Recently theorists have developed competing accounts of the origins and nature of protolanguage and the subsequent evolution of language. Debate over these accounts is lively. Participants ask: Is music a direct precursor of language? Were the first languages gestural? Or is language continuous with primate vocalizations, such as the alarm calls of vervets? In this article I survey the leading hypotheses and lines of evidence, favouring a largely gestural conception of protolanguage. However, the “sticking point” of gestural accounts, to use (...) Robbins Burling’s phrase, is the need to explain how language shifted to a largely vocal medium. So with a critical eye I consider Michael Corballis’s most recent expression of his ideas about this transition. Corballis’s view is an excellent foil to mine and I present it as such. Contrary to Corballis’s account, and developing Burling’s conjecture that musicality played some role, I argue that the foundations of an evolving musicality provided the means and medium for the shift from gestural to vocal dominance in language. In other words, I suggest that an independently evolving musicality prepared ancient hominins, morphologically and cognitively, for intentional articulate vocal production, enabling the evolution of speech. (shrink)

The interview revolves around the idea that Al Qaeda is a distinctively modern phenomenon dependent upon modern and Western ideas of transformation of the human condition through mass violence. Meanwhile, the USA and Europe are deeply superstitious about their own unique position in the world. Professor John Gray outlines a clash of modernisms, the one not less ambitious or global in nature than the other. He applies an analysis of modernity upon present phenomena such as the war in Iraq, (...) the failed EU constitution, the debate about Muslims and more broadly religion in secular societies, etc., and sketches an alternative path for the West than the present liberal revolutionary; a path informed by an awareness of limitations. (shrink)

Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) has now been part of the dominant medical paradigm for 15 years, and has been frequently debated and progressively modified. One question about EBM that has not yet been considered systematically, and is now particularly timely, is the question of the novelty, or otherwise, of the principles and practices of EBM. We argue that answering this question, and the related question of whether EBM-type principles and practices are unique to medicine, sheds new light on EBM (...) and has practical implications for those involved in all EBM. This is because one's answer to the question (whether explicit or implicit) affects the amount and type of funding and attention received by EBM, the extent to which EBM, and the generation, judgment and use of evidence more generally, can be appropriated by certain groups and questioned by others, and the extent to which truly unique socio-political developments in evidence, and in medicine more generally, are recognized and harnessed. (shrink)

The paper presents a revised view of quantum mechanics centered on the notion (“genuine fortuitousness”) that the click in a counter is a totally lawless event, which comes by itself. A crucial point is the distinction between events on the spacetime scene and the content of the symbolic algorism. A revised conception of matrix variables emerges, by which such a variable, as part of a whole, does not have a value, under any circumstance. This conception is at variance with (...) that of indeterminate variables. A matrix variable not having a value does not enter spacetime and is not a measurable quantity, but manifests itself by a click in a counter with the remarkable property of having an onset, a beginning, from which the click develops. The individual click with its immense complexity is unique and lawless, even beyond probability. The notion of probability only applies to clicks in low resolution, and the completeness of a probabilistic theory is thereby seen in a new perspective. The genuinely fortuitous click is not produced by the impact of a particle, nor caused by an event in the source prior to the click in the counter. Indeed, there are no particles on the spacetime scene. The theory is thereby liberated from notions, which go with particles having indeterminate variables, and which have given to quantum mechanics the image of an unfathomable theory. With no particle as intermediary, the connection between source and detector is non-local, as is the entire theory, which deals exclusively with distributions of clicks. The locality permeating quantum mechanics is a symbolic one. The wave function enters in the sole role of encoding the probability distributions of clicks. The quest to understand the occurrence of the click in terms of the evolution of the wave function loses its meaning. However, click distributions in low resolution can be analyzed in terms of the connection between click distributions for different sets of counters, as given by the wave function. With increasing resolution, the probabilities, and the wave function, gradually lose significance, whereby the onset remains beyond reach. Thus, the downward path from events on the spacetime scene does not extend beyond the onset. The notion that quantum mechanics deals with particles (or fields) is rooted in the historical evolution but appears unable to accomodate genuine fortuitousness. The latter concept is given its due place by fully accepting the abstract nature of the matrix variables. (shrink)

