This research is designed to investigate the possibility that contemporary Danish fiber art communicates expressive meaning for the artists who create it and the patrons who support it. A series of interviews with Danish artists and patrons about forty-five fiber art works reveals eleven expressive qualities often discussed during interpretation. For this study, artistic expression is defined as the communication of ideas and feelings in a work of art and meaning is the cognitive and emotional content of the work carried (...) via expressive qualities. ;This investigation overviews contemporary Danish fiber art, reviews the literature, and defines a fieldwork methodology for testing the research hypothesis. Data from the interviews is presented with a discussion of how the art works of investigation communicate meaning via expressive qualities. Several expression theories are presented together with a discussion of their ramifications for fiber art. Although the meaning of the art works investigated was found to be complex, encompassing a diversity of interpretations, it is concluded that through interpretation, meaning is revealed. In the process, the artifacts are given attention that brings out their expressive qualities, thus emphasizing that fiber art is capable of provoking serious scholarly discussion similar to the discussion of other art forms. (shrink)

Metaphysical dualities divorce humankind from its natural environment, dualities that can precipitate environmental disaster. Loyal Rue in Religion Is Not About God seeks to resolve the abstract modalities of religion and naturalism in a unified monistic ecocentric metaphysic characterized as religious naturalism. Rue puts forward proposals for a general naturalistic theory of religion, a theory that lays bare the structural and functional features of religious phenomena as the critical first step on the road to badly needed religion- science realignment. Only (...) then will humanity be equipped to address the environmental imperative. (shrink)

Review of Rob Wilson?s Boundaries of the Mind: The Individual in the Fragile Sciences: Cognition.

Michael Oakeshott has long been recognized as one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century, but until now no single volume has been able to examine all the facets of his wide-ranging philosophy with sufficient depth, expertise, and authority. The essays collected here cover all aspects of Oakeshott’s thought, from his theory of knowledge and philosophies of history, religion, art, and education to his reflections on morality, politics, and law. The volume provides an authoritative and synoptic guide (...) to one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Symposium of Oakeshott on religion, science and politics.

To know is to cognize, to cognize is to be a culturally bounded, rationality-bounded and environmentally located agent. Knowledge and cognition are thus dual aspects of human sociality. If social epistemology has the formation, acquisition, mediation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge in complex communities of knowers as its subject matter, then its third party character is essentially stigmergic. In its most generic formulation, stigmergy is the phenomenon of indirect communication mediated by modifications of the environment. Extending this notion one might (...) conceive of social stigmergy as the extra-cranial analog of an artifcial neural network providing epistemic structure. This paper recommends a stigmergic framework for social epistemology to account for the supposed tension between individual action, wants and beliefs and the social corpora. We also propose that the so-called "extended mind" thesis offers the requisite stigmergic cognitive analog to stigmergic knowledge. Stigmergy as a theory of interaction within complex systems theory is illustrated through an example that runs on a particle swarm optimization algorithm. (shrink)

This brief article introduces a symposium discussing the extended mind thesis and its suggestive relation to religious thought. Essays by Mark Rowlands, Lynne Rudder Baker, Teed Rockwell, Joel Krueger, Leonard Angel, and Matthew Day present a variety of perspectives.

Neurodegenerative diseases are becoming increasingly common as life expectancy increases. Recent years have seen tremendous progress in the identification of genes that cause these diseases. While mutations have been found and cellular processes defined that are altered in the disease state, the identification of treatments and cures has proven more elusive. The process of finding drugs and therapies to treat human diseases can be slow, expensive and frustrating. Can model organisms such as Drosophila speed the process of finding cures and (...) treatments for human neurodegenerative diseases? We pose three questions, (1) can one mimic the essential features of human diseases in an organism like Drosophila, (2) can one cure a model organisms of human disease and (3) will these efforts accelerate the identification of useful therapies for testing in mice and ultimately humans? Here we focus on the use of Drosophila to identify potential treatments for neurodegenerative diseases such as Huntington's and we discuss how well these therapies translate into mammalian systems. BioEssays 26:485–496, 2004. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

This paper introduces a symposium discussing Michael Oakeshott's understanding of the relationship of religion, science and politics. Essays by Elizabeth Corey, Timothy Fuller, Byron Kaldis, and Corey Abel are followed by a review of Corey's recent book by Efraim Podoksik.

