The evolution from pre-human primates to modern Homo sapiens is a complex one involving many domains, ranging from the material to the social to the cognitive, both at the individual and the community levels. This article focuses on a critical qualitative transition that took place during this evolution involving both the social and the cognitive domains. For the social domain, the transition is from the face-to-face forms of social interaction and organization that characterize the non-human primates that reached, with Pan, (...) a hiatus due to the centripetal effects that highly individualized behavior has on a social system. The transition is to the relation-based forms of social organization that evolved in the hominins ancestral to Homo sapiens and are universal in human societies today. For the cognitive domain, this transition involves going from behavior responding mainly to phenomenal level sensory inputs to behavior formed in accordance with the concept of a relation, initially abstracted from behavior patterns, then extending the concept of a relation beyond abstraction from behavior patterns to the concept of a relation generated recursively through constructing the relation of a relation. This extension made possible the construction of systems of relations; initially genealogical systems of relations constructed culturally using the logic of recursion, and subsequently, the symbolic, computational systems of kin term relations referred to by anthropologists as kinship terminologies. The latter are “constructed realities” in the sense this term is used by cultural anthropologists. It follows that the evolution of relation-based systems of social interaction is not adequately accounted for through population model evolutionary accounts such as the Dual Inheritance Theory of human evolution since “constructed realities” constitute collectively and publicly shared cultural knowledge rather than the individually and privately possessed knowledge that is assumed in the population model framework for human evolution. (shrink)

The term “deep history” refers to historical accounts framed temporally not by the advent of a written record but by evolutionary events (Smail 2008; Shryock and Smail 2011). The presumption of deep history is that the events of today have a history that traces back beyond written history to events in the evolutionary past. For human kinship, though, even forming a history of kinship, let alone a deep history, remains problematic, given limited, relevant data (Trautman et al. 2011). With regard (...) to a deep history, one conjecture is that human kinship evolved from primate social systems in a gradual, more-or-less continuous manner (see Chapais 2008); another conjecture is that kinship, in accordance with the incest account of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969) or the fanciful, tetradic account of Nicholas J. Allen (1986), “comes into existence with a leap” (Trautman et al. 2011: 176); and yet another, the account to be developed in this paper, is that kinship, as it is understood and lived by culture bearers today, is the consequence of a profound and qualitative evolutionary transformation going from an ancestral primate-like social system predicated on extensive face-to-face interaction to the relation-based social systems that characterize human societies (Read 2012). (shrink)

Darwinian evolution, defined as evolution arising from selection based directly on the properties of individuals, does not account for cultural constructs providing the organizational basis of human societies. The difficulty with linking Darwinian evolution to structural properties of cultural constructs is exemplified with kinship terminologies, a cultural construct that structures and delineates the domain of kin in human societies. (Published Online November 9 2006).

© Cambridge University Press 2016.Richerson et al. propose cultural group selection as the basis for understanding the evolution of cultural systems. Their proposal does not take into account the nature of cultural idea systems as being constituted at an organizational rather than an individual level. The sealing partners of the Netsilik Inuit exemplify the problem with their account.

The evolutionary trajectory from non-human to human forms of social organization involves change from experiential- to relational-based systems of social interaction. Social organization derived from biologically and experientially grounded social interaction reached a hiatus with the great apes due to an expansion of individualization of behaviour. The hiatus ended with the introduction of relational-based social interaction, culminating in social organization based on cultural kinship. This evolutionary trajectory links biological origins to cultural outcomes and makes evident the centrality of distributed forms (...) of information for both the boundary and internal structure of human societies as these evolved from prior forms of social organization. (shrink)

Jones' proposed application of Optimality Theory assumes the primary kinship data are genealogical definitions of kin terms. This, however, ignores the fact that these definitions can be predicted from the computational, algebralike structural logic of kinship terminologies, as has been discussed and demonstrated in numerous publications. The richness of human kinship systems derives from the cultural knowledge embedded in kinship terminologies as symbolic computation systems, not the post hoc constraints devised by Jones.

The goal of forming a science of intentional behavior requires a more richly detailed account of symbolic systems than is assumed by the authors. Cultural systems are not simply the equivalent in the ideational domain of culture of the purported Baldwin Effect in the genetic domain. © 2014 Cambridge University Press.

Models of cultural evolution need to address not only the organizational aspects of human societies, but also the complexity and structure of cultural idea systems that frame their systems of organization. These cultural idea systems determine a framework within which behaviors take place and provide mutually understood meanings for behavior from the perspective of both agent and recipient that are critical for the coherence of human systems of social organization.