It is an old and widespread assumption in historical linguistics that hypotactic structures evolved out from paratactic structures. In more recent times, the parataxis-to-hypotaxis hypothesis was associated with the assumption that syntactic structures are discourse-based. This means that hypotactic structures evolved via syntacticization, i.e., via “a process by which flat, paratactic discourse-pragmatic structures transform over time into tight, hierarchic syntactic structures” (Givón 1979: 82f.). One special aspect of this assumption is that complementizers are held to (...) have grammaticalized from nouns, verbs, prepositions, or pronouns in bi-sentential, paratactic source structures. In this paper, I will re-evaluate the existing evidence for the parataxis-to-hypotaxis hypothesis with special focus on the emergence of complementizers. The result of the re-evaluation is that in all cases, where we have enough historical data to reconstruct the development in detail, we have to assume a source structure that already displays subordination. In most cases, the subordinate clause is a relative clause suggesting that relativization is probably the oldest form of subordination. The over-all result of the re-evaluation is that there is no reliable evidence at all for the parataxis-to-hypotaxis hypothesis in its current form. (shrink)

To understand the future of informed consent, we should pay attention to two ethical-legal sources in addition to the revised Common Rule. Physicians acting as investigators and patients serving as research subjects bring to that relationship a long history regarding consent to treatment, and everyone dealing with research ethics needs to be aware of the Nuremberg Code and other human-rights documents. These three streams make separate and distinctly different contributions to informed consent doctrine.

Teachers edition for _Where Did __I Come From?... _1-58731-929-7.

Discusses the Catholic Church's teaching on a number of topics, such as faith and reason, knowing God, Christ's role, conscience, individual freedom, and social issues.

Discusses the Catholic Church's teaching on a number of topics, such as faith and reason, knowing God, Christ's role, conscience, individual freedom, and social issues.

Increasingly, our cities are confronted with crises. Fuelled by climate change and a loss of biodiversity, increasing inequalities and fragmentation, challenges range from social unrest and outbursts of violence to heatwaves, torrential rainfall, or epidemics. As crises require rapid interventions that overwhelm human decision-making capacity, AI has been portrayed as a potential avenue to support or even automate decision-making. In this paper, I analyse the specific challenges of AI in urban crisis management as an example and test case (...) for many super wicked decision problems. These super wicked problems are characterised by a coincidence of great complexity and urgency. I will argue that from this combination, specific challenges arise that are only partially covered in the current guidelines and standards around trustworthy or human-centered AI. By following a decision-centric perspective, I argue that to solve urgent crisis problems, the context, capacities, and networks need to be addressed. AI for crisis response needs to follow dedicated design principles that ensure (i) human control in complex social networks, where many humans interact with AI; (ii) principled design that considers core principles of crisis response such as solidarity and humanity; (iii) designing for the most vulnerable. As such this paper is meant to inspire researchers, AI developers and practitioners in the space of AI for (urban) crisis response – and other urgent and complex problems that urban planners are confronted with. (shrink)

Little is known about the aetiology of philosophical intuitions, in spite of their central role in analytic philosophy. This paper provides a psychological account of the intuitions that underlie philosophical practice, with a focus on intuitions that underlie the method of cases. I argue that many philosophical intuitions originate from spontaneous, early-developing, cognitive processes that also play a role in other cognitive domains. Additionally, they have a skilled, practiced, component. Philosophers are expert elicitors of intuitions (...) in the dialectical context of professional philosophy. If this analysis is correct, this should lead to a reassessment of experimental philosophical studies of expertise. (shrink)

It is possible to learn multiple layers of non-linear features by backpropagating error derivatives through a feedforward neural network. This is a very effective learning procedure when there is a huge amount of labeled training data, but for many learning tasks very few labeled examples are available. In an effort to overcome the need for labeled data, several different generative models were developed that learned interesting features by modeling the higher order statistical structure of a set of input vectors. (...) One of these generative models, the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), has no connections between its hidden units and this makes perceptual inference and learning much simpler. More significantly, after a layer of hidden features has been learned, the activities of these features can be used as training data for another RBM. By applying this idea recursively, it is possible to learn a deep hierarchy of progressively more complicated features without requiring any labeled data. This deep hierarchy can then be treated as a feedforward neural network which can be discriminatively fine-tuned using backpropagation. Using a stack of RBMs to initialize the weights of a feedforward neural network allows backpropagation to work effectively in much deeper networks and it leads to much better generalization. A stack of RBMs can also be used to initialize a deep Boltzmann machine that has many hidden layers. Combining this initialization method with a new method for fine-tuning the weights finally leads to the first efficient way of training Boltzmann machines with many hidden layers and millions of weights. (shrink)