This article introduces the work of philosopher-novelist Walker Percy to the Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science readership. After some biographical and contextual preliminaries, I suggest that the conceptual collecting feature to Percy's work is his critique of abstractionism manifest in a tripartite congruence of Cartesianism, derivatively misapplied science, and social atomism.

This collection, the first of its kind, brings together specially commissioned academic essays to mark fifty years since the death of John Kennedy Toole.

A themed issue on the work of Michael Oakeshott.

Practical politics is plagued by an unabashed and unrelenting mutual demonization of a given ideology, with each side classing each other’s cluster of ideas as pathological, i.e. “indicative of disease” and/or “extreme or excessive” or hopelessly irrational. This chapter specifically argues that the demonization, or the pathologization of conservatism as an ideology runs on a straw man fallacy—that is, detractors (and vulgar catechumen-like defenders) blithely assume that conservatism is coextensive with an ideology. This chapter argues for the view that not (...) only is political conservatism not an ideological worldview, it is a cluster of epistemic virtues that should temper the rationalistic impulse regardless of ideological commitments—at least within the domain of sociality. Epistemic conservatism in its most generic form is the idea that a belief has some presumption of rationality merely because it is held. Cognitive closure, otherwise known pejoratively as “new mysterianism”, is the view that the mind is structurally constrained in its computational power. Situated cognition, or ecological rationality, is a stance emphasizing rationality as being constitutive of activity, context, and culture. Social externalism is the view that much of our thinking is individuated in part by the linguistic and social practices of a thinker’s community. The social complexity thesis is the view that there cannot be a predictive science of politics to drive a radical reconstitution of society. Complexity in the social realm, intrinsically stochastic, is coordinated by a voluntary manifold of self-organizing emergent spontaneous orders. Though each of these theses have resonance to so-called “political” conservatism they are not political positions per se. Regardless of ideological commitments, a cast of mind displaying a significant over-preponderance of rationalist traits, could well be deemed a neurodevelopmental disorder. (shrink)

This paper conceives of Hayek’s overall project as presenting a theory of sociocognition, explication of which has a two-fold purpose: (1) to locate Hayek within the non-Cartesian tradition of cognitive science, and (2) to show how Hayek’s philosophical psychology infuses his social theory.

Hayek’s philosophical psychology as set out in his The Sensory Order (1952) has, for the most part, been neglected. Despite being lauded by computer scientist grandee Frank Rosenblatt and by Nobel prize-winning biologist Gerald Edelman, cognitive scientists -- with a few exceptions -- have yet to discover Hayek’s philosophical psychology. On the other hand, social theorists, Hayek’s traditional disciplinary constituency, have only recently begun to take note and examine the importance of psychology in the complete Hayek corpus. This volume brings (...) together for the first time state-of-the-art contributions from neuroscientists and philosophers of mind as well as economists and social theorists, all critically engaging in many aspects of Hayek’s philosophical psychology. (shrink)

Leslie Marsh provides an overview of the various ways that Percy has typically been understood. Marsh deems the golden thread across Percy’s corpus to be that of abstraction under whose aspect the ideas of alienation and complexity play a deeply distinctive role.

No longer is sociality the preserve of the social sciences, or ‘‘culture’’ the preserve of the humanities or anthropology. By the same token, cognition is no longer the sole preserve of the cognitive sciences. Social cognition (SC) or, sociocognition if you like, is thus a kaleidoscope of research projects that has seen exponential growth over the past 30 or so years.

Encyclopedia entry: http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book234813#tabview=title.