Guala does not go far enough in his critique of the assumption that human decisions about sharing made in the context of experimental game conditions accurately reflect decision-making under real conditions. Sharing of hunted animals is constrained by cultural rules and is not as assumed in models of weak and strong reciprocity. Missing in these models is the cultural basis of sharing that makes it a group property rather than an individual one.

Subjective experience is transformed into objective reality for societal members through cultural idea systems that can be represented with theory and data models. A theory model shows relationships and their logical implications that structure a cultural idea system. A data model expresses patterning found in ethnographic observations regarding the behavioral implementation of cultural idea systems. An example of this duality for modeling cultural idea systems is illustrated with Arabic proverbs that structurally link friend and enemy as concepts through a culturally (...) defined computational system. Computational systems also generate new concepts, as will be illustrated through a theory model for the structure of a .. (shrink)

How children learn number concepts reflects the conceptual and logical distinction between counting numbers, based on a same-size concept for collections of objects, and natural numbers, constructed as an algebra defined by the Peano axioms for arithmetic. Cross-cultural research illustrates the cultural specificity of counting number systems, and hence the cultural context must be taken into account.

We present an algebraic account of the Tongan kinship terminology (TKT) that provides an insightful journey into the fabric of Tongan culture. We begin with the ethnographic account of a social event. The account provides us with the activities of that day and the centrality of kin relations in the event, but it does not inform us of the conceptual system that the participants bring with them. Rather, it is a slice in time of an ongoing dynamic process that links (...) behavior with a conceptual system of kin relations and vice versa. To understand this interplay, we need an account of the underlying conceptual system that is being activated during the event. Thus, we introduce a formal, algebraically based account of TKT. This account brings to the fore the underlying logic of TKT and allows us to distinguish between features of the kinship system that arise from the logic of TKT as a generative structure and features that must have arisen through cultural intervention. (shrink)

Human beings, as a species, have two outstanding characteristics compared to all other species: the apparently enormous elaboration of our thought through language and symbolism, and the elaboration of our forms of social organization. The obvious question is whether these two characteristics are connected. ... Our view is that they are connected intimately. Thought and social organization are two aspects of the same larger phenomenon, or better the same larger bundle of phenomena. ... Here we bring the two streams of (...) analysis together, in what is at once an exposition of the basic structure of the systems of thought that organizations are built upon and, eo ipso, an exposition of the organizational basis and origin of human thinking as such. The resulting reconfiguring of questions, answers, and methods, we believe, cannot be described otherwise than as a new science and not just a new paradigm. (shrink)

Encultured individuals see the behavioral rules of cultural systems of moral norms as objective. In addition to prescriptive regulation of behavior, moral norms provide templates, scripts, and scenarios regulating the expression of feelings and triggered emotions arising from perceptions of norm violation. These allow regulated defensive responses that may arise as moral idea systems co-opt emotionally associated biological survival instincts.

This topically organized, interdisciplinary anthology provides competing perspective on the claim that western culture faces a moral crisis. Using clearly written, accessible essays by well-known authors in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities, the book introduces students to a variety of perspectives on the current cultural debate about values that percolates beneath the surface of most of our social and political controversies.

The Market Economy: A Reader outlines the characteristics and philosophical underpinnings of the market economy and its usefulness in the allocation of resources. This anthology offers a comprehensive set of authentic, primary source selections that demonstrate how the tenets of classical economic liberalism provide the foundation for an efficient economic system--while also maximizing individual freedom. The readings also provide a structure for analyzing economic and philosophical issues. The book includes selections from several authors who are not economists but whose work (...) is important in terms of their contribution to economic thought, such as Henry David Throeau and Ayn Rand. It also features classic readings such as Adam Smith's invisible hand from his Wealth of Nations, David Ricardo's original explanation of comparative advantage from Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, and John Stuart Mill's eloquent expression of the limits of government in On Liberty. Latter day proponents of private enterprise include Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman. These authors and others address how the market economy responds to such topical issues as the environment, income distribution, and free trade. (shrink)