Business legitimacy is important for any business, especially in times of economic downturn and increased media attention on corporate scandals. However,legitimacy is a quality that comes from society itself, sometimes influenced by the actions or image of the firm, but also rooted in the basic cultural values of the population. This study takes “legitimacy gap” as its dependent variable, defining it as the difference between expected and observed levels of social and environmental performance for both publicly-traded and family-owned (...) business. The study was conducted with a random sample using mailed surveys, and was oriented towards the forest products sector. Results indicate that family-owned businesses have lower legitimacy gaps (therefore, higher legitimacy) than publicly-traded companies, especially when the latter are considered very profitable. These findings were especially strong for women and for respondentswith a high social responsibility (SRO) orientation. (shrink)

For centuries, philosophers studying the great mysteries of human subjectivity have focused on the mind/body problem and the difference between human beings and animals. Now a new ontological question takes center stage: to what extent can a manufactured object (a computer) exhibit qualities of mind? There have been passionate exchanges between those who believe that a "manufactured mind" is possible and those who believe that mind cannot exist except as a living, socially situated, embodied person. As with earlier (...) arguments, this one shows no sign of being resolved. But the fight over computationalism (the belief that all mental processes can be generated by computer programs) has immediate, "hard" consequences for technological research and development, social- and cognitive-science methodology, and for our everyday experience of the world and ourselves. This special issue consists of papers presented at a conference of the same title held at the Center for Cognitive Science at the University at Buffalo, 22-23 May 1990. The authors come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (Computer Science, Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, etc.), and bring a wide variety of perspectives to the topic. (shrink)

Not long ago, I received an email from a man who had been trying to get his seven-year-old son interested in science, and teach him a little bit about the workings of the brain. He had been showing his son one of those diagrams of a brain with various regions labeled as "speech center," vision center," and the like (something similar to this, I suppose), when the little boy suddenly asked, "Daddy, which part of the brain does imagination (...) class='Hi'>come from?". It was not on the diagram, and the father, although he studied human biology at college, realized he did not know the answer. As we do these days, he got on the internet to try to find out. It was not as easy as he might have expected. "Imagination" is certainly a word that is found on a lot of web pages, and there are plenty that seem to be devoted to celebrating or promoting it, but very few of them seem to have anything at all to say about what it is, how it works, or where in the brain it might be implemented. Eventually, he found his way to this site. Even here, however, he could find no straightforward answer to his son's apparently straightforward question. (The truth is, the question is not nearly as straightforward as it appears.) He thought I might be a good a person to ask, however, and sent me an email. What follows is a lightly revised version of the reply I sent. It is not written in terms that a seven-year-old could understand (I am not clever enough to do that), but neither is it pitched at the professional, academic level of most of the material on this site. I would like to think that it answers the question (inasmuch as it can be answered in the current state of scientific knowledge) in a way that a layperson should be able to understand, and that they might then be able to explain to a curious and intelligent child. If you want to know the detailed reasons, and see the citations to the scientific literature, that justify the claims made here, you can find them in the other articles on this site.. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis study examines the types of verbal, pictorial, and multimodal metaphors in the genre of sex education picture books for young children in Mainland China. Although being an educational discourse genre that is essentially concerned with transmitting scientific facts, sex education picture books employ a range of metaphors that categorize and construe the biological knowledge of human reproduction in a way that not only facilitates young children’s understanding of scientific concepts but also instills in them particular values (...) and moralities that are socioculturally conditioned. An examination of the source domains from which the metaphors are drawn and the target domains onto which the metaphors are mapped reveals three types of metaphor, namely, personification, domestication, and cross-experience metaphors. The analysis of seven sex education picture books for pre-school children suggests that these types of metaphor are used purposefully for addressing pedagogical as well as ideological con... (shrink)

Law, like language, is the product of social evolution, embodied in custom. The conditions for the emergence of law—embodiment, scarcity, rationality, relatedness and plurality—are outlined, and the context for the emergence of law—dispute resolution—is analysed. Adjudication procedures, rules and enforcementmechanisms, the elements of law, emerge from this context. The characteristics of such a customarily evolved law are its severely limited scope, its negativity, andits horizontality. It is suggested that a legal system (or legal systems) based on the principles (...) of archaic law could answer the needs of social order without permitting the paternalistic interferences with liberty characteristic of contemporary legal systems. (shrink)

