Online research in philosophy

Qualitative Complexity offers a critique of the humanist paradigm in contemporary social theory. Drawing from sources in sociology, philosophy, complexity theory, 'fuzzy logic', systems theory, cognitive science and evolutionary biology, the authors present a new series of interdisciplinary perspectives on the sociology of complex, self-organizing structures.

Researchers have begun to explore animals' capacities for uncertainty monitoring and metacognition. This exploration could extend the study of animal self-awareness and establish the relationship of self-awareness to other-awareness. It could sharpen descriptions of metacognition in the human literature and suggest the earliest roots of metacognition in human development. We summarize research on uncertainty monitoring by humans, monkeys, and a dolphin within perceptual and metamemory tasks. We extend phylogenetically the search for metacognitive capacities by considering studies that have tested less (...) cognitively sophisticated species. By using the same uncertainty-monitoring paradigms across species, it should be possible to map the phylogenetic distribution of metacognition and illuminate the emergence of mind. We provide a unifying formal description of animals' performances and examine the optimality of their decisional strategies. Finally, we interpret animals' and humans' nearly identical performances psychologically. Low-level, stimulus-based accounts cannot explain the phenomena. The results suggest granting animals a higher-level decision-making process that involves criterion setting using controlled cognitive processes. This conclusion raises the difficult question of animal consciousness. The results show that animals have functional features of or parallels to human conscious cognition. Remaining questions are whether animals also have the phenomenal features that are the feeling/knowing states of human conscious cognition, and whether the present paradigms can be extended to demonstrate that they do. Thus, the comparative study of metacognition potentially grounds the systematic study of animal consciousness. Key Words: cognition; comparative cognition; consciousness; memory monitoring; metacognition; metamemory; self-awareness; uncertainty; uncertainty monitoring. (shrink)

Josiah Royce’s late masterpiece, ’The Problem of Christianity’, is based on a series of lectures he delivered at Manchester College, Oxford, in 1913. It presents his philosophical interpretation of Christianity’s fundamental ideas--community, sin, atonement, and saving grace; shows their relevance to the current confluence of world religions; and grounds his position upon a personal transformation into genuine loyalty toward the community of the entire human family. (publisher, edited).

The new field of quantitative health risk assessment owes its emergence much more to the 'market pull' of demand from societal decision-making processes than to dramatic advances in our ability to make the desired predictions. This paper discusses problems and opportunities in the current practice of quantitative risk estimation under three broad headings: Basic (Technical) Assessment Methodology, and Methods for Assessing Uncertainty; Conception of the Problem for Analysis, and Ways of Expressing Results; and Defining Appropriate Roles for Expert Analysts in (...) Social Decision Processes. Finally, borrowing from work of McMullin, the paper offers some criteria for judging risk assessment theories other than the generally unavailable 'goodness-of-fit' procedures. (shrink)