From the early postwar period until his death at the turn of the century, Dwight Waldo was one of the most authoritative voices in the field of public administration. Through probing questions, creative ideas, and ever-developing arguments, he perhaps contributed more than any other single figure to the development of public administration as a discipline in the 20th century, equally in his classic, masterful debut The Administrative State as in his last unpublished writings. In this new deep dive into (...) Dwight Waldo's writing, editor Richard Stillman offers a representative selection of Waldo's most important works alongside introductory essays to help the seasoned public administration scholar and the novice student alike appreciate Waldo's contribution to public service as a crucial and colorful field of study. Selections have been chosen for their ability to speak to current and ongoing concerns in the field, their brevity, and their accessibility to those newer to the field. This anthology provides new generations of readers a fresh look at the work of this prolific, profoundly influential author, while offering experienced scholars/practitioners in the field renewed access to many of his hard-to-find works. In particular, selections of Waldo's previously unpublished magnum opus on democracy and bureaucracy are included. This book will be required reading for all those interested in public administration as a field of inquiry or practice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The History of Ideas:Precept and Practice, 1950–2000 and BeyondAnthony GraftonIn the middle years of the twentieth century, the history of ideas rose like a new sign of the zodiac over large areas of American culture and education. In those happy days, Dwight Robbins, the president of a fashionable progressive college, kept "copies of Town and Country, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and a small magazine—a little (...) magazine—that had no name" on the table in his waiting room. True, Robbins did not exist: he was the fictional president of Randall Jarrell's equally fictional Benton, a liberal arts dystopia where "[h]alf of the college was designed by Bottom the Weaver, half by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe."1 But Jarrell's notation of the Journal's status was accurate nonetheless.2The Journal, in the twenty years or so after its foundation, attracted attention from many quarters, some of them unexpected. And it occupied a unique position, between the technical journals of history and philology, [End Page 1] each firmly identified with a discipline, in which professional humanists normally published their results, and the quarterlies, often based not in disciplines but in liberal arts colleges and universities, which cultivated a mixed readership to which they offered fiction and poetry as well as essays. By contrast with both, the JHI fifty years ago ran on a rich mix of technical articles and wide-ranging essays that could easily have attracted the attention of a sophisticated administrator—or at least made a good impression on his coffee table. Bliss was it to be a subscriber in that happy day when the JHI glowed with something of the luster that haloed Representations in the 1980s and Critical Inquiry more recently.3The main reason for the Journal's prominence was that it represented a new field, appealingly located between disciplines as the Journal was between other sorts of periodical. In its postwar heyday, the history of ideas was not a dim subdivision of history, itself a discipline whose luster has worn off with time, but an intellectual seismic zone where the tectonic plates of disciplines converged and rubbed against one another, producing noises of all sorts. In recent years, it has sometimes seemed impossible, even to the best informed observers, that intellectual history, or the history of ideas, ever enjoyed this sort of prestige. A quarter century ago, Robert Darnton surveyed the state of intellectual and cultural history in the United States in an informative and influential essay. Using a language more resonant of the historical President Carter than the fictional President Robbins, Darnton detected "malaise" everywhere he looked. In the fifties, he noted, intellectual historians had seen "their discipline as the queen of the historical sciences. Today she seems humbled." True, desperate cries for help were not yet called for. Historians continued to write histories of ideas, and even to cast them in the technical languages of A.O. Lovejoy or Perry Miller: "one still finds 'unit-ideas' and 'mind' among the trendier terms." The just-published Dictionary of the History of Ideas, moreover, offered a vast selection of Lovejoyan formal analyses, systematically organized, to the reading public.4 [End Page 2]But for the last ten years, Darnton argued, younger scholars, especially graduate students, had been scrambling over the gunwales of the good ship History of Ideas, abandoning the effort to converse abstractly with the mighty dead, and clambering in hordes over the side of a newer vessel, Social History, which boasted a Hogarthian passenger list of heretics, misfits, and military women. At the level of the dissertations written in history departments, social history was outpacing intellectual, by a proportion of three to one. At the level of the scholarly journal, too, social history had forged ahead, though by a smaller margin. In the murkier, but no less significant, world of opinion, finally, the decline of intellectual history appeared clearest. History of ideas no longer occupied the cutting edge in young scholars' mental vision of their discipline.Social history, after all, had captured the minds of a generation—or a large percentage of it—in the 1960s, thanks both to the power of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Original Dwelling Place: Zen EssaysRobert E. GossOriginal Dwelling Place: Zen Essays. By Robert Aitken. Upland, California: Counterpoint, 1996. 