There is trouble at the foundations of Grice's theory of conversational implicature, or so I shall argue. Grice's commentators seem to agree, and some of Grice's own remarks suggest, that every case of implicature is one in which ‘the speaker gets across more than he says…. ’ The problem is that there are cases in which nothing is said - in which case it is not clear that there is any vehicle by which the implicature might be (...) carried, and consequently not clear that Grice's theory can account for the implicature which does appear to be carried. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor’s arguments against the possibility of concept learning, and the responses that have been offered in defense of the coherence of concept learning, have both by and large assumed that concept learning is a descriptive process. I offer an alternative, ostensive approach to concept learning and explain how descriptive concept learning can be explained as a version of ostensive concept learning. I argue that an ostensive view of concept learning offers an empirically plausible and philosophically adequate (...) account of concept learning that is explanatorily superior to traditional descriptive views. (shrink)

Knowledge is a presumed motivator for changed consumption practices in ethical eating discourse: the consumer learns more about where their food comes from and makes different consumption choices. Despite intuitive appeal, scholars are beginning to illuminate the limits of knowledge-focused praxis for ethical eating. In this paper, we draw from qualitative interviews and focus groups with Toronto mothers to explore the role of knowledge in conceptions of ethical foodwork. While the goal of educating children about their food (...) has become central to Canadian and American discourses of “good” mothering, we identify a paradoxical maternal expectation surrounding meat consumption: to raise informed child consumers who know where their food comes from, and to protect children from the harsh realities of animal slaughter. Rather than revealing the story behind the meat on a child’s plate, mothers seek to shield children from knowledge of meat production. Our analysis of the child consumer contributes to ethical eating scholarship and illuminates a larger paradox surrounding knowledge of meat in an industrialized food system. In the practice of feeding children, mothers confront the visceral discomforts of meat consumption; their reactions speak to discordant feelings involved with eating meat in a setting far-removed from the lives and deaths of animals. Ultimately, the paper illustrates the limits of consumer-focused strategies for food-system change that call on individual mothers to educate young consumers and protect childhood innocence, all while getting ethically-sourced meals on the table. (shrink)

F. A. Hayek's realistic economic theory has been replaced by the formalistic use of equlibrium models that bear little resemblance to reality. These models are as serviceable to the right as to the left: they allow the economist either to condemn capitalism for failing to measure up to the model of perfect competition, or to praise capitalism as a utopia of perfect knowledge and rational expectations. Hayek, by contrast, used equilibrium to show that while capitalism is not perfect, (...) it contains error‐correcting institutions that bring it closer to perfection than is intuitively apparent. (shrink)

F. A. Hayek's realistic economic theory has been replaced by the formalistic use of equlibrium models that bear little resemblance to reality. These models are as serviceable to the right as to the left: they allow the economist either to condemn capitalism for failing to measure up to the model of perfect competition, or to praise capitalism as a utopia of perfect knowledge and rational expectations. Hayek, by contrast, used equilibrium to show that while capitalism is not perfect, (...) it contains error‐correcting institutions that bring it closer to perfection than is intuitively apparent. (shrink)

“Let me tell you where I'm coming from...”—so begins many a discussion in contemporary U.S. culture. Pressed by an almost compulsive desire to situate ourselves within a definite matrix of reference points in both scholarly inquiry and everyday parlance, we seem to reject adamantly the idea of a universal human subject. Yet what does this rhetoric of self-affiliation tell us? What is its history? David Simpson’s _Situatedness_ casts a critical eye on this currently popular form of identification, suggesting (...) that, far from being a simple turn of phrase, it demarcates a whole structure of thinking. Simpson traces the rhetorical syndrome through its truly interdisciplinary genealogy. Discussing its roles within the fields of legal theory, social science, fiction, philosophy, and ethics, he argues that the discourse of situatedness consists of a volatile fusion of modesty and aggressiveness. It oscillates, in other words, between accepting complete causal predetermination and advocating personal agency and responsibility. Simpson’s study neither fully rejects nor endorses the present-day language of self-specification. Rather it calls attention to the limitations and opportunities of situatedness—a notion whose ideological slippage it ultimately sees as allowing late-capitalist liberal democracies to function. Given its wide scope and lively rendering, _Situatedness_ will attract a range of scholars in the humanities and legal studies. It will also interest all those for whom the politics of subjectivity pose real problems of authority, identity, and belief. (shrink)