In a recent paper (Hardwick & Marsh, in press) we examine the recent tensions between the two broadly successful spontaneous orders, namely the Market and Science. We argued for an epistemic pluralism, the view that freedom and liberty (indeed the very concept of liberalism and civil society) exists at the nexus of a manifold of spontaneous forces, and that no single epistemic system should dominate. We also briefly introduced the concept of “iterative” knowledge to characterize the essentially dynamic nature (...) of scientific knowledge. Herein lies a tension. The Market (and perhaps the prevailing culture at large) sees scientific knowledge in cumulative terms, that is, progressing to a conclusion in a linear fashion. This relatively static understanding of medical science as it relates to pharmaceutical studies can have a corrosive effect on the practice of medicine and ultimately, we believe, on the proper functioning of the market itself. In this paper we examine this tension in much closer detail by focusing upon the demands of the market, specifically the pharmaceutical industry, and the science upon which it is based. In other words, we expound upon a clash of epistemic value – one (science) that sees knowledge as essentially iterative (dynamic yet tentative) and the other (the Market) that harvests conclusive scientific knowledge (ostensibly as a fixed and firm commodity) functional to its own interests. Clinical Trials that are sharply focused with precisely determined deliverables often manifest this tension in the sharpest of relief. As a means of recovering drug development and testing costs, conclusive assessment is required to avoid creating serious financial problems for the companies themselves not to mention issues in the public interest. (shrink)

This book is a collection of specially commissioned chapters from philosophers, economists and political scientists, focusing on Adam Smith's two main works Theory of Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations. It examines the duality which manifests itself as an apparent contradiction: that is, how does one reconcile the view of human nature expounded in Theory of Moral Sentiments (sympathy and benevolence) and the view of human nature expounded in Wealth of Nations (self-interest)? New work by philosophers has uncovered the complex (...) and nuanced connections between Smith's account of economic and moral motivation. His economic theory has presented conceptual challenges: the famous 'invisible hand' has proved an elusive concept much in need of scrutiny. 'Prosperity' in the title captures the economic side of Smith's thought. 'Propriety' points to his ethics. In recent philosophical scholarship two major shifts have occurred. One is that the originality of Smith's moral theory has been rediscovered and recognised. His account of sympathy is significantly different from Hume's: his idea of the 'impartial spectator' is independent, rich and complex and he is alert to the phenomenon of self-deception. The second shift is that Smith's image as an economic liberal has been drastically revised, reclaiming him from current ideological use in defence of free markets and the minimal state. Smith links economics, politics and ethics through notions of justice and utility in subtle ways that make the labels 'economic liberal' and 'laissez-faire theorist' at best inadequate and at worst misleading. -/- This collection was put together with a view to bringing Smith to a mainstream philosophy audience while simultaneously informing Smith's traditional constituency (political economy) with philosophically finessed interpretations. (shrink)

Hayek’s and Simon’s social externalism runs on a shared presupposition: mind is constrained in its computational capacity to detect, harvest, and assimilate “data” generated by the infinitely fine-grained and perpetually dynamic characteristic of experience in complex social environments. For Hayek, mind and sociality are co-evolved spontaneous orders, allowing little or no prospect of comprehensive explanation, trapped in a hermeneutically sealed, i.e. inescapably context bound, eco-system. For Simon, it is the simplicity of mind that is the bottleneck, overwhelmed by the ambient (...) complexity of the environmental. Since on Simon’s account complexity is unidirectional, Simon is far more ebullient about the prospects of explanation. Hayek’s social externalism functions as a kind of distributed “extra-neural” memory store manifest as dynamic spontaneous orders. Simon’s organizational rule-governed externalism negotiates the “inner” world (the mind) with the “outer” world through a homeostatic interface that offloads the cognitive burden into the environment. Their respective externalisms may differ in detail but not in spirit in that it ameliorates their shared presupposition of cognitive constraint. Even though any “optimization talk” for Hayek and Simon is objectionable, knowledge acquisition can be represented by a contextualized stigmergic swarm optimization algorithm that gives due emphasis to both the individual and the environment. The key insight is that “perfect” knowledge is unnecessary, impracticable and indeed irrelevant if one understands the mechanism at work in complex sociality, a stigmergic sociality that in effect augments or scaffolds cognition. (shrink)

The editors introduce the themed issue “stigmergy 3.0”.

