absence of domination. We thereby identify different (...) types of responsibility held by AI engineers and link them to concrete suggestions on how to improve professional practices. This paper contributes to the literature on AI and ethics by focusing on the work necessary to configure AI systems, thereby offering an input to better practices and an input for societal debates. (shrink)

Suppose that you prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. Your preferences violate Expected Utility Theory by being cyclic. Money-pump arguments offer a way to show that such violations are irrational. Suppose that you start with A. Then you should be willing to trade A for C and then C for B. But then, once you have B, you are offered a trade back to A for a small cost. Since you prefer A to B, you (...) pay the small sum to trade from B to A. But now you have been turned into a money pump. You are back to the alternative you started with but with less money. This Element shows how each of the axioms of Expected Utility Theory can be defended by money-pump arguments of this kind. The Element also defends money-pump arguments from the standard objections to this kind of approach. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

Immigration is often associated with a situation in which would-be migrants and their countries of origin are put at the mercy of others’ decisions. The main objective of this article is to theorize this ‘being at the mercy’ in light of a republican definition of what freedom is about: the absence of domination. Immigration policy represents instances of domination on a wide spectrum of individuals and political communities. This article focuses on the procedural discretion claimed by states of destination in (...) their relations with would-be migrants. On the basis of a definition of the concept of ‘jurisdiction’, the article distinguishes 4 paradigmatic situations of immigration, which all display situations of domination. In each situation, the state of destination arbitrarily interferes with important interests of individuals and political communities. In light of this argument, existing mechanisms in national, transnational and international settings can be identified and justified as anti-domination measures. The argument offers a blueprint on how to further develop them in preventing domination in immigration. (shrink)

Immigration is often associated with a situation in which would-be migrants and their countries of origin are put at the mercy of others’ decisions. The main objective of this article is to theorize this ‘being at the mercy’ in light of a republican definition of what freedom is about: the absence of domination. Immigration policy represents instances of domination on a wide spectrum of individuals and political communities. This article focuses on the procedural discretion claimed by states of destination in (...) their relations with would-be migrants. On the basis of a definition of the concept of ‘jurisdiction’, the article distinguishes 4 paradigmatic situations of immigration, which all display situations of domination. In each situation, the state of destination arbitrarily interferes with important interests of individuals and political communities. In light of this argument, existing mechanisms in national, transnational and international settings can be identified and justified as anti-domination measures. The argument offers a blueprint on how to further develop them in preventing domination in immigration. (shrink)

A series of experiments was performed in which subjects indicated whether two four-dot patterns were the same, although possibly viewed from different directions, or different, paired at random. Analyses of responses times and error rates suggest that the subjects' performance in this affine matching task is based on non-accidental properties such as convexity, parallelism, collinearity, and proximity, rather than on real affine invariants such as the ratio of triangular areas.

The genetically manipulated organism crisis demonstrated that technological development based solely on the law of the marketplace and State protection against serious risks to health and safety is no longer a warrant of ethical acceptability. In the first part of our paper, we critique the implicitly individualist social-acceptance model for State regulation of technology and recommend an interdisciplinary approach for comprehensive analysis of the impacts and ethical acceptability of technologies. In the second part, we present a framework for the analysis (...) of impacts and acceptability, devised—with the goal of supporting the development of specific nanotechnological applications—by a team of researchers from various disciplines. At the conceptual level, this analytic framework is intended to make explicit those various operations required in preparing a judgement about the acceptability of technologies that have been implicit in the classical analysis of toxicological risk. On a practical level, we present a reflective tool that makes it possible to take into account all the dimensions involved and understand the reasons invoked in determining impacts, assessing them, and arriving at a judgement about acceptability. (shrink)

The Black antislavery theorist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757–c.1791) is increasingly recognized as a noteworthy figure in the history of philosophy. Born in present-day Ghana, Cugoano was enslaved at the age of 13 and shipped to Grenada, before being taken onwards to England, where the 1772 Somerset court ruling in effect freed him. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery [1787/1791] broke new ground by demanding the immediate end of the slave-trade and of slavery itself, without any compensation to (...) slaveholders. Notwithstanding this, Cugoano endorsed the legitimacy of penal enslavement on principled grounds – like many other abolitionists writing in late eighteenth-century Britain. “Every free community might keep slaves, or criminal prisoners in bondage” – and even sell them. Amidst the growing literature exploring Cugoano’s abolitionism, his paradoxical justification of penal slavery has bewildered commentators. Far from an offhand inconsistency, I argue that this justification is deeply embedded within his moral and legal philosophy; constraining his antislavery arguments while simultaneously serving retaliatory aims. His two-pronged principle of just punishment – the lex talionis (‘eye for an eye, bondage for bondage’) as tempered by mercy – sometimes demands penally enslaving colonial slaveholders and slave-traders in turn. Throughout, I compare Cugoano’s justification of penal enslavement with those of other early modern philosophers, especially Locke and Kant. This helps me position Cugoano within the history of philosophy, thus making his views more accessible to a wider philosophical audience. It also indicates just how deeply theories of punishment shaped philosophical thinking about penal bondage in the period. (shrink)

Bayesian models are often criticized for postulating computations that are computationally intractable (e.g., NP-hard) and therefore implausibly performed by our resource-bounded minds/brains. Our letter is motivated by the observation that Bayesian modelers have been claiming that they can counter this charge of “intractability” by proposing that Bayesian computations can be tractably approximated. We would like to make the cognitive science community aware of the problematic nature of such claims. We cite mathematical proofs from the computer science literature that show intractable (...) Bayesian computations, such as postulated in existing Bayesian models, cannot be tractably approximated. This does not mean that human brains do not (or cannot) implement the type of algorithms that Bayesian modelers are advancing, but it does mean that proposing that they do by itself does nothing to parry the charge of intractability, because the postulated algorithms are as intractable (i.e., require exponential time) as the computations they try to approximate. Besides our negative message for the community, our letter also makes a positive contribution by referring to a methodology that Bayesian modelers can use to try and parry the charge of intractability in a mathematically sound way. (shrink)