Are values objective or subjective? To clarify this question we start with an overview of the main concepts and debates in the philosophy of values. We then discuss the arguments for and against value realism, the thesis that there are objective evaluative facts. By contrast with value anti-realism, which is generally associated with sentimentalism, according to which evaluative judgements are grounded in sentiments, value realism is commonly coupled with rationalism. Against this common view, we argue that value realism (...) can be combined with sentimentalism, and we suggest that a plausible account, which we call ‘sentimental realism’, and according to which evaluative judgements are closely related to emotions, can be developped. (shrink)

We present the details of a methodology for quality assurance in large medical terminologies and describe three algorithms that can help terminology developers and users to identify potential mistakes. The methodology is based in part on linguistic criteria and in part on logical and ontological principles governing sound classifications. We conclude by outlining the results of applying the methodology in the form of a taxonomy different types of errors and potential errors detected in SNOMED-CT.

I argue that the opening line of the _Phaedrus_ proleptically encapsulates the major themes of the dialogue and that paying attention to the opening line enables us to strengthen the identification of psychagogy as the key unifying thread of the whole dialogue. In particular, I argue that the opening line foreshadows the quarrel between Lysias and Socrates over the practical guidance of Phaedrus’ soul; the prominence of friendship in the philosophical form of life; the pertinence of Socrates’ (...) one-on-one, custom-built speeches, vis-à-vis the later conceptualization of rhetoric; the definition of the soul as a source of never-ending movement; as well as the origin (_arché_) and destiny (_télos_) of human souls, following the lines of the Palinode. (shrink)

Where did everything come from? Why are humans so biologically similar, and why do we let small differences divide us? What shall determine our destiny? Paul Singh and John R. Shook draw on the latest findings from the physical and biological sciences, astronomy and cosmology, geology and genetics, and prehistory and archeology in search of answers. As they lucidly and engagingly demonstrate, the answers science gives about ourselves and the universe in which we live are incomparably (...) more surprising and interesting than any mythical tale about some clash of titans or calculating creator. Indeed, science's proud journey of exploration and discovery is humanity's finest narrative yet, about how we trusted our intelligence to find out what we really are and who we can be—intrepidly going wherever the evidence led. Even though science reveals that humanity may have no special place in the universe, humanity is truly special because of our ability to comprehend our universe. Thus, this inspiring story of exploration and discovery is a celebration not only of science—of science's knowledge of the world, and of science's own journeys to gain that knowledge—but also of ourselves. (shrink)

Bayesian prior probabilities have an important place in probabilistic and statistical methods. In spite of this fact, the analysis of where these priors come from and how they are formed has received little attention. It is reasonable to excuse the lack, in the foundational literature, of detailed psychological theory of what are the mechanisms by which prior probabilities are formed. But it is less excusable that there is an almost total absence of a detailed discussion of (...) the highly differentiating nature of past experience in forming a prior. The focus here is on what kind of account, even if necessarily schematic, can be given about the psychological mechanisms back of the formation of Bayesian priors. The last section examines a detailed experiment relevant to how priors are learned. (shrink)