Purpose/problem statement – Two highly successful complex adaptive systems are the Market and Science, each with an inherent tendency toward epistemic imperialism. Of late, science, notably medical science, seems to have become functionally subservient to market imperatives. We offer a twofold Hayekian analysis: a justification of the multiplicity view of spontaneous orders and a critique of the libertarian justification of market prioricity. Methodology/approach – This chapter brings to light Hayekian continuities between diverse literatures – philosophical, epistemological, cognitive, and scientific. Findings (...) – The very precondition of knowledge is the exploitation of the epistemic virtues accorded by society's manifold of spontaneous forces, a manifold that gives context and definition to intimate, regulate, and inform action. The free-flow of information is the lifeblood of civil (liberal) society. The commoditization of medical knowledge promotes a dysfunctional free-flow of information that compromises notions of expertise and ultimately has implications for the greater good. Research limitations/implications – While we accept that there are irresolvable tensions between these epistemic magisteria we are troubled by the overt tampering with the spontaneous order mechanism of medical science. The lessons of Hayek are not being assimilated by many who would go by the adjective Hayekian. Originality/value of chapter – On offer is a Hayekian restatement (contra the libertarian view typically attributed to Hayek) cautioning that no one spontaneous order should dominate over another, neither should they be made conversable. Indeed, we argue that the healthy functioning of a market presupposes institutions that should not answer to market imperatives. (shrink)

This book is a collection of specially commissioned chapters from philosophers, economists, political and behavioral economists, cognitive and organizational psychologists, computer scientists, sociologists and permutations thereof as befits the polymathic subject of this book – Herbert Simon.

Austrian social theory and associated social epistemology provides a well-needed corrective to the overly rationalistic tendencies of liberal social theory, namely the positing of abstract individualism and the inherent paradoxes of so-called social justice. This said, what is of concern is that some self-avowed Austrians seem to have taken a “hard” libertarian turn: that is, the market is viewed as the sole source or arbiter of moral, political and other values. They seem to be committed to a form of abstract (...) individualism manifest as social atomism, and in conceiving the market as the summum bonum, promote a substantive theory of the good, unwittingly abandoning a truly skeptical position regarding government and its engagements. Analogously, many self-avowed “conservatives” have also uncritically embraced the market seemingly unaware that the spontaneous order that the market generates may well be incompatible with the social values they wish to preserve. Aside from the tension between market spontaneous order and the socio-political imperatives conservatives embrace those socio-political imperatives are clearly an instance of promoting a substantive theory of the human good – again, in effect, anti-liberal. -/- The master argument offered in this chapter is that any liberal position worthy of the name must surely emphasize its skeptical roots and as such be cognizant of the hardwon achievements of free societies. The greatest achievement, arguably, is the independence of spontaneous orders such as science and the market from epistemic monopolies, including the theocratic state or the expansive and centralized state, or indeed corporate monopolies. Liberality or the modern civil condition exists at the nexus of science, religion, politics, markets, art and more besides. -/- On offer is not an anti-market critique. On the contrary, we wish to preserve the integrity of the market, and also science and other forms of experience, but it needs to be understood that each realm with its own criteria of objectivity, standards and teleology, cannot be answerable to (or reducible to) another order’s teleology or metric. Furthermore, it is the sine qua non of the liberal condition that there will always be tensions between orders: to reduce one realm to another is thus anti-liberal. -/- The body of the discussion seeks to: -/- (a) unpack the notions of individualism and individuality; (b) examine the idealized tensions between modes of association, what Oakeshott termed civil vs. enterprise association. -/- The former constitutes an understanding of the state as a non-purposive; the latter is an understanding of the state in which the members are related in terms of a common, substantive purpose, whether it be religious salvation, moral virtue, or economic productivity or redistribution; -/- (c) examine Hayek’s somewhat related (though not coextensive with Oakeshott) idealized distinction between cosmos and taxis. The former connoting spontaneous order; the latter connoting an order that is constructed with conscious aforethought; (d) critically filter marketocrats of both varieties through the lens of a methodological individualist (Hayek) and a liberal modal critique (Oakeshott); and finally, (e) offer some concluding remarks. (shrink)

The thesis that Dennett argues for in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon has a double aspect. First, religion being but one natural phenomenon among many should be subject to scientific investigation (p. 17). Resistance to this notion constitutes the first spell or taboo and is in complicity with the second “master” spell, that of the phenomenon of religion itself (pp. 18, 322).