This essay presents arguments for the claim that in the best of all possible worlds (Leibniz) there are sources of unpredictability and creativity for us humans, even given a pancomputational stance. A suggested answer to Chaitin’s questions: “Where do new mathematical and biological ideas come from? How do they emerge?” is that they come from the world and emerge from basic physical (computational) laws. For humans as a tiny subset of the universe, (...) a part of the new ideas comes as the result of the re-configuration and reshaping of already existing elements and another part comes from the outside as a consequence of openness and interactivity of the system. For the universe at large it is randomness that is the source of unpredictability on the fundamental level. In order to be able to completely predict the Universe-computer we would need the Universe-computer itself to compute its next state; as Chaitin already demonstrated there are incompressible truths which means truths that cannot be computed by any other computer but the universe itself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Where Do Substantial Forms Come From?—A Critique of the Theistic Evolution of Mariusz Tabaczek*Michael Chaberek O.P. and Monika Metlerska-ColerickIntroductionThe question posed in the present article is whether it is possible to be a proponent of theistic evolution and, at the same time, of the metaphysical [End Page 239] principles elaborated by St. Thomas Aquinas. The authors of Thomistic Evolution: a Catholic Approach to Understanding Evolution in (...) the Light of Faith, recently published in Polish, imply that Aquinas's doctrine was not only compatible with the idea of biological macroevolution, but also—on some level—endorsed it.1 In his "Afterword" to the above publication, Mariusz Tabaczek points out certain deficiencies in the argumentation provided by its authors, simultaneously underlining that he agrees with the book's principal thesis.I will not examine the book by the American Dominicans in this article because I have already addressed their arguments in full in my book entitled Aquinas and Evolution,2 where I demonstrated that it is impossible to be both a proponent of theistic evolution and a follower of the philosophical views proposed by St. Thomas. In his "Afterword," Tabaczek presents a contradictory thesis. He claims that being both of the above is possible, provided that one modifies St. Thomas's teaching in four "essential aspects." The very approach of this kind already raises doubts. After all, if St. Thomas's doctrine indeed needs to be modified in order to reconcile his thought with evolution, it suggests that, in fact, it cannot be reconciled with it. Therefore, perhaps the problem comes down to asking whether the four points of incompatibility indicated by Tabaczek really constitute an "essential" part of Aquinas's doctrine? If it is not the case, they might be omitted or modified. If, however, they relate to certain essential elements of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, disregarding them equals denying St. Thomas's teaching and, consequently, makes it impossible to reconcile it with theistic evolution.In order to settle the problem, I devote the first part of my article to determining whether the points presented by Tabaczek refer to the essential elements of Aquinas's discourse. In the second part of my text, however, I move to a more important point, namely the fact that theistic evolution encounters many more problems in the context of Thomistic metaphysics. Since I have already addressed this matter in several places,3 I limit the scope [End Page 240] of the second part of my article to only one such problem: the emergence of new substantial forms (new species) via the mechanism of evolution. Thus, the object of the present analysis is to examine whether the solution suggested by Tabaczek provides an explanation to the problem of the origin of new substantial forms in theistic evolution.Commentary on the Four Points of IncompatibilityAccording to Tabaczek, the teaching of St. Thomas can be reconciled with theistic evolution under the conditions of:(1) recognizing the possibility of the emergence of new species, that is, acknowledging that the perfection of the universe can increase every day not only in terms of the number of individual beings, but also as regards the number of species; (2) emphasizing the fact that God's initial act of creation is limited to the derivation of matter of the lowest degree of complexity out of nothing (ex nihilo); (3) recognizing the fact that the processes of chemical, biochemical, and biological evolution belong to the work of adornment (opus ornatus), whose subsequent stages spread out across the entire history of the universe and, therefore, are not limited to a finished and past time period; and finally (4) acknowledging that God's direct intervention in the creation of the first representatives of plant and animal species (with the exception of man) is not necessary.4Ad (1) and ad (3). Points 1 and 3 boil down to the same idea, since they are both concerned with the fact that evolution continues, whereas from the Christian perspective, the divine work of creation had already finished. Therefore, if one adopts theistic evolution, the Christian truth of God completing his creative work with the creation of man has to be rejected. The... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When Ethics Survives Where People Do Not: A Story From DarfurGhaiath HusseinI was not new to Darfur. I had been here before, although I wore a different hat as I literally walked under the burning April sun along the wide, dusty, unpaved streets of Nyala, South Darfur, to “headquarters.” It was to be another interesting, but normal, peaceful, and safe day as I led the Sudanese household (...) survey in South Darfur, then the largest of all Darfur states. That was in 2006, a few years after I joined the Federal Ministry of Health. My office overlooked the Nile, but getting out of the capital city of Khartoum was always the best part of working there. I had the opportunity to meet real people in their real places, where they are home and at ease.Overall, the data collection team’s work went according to plan. Most of the randomly selected villages were visited as planned or replaced according to protocol. But this morning was anything but normal. A few days earlier, while visiting a village in a nearby town, Kass, my team was able to make a single phone call to us, the leadership [End Page 162] team, composed of two colleagues from Darfur and myself, indicating the team had no reception—the nearest signal was an hour’s drive away. The team leader assured me that they had started collecting data and promised to call every day or every other day. They were a team of six young men and women (I called them boys and girls because they were so young and innocent) between the ages of 20 and 25, all from Darfur. Two of them were in love and participated in the survey collection to save the per diem for their wedding.The time I was expecting their call came, but the call did not come. Then another day, then another, then another.One of the management team was in charge of the security update, and that morning he asked me in a shaky voice if we could have a private meeting as soon as I entered the room. He informed me that the village where my team was located had been attacked by the Janjaweed, the notorious militia known for its ruthless, brutal attacks that leave nothing behind, but men killed indiscriminately, houses and children on fire, and women raped. I recalled my experience in Darfur the year before when I mechanically asked a woman if she had lost a family member in the last six months and what the cause of death was. She burst into tears. I tried to calm her down. Finally, she told me that her few-month-old baby had been burned alive in front of her own eyes. Before I could even imagine the fate of the boys and girls on the team, a call came in. It was not from the team, but from a crying mother who asked me to “bring her daughter back.” She told me she did not want her daughter killed or raped. I cannot remember what I said because I was in shock and did not want anyone to see this, especially the other teams. The last thing I needed was to see the panic for which I was not trained to manage.I had no time to waste. I had no exit or contingency plan in the 224-page survey guide that explained how to collect the data, how to ask the questions, how to sort and safely store the paper questionnaires, how to enter the data. It seemed to provide extensive guidance on everything except for the only instruction I needed at the time—How to keep my teams safe under fire. I took the first flight to the survey’s national headquarters in Khartoum seeking help. I was promised to be put in contact with the intelligence and army in the region through the government agency responsible for organizing humanitarian work in the country. In fact, none of them were in the attacked village. My colleagues on the management team seemed more hardened to the conflict than I was. For me it was something I followed on the news... (shrink)

This paper considers a central objection to evolutionary epistemology. The objection is that biological and epistemic development are not analogous, since while biological variation is blind, epistemic variation is not. The generation of hypotheses, unlike the generation of genotypes, is not random. We argue that this objection is misguided and show how the central analogy of evolutionary epistemology can be preserved. The core of our reply is that much epistemic variation is indeed directed by heuristics, but these (...) heuristics are analogous to biological preadaptations which account for the evolution of complex organs. We also argue that many of these heuristics or epistemic preadaptations are not innate but were themselves generatedby a process of blind variation and selective retention. (shrink)

Everyone agrees that testing hypotheses is important, but Bowers et al. provide scant details about where hypotheses about perception and brain function should come from. We suggest that the answer lies in considering how information about the outside world could be acquired – that is, learned – over the course of evolution and development. Deep neural networks (DNNs) provide one tool to address this question.

Gellner relied extensively on the work of Ibn Khaldun to understand both the dynamics of social order in North Africa and Islam’s alleged resistance to secularization. However, what the two scholars also shared is their focus on the social origins and functions of group solidarity. For Ibn Khaldun the concept of asabiyyah was central in understanding the strength of long-term group loyalties. In his view, asabiyyah was a fundamental and elementary cohesive bond of human societies which originated in nomadic tribal (...) structures and retained significance in the early formation of complex states and empires. For Gellner, the shape and character of group solidarity is heavily dependent on the economic foundations of a particular social order: foragers require small group bonds for mere survival, the agrarian universe stratifies solidarity and utilizes cultural bonds to differentiate between the ruling aristocrats and the plough-tied serfs, whereas the industrial world generates solidarity from incessant economic growth and state-induced, cross-class, national identifications. Thus, for Gellner, solidarity remains the central force that keeps social orders together. This paper provides a critical analysis of the Khaldunian and Gellnerian models of group solidarity and offers an alternative interpretation that places the social impact of micro-solidarity in the long-term development of ideological and coercive forms of social organization. (shrink)

Gellner relied extensively on the work of Ibn Khaldun to understand both the dynamics of social order in North Africa and Islam’s alleged resistance to secularization. However, what the two scholars also shared is their focus on the social origins and functions of group solidarity. For Ibn Khaldun the concept of asabiyyah was central in understanding the strength of long-term group loyalties. In his view, asabiyyah was a fundamental and elementary cohesive bond of human societies which originated in nomadic tribal (...) structures and retained significance in the early formation of complex states and empires. For Gellner, the shape and character of group solidarity is heavily dependent on the economic foundations of a particular social order: foragers require small group bonds for mere survival, the agrarian universe stratifies solidarity and utilizes cultural bonds to differentiate between the ruling aristocrats and the plough-tied serfs, whereas the industrial world generates solidarity from incessant economic growth and state-induced, cross-class, national identifications. Thus, for Gellner, solidarity remains the central force that keeps social orders together. This paper provides a critical analysis of the Khaldunian and Gellnerian models of group solidarity and offers an alternative interpretation that places the social impact of micro-solidarity in the long-term development of ideological and coercive forms of social organization. (shrink)