This paper highlights a troubling tension within the philosophy of Michael Oakeshott. The relativistic stance that informs his radical constructivism gives license to socio-political conclusions we know Oakeshott couldn’t possibly accept.

Hayek s philosophical psychology as set out in his The Sensory Order (1952) has, for the most part, been neglected. Despite being lauded by computer scientist grandee Frank Rosenblatt and by Nobel prize-winning biologist Gerald Edelman, cognitive scientists -- with a few exceptions -- have yet to discover Hayek s philosophical psychology. On the other hand, social theorists, Hayek s traditional disciplinary constituency, have only recently begun to take note and examine the importance of psychology in the complete Hayek corpus. (...) This volume brings together for the first time state-of-the-art contributions from neuroscientists and philosophers of mind as well as economists and social theorists, all critically engaging in many aspects of Hayek's philosophical psychology. (shrink)

Introduction to the special issue “Perspectives on Social Cognition”.

The notion of the cyborg has exercised the popular imagination for almost two hundred years. In very general terms the idea that a living entity can be a hybrid of both organic matter and mechanical parts, and for all intents and purposes be seamlessly functional and self-regulating, as prefigured in literary works such as Shelly's Frankenstein (1816/18) and Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872). This notion of hybridism has been a staple theme of 20th century science fiction writing, television programmes and the (...) cinema. For the most part, these works trade on a deep sense of unease we have about our personal identity - how could some non-organic matter to which I have so little conscious access count as a bona fide part of me? Cognitive scientist and philosopher, Andy Clark, picks up this general theme and presents an empirical and philosophical case for the following inextricably linked theses. (shrink)

The topic of philanthropy has a great deal of philosophical interest because it exists at the nexus of issues surrounding distributive, remedial, and commutative justice, perennial issues in political philosophy (Ealy 2010, vi). It is perhaps because of this that, conceptually speaking, philanthropy seems to have a twilight existence, typically laboring under one of the most prevalent confusions—the synonymous usage of the terms “nonprofit” and “philanthropy” (McCully 2010). Yet, discussion of the philosophy of philanthropy is surprisingly neglected. The present discussion (...) examines the relationship between private philanthropy and the welfare-oriented state: Is it possible for the philanthropic sphere and/or indeed the philanthropic impulse to coexist in an expansive governmental environment that sees health care as a natural part of its administrative monopoly? We answer with a qualified “yes.” Our paper, however, is not concerned with an appraisal of welfarism in its many guises nor with recommendations for reform, but with the pragmatics of operating within such an environment. As such we: (a) assess the philosophical presuppositions that animate recent discussion of the “Big Society” and the role philanthropy is accorded within it; and (b) offer practical guidance about protecting and encouraging the philanthropic impulse when a climate of welfarism prevails. (shrink)

Gilbert Ryle’s “Knowing How/Knowing That” distinction gave crisparticulation to a long-standing epistemological concern that Michael Oakeshott had: that is,what is the epistemic status of the area that comprises our waking lives, the domain of practical reasoning, of which political practice, on Oakeshott’s account, is but one aspect. This concern is set against a much broader purview: that of the nature of rationality, or more accurately the social nature of rationality.

Review Essay: Dennett’s Sweet Dreams Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness.

Michael Wheeler is the latest in a new wave of philosophical theorists that fall within a loose coalition of anti-representationalism (or anti-Cartesianism): Dynamical - Embodied - Extended - Distributed - and Situated - theories of cognition (DEEDS an apt acronym).

Though Walker Percy is best known as a novelist, he was first and foremost a philosopher. This collection offers a sustained examination of key aspects to his more technical philosophy as well as some of his lesser known philosophical interests, including the philosophy of place and dislocation. Contributors expound upon Percy’s multifaceted philosophy, an invitation to literature and theology scholars as well as to philosophers who may not be familiar with the philosophical underpinnings of his work.