Where exactly did Hegel go wrong on race? Moellendorf helpfully tells us that Hegel's treatment of race begins systematically in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and that he went wrong philosophically in the use of the biological category of race. This is basically correct but requires precisification. This article considers why Hegel's category of race is not unambiguously biological. Race's biological status can be problematized from the standpoint of contemporary biology and from the standpoint of (...) Hegel's system. The textual placement of Hegel's systematic discussion of race in the philosophy of spirit makes clear that Hegel conceived of race in spiritual terms. Hegel took race to be a biospiritual category. Hegel was clearly committed to the now-controversial proposition that there is such a thing as human biological race, that there is a plurality of biological human races. He regarded race as a robust natural kind. His preferred list of races includes Caucasians, Negros, Mongolian, Malaysians and Americans. One noteworthy feature of his understanding of race's physical aspect was his focus on the formation of the skull and the face. At the same time, he clearly held that there were other deeper physical differences that accounted for the spiritual differences of race. Hegel was perfectly clear that race has a spiritual as well as physical aspect. He held that that the members of racial groups essentially shared certain fundamental, heritable, moral, intellectual and cultural characteristics with one another that they did not share with members of any other race and that these differences were such as to support an objective ranking. This shows that Hegel took the category of race to be the sort of category we today would characterize as ‘racialist’. Hegel's concept of race was the racialist concept of race. (shrink)

The practical difficulty with applying ethical theories to particular problems is that ordinarily people pay little attention to theories when they make moral decisions. Instead, we are guided by our ethical beliefs, which are primarily the result of cultural factors beyond our reach—factors subject to rational scrutiny and to change, but largely out of our control.

Over the past 15 years we have seen the rise of a field of inquiry known as Whiteness Studies. Two of its major tenets are (1) that white identity is socially constructed and functions as a racial norm and (2) that those who occupy the position of white subjectivity exercise ‘white privilege’, which is oppressive to non-whites. However, despite their ubiquitous use of the term ‘norm’, Whiteness Studies theorists rarely give any detailed account of how whiteness serves to (...) normalize. A case is made here that we can only understand how whiteness normalizes if we place the development of white racial subject positions within the context of the development of normalizing biopower that Foucault describes in his work through the 1970s. Once that context is provided, it becomes clear that a larger problem exists in Whiteness Studies, one evident in the use of the concept of ‘white privilege’. Whiteness Studies theorists have not thoroughly critiqued the juridical conception of power that they have inherited from traditional political theory; as a result, they cannot get away from psychological accounts of the origins of racism, even though they usually state very clearly that they believe racism is an institutional phenomenon and racist subject positions are formed within networks of power. If Whiteness Studies is to accomplish both its analytical and its political goals, its theorists need to pay close attention to Foucault’s work on biopower. (shrink)

This paper presents a model-theoretic semantics for discourse "about" natural numbers, one that captures what I call "the mathematical-object picture", but avoids what I can "the mathematical-object theory".

Osiurak and Reynaud do not explain the evolutionary emergence and development of the elephant in the room, that is, technical cognition. We first argue that there is a tight correlation between the evolution of cumulative technological culture and the evolution of reasoning about abstract forces. Second, intentional teaching plays a greater role in CTC evolution than acknowledged in the target article.

I argue that immunity to error through misidentification primarily characterizes thoughts that are 'implicitly' de se, as opposed to thoughts that involve an explicit self-identification. Thoughts that are implicitly de se involve no reference to the self at the level of content: what makes them de se is simply the fact that the content of the thought is evaluated with respect to the thinking subject. Or, to put it in familiar terms : the content of (...) the thought is a property which the thinking subject self-ascribes (as in the Loar/Lewis/Chisholm analysis). After answering an objection (to the effect that immunity can affect explicit de se thoughts), I extend the analysis to demonstrative thoughts, which also exhibit the property of immunity to error through misidentification. (shrink)

After reviewing the recent publications of Richard Kearney, appearing between 2017 and 2021, including an anthology of his essential writings over his career, and covering topics such as hospitality, God, religion, anatheism, theopoetics, hermeneutics, and touch, there follows a critical engagement with Kearney's work, one that sets out in particular how, despite the very considerable overlap in our work, as fellow travelers in continental philosophy of religion and hermeneutics, our positions differ on what we mean by God and by (...) welcoming the tout autre. (shrink)