241 pp.Robert Aitken narrates his over forty-year journey into Zen, elucidating not only his spiritual journey but also reflecting the Americanization of Zen Buddhism. He was introduced to Zen Buddhism during World War II as an internee in a camp for enemy civilians in Kobe, Japan. Original Dwelling Place is Aitken’s (...) ninth book to explore a series of topics that accent his personal journey into Zen. He has gathered a series of essays about the texts and lineage teachers with whom he studied over the years. In the opening section, entitled “Ancestors,” he pays homage to the masters [End Page 212] who influenced his own Zen practice. He writes, “All of my guides have passed away, but they are alive in my mind and body” (p. 5). The book reflects his continuing bond with those deceased teachers who exercised a vital presence and environmental influence within his life. He shares some stories, personal insights, and legacies of some of his guides, such as Nyogen Senzaki, Soen Roshi, Blyth Sensei, and D. T. Suzuki. I found his essay on the legacy of Dwight Goddard filling in many personal details of a pioneer Western Buddhist who significantly contributed to the Americanization of Buddhism. In many ways, Aitken’s own spiritual development and Original Dwelling Place recapitulate the Americanization of Zen Buddhism, providing some important insights into that process of Buddhist acculturation.Yet Aitken does not limit his guides to twentieth-century ones. He brings alive the classical discourses and relates them to contemporary life. Throughout his essays, I was struck by how alive and dynamic Aitken’s Mahayana contemplative vision and practice are. There is a spirit of “contemplative action” that collapses the duality of meditative practice and living that discovers the truth dynamically within a matrix of open living. As a Christian practitioner of Ignatian spirituality, I found many parallels to the Jesuit ideal of being “contemplative in action.” Aitken’s essays elucidate an ongoing dynamic dialectic that fluctuates between meditative reflection and the world of experience—reminding me at times of the contemplative Trappist monk, Thomas Merton, and at other times of the Jesuit poet-activist, Daniel Berrigan.The reader garners an aesthetic sense that classical Zen texts have been an integral part of his journey and have provided him with a platform to reflect on topics such as marriage, death, the use of money, sexuality, and Zen practice. Some of his essays have a meditative quality, drawing the reader into an web of intertextuality and experience where Zen teachers and Western poets engage in a contemplative path of pleasure expressed in awareness of the everyday dewdrop world. There were moments that I envisioned reading a particular essay on retreat, for they had a meditative quality that reminded me of some the writings of Thomas Merton. Like Merton, Robert Aitken does not merely probe meditative experience but attempts to interrogate the everyday experiences of Western Buddhists from meditative awareness. Most Japanese Buddhists, he notes, are married within Shinto ceremonies, and Western Buddhists have resurrected old Buddhist marriage ceremonies seldom used by Japanese practitioners. Western Buddhist marriage ceremonies, Aitken notes, are a relatively new tradition that often blends ceremonies from The Book of Common Prayer with Buddhist rituals. He ends his short essay on marriage with final reflections on how marriage and family form a little sangha.In “Death: A Zen Buddhist Perspective,” Aitken breaks new ground by noting how Buddhists face the fact of death and find solace in impermanence. He quotes the Japanese haiku poet, Isa Kobayashi (1763–1827), grieving at the loss of his baby daughter:The dewdrop world is the dewdrop world, and yet—and yet(p. 124). [End Page 213]Isa looks desperately for something to give him hope but only finds comfort in his grief. Aitken points out that within grief is emancipation and that bereavement can be a good teacher. He develops some reflections on a highly underdeveloped topic within Buddhism: grieving and the transformation of grief into solace.Aitken writes on political revolution and the matters of ethics. He addresses... (shrink)

Dwight Furrow examines the contemporary fascination with food and culinary arts not only as global spectacle, but also as an expression of control, authenticity, and playful creation for individuals in a homogenized, and increasingly public, world.

This review article discusses the conception of collective rights necessary to ground contemporary entrenchments of minority educational rights, Indigenous rights and collective bargaining rights, as discussed in Miodrag Jovanović’s book, Collective Rights: A Legal Theory. Jovanović argues for a role for value collectivism in elucidating a rationale for the entrenchment of rights held by what he conceives of as pre-legally existing groups with interests not reducible to those of their individual members. This approach can offer an explanation for the entrenchment (...) of minority educational rights and Indigenous rights. The article extols Jovanović’s attempt to grapple with an explanation for rights not explained within standard liberal theory, even in Will Kymlicka’s attempt to justify minority rights within liberalism. The review also critiques the argument offered by Jovanović. First, the review argues that a full-fledged adoption of value collectivism is not necessary to provide a justification for irreducibly collective rights and that the unnecessary adoption of such a theoretical construct may, in practical terms, work counter to the ongoing entrenchment of the rights it seeks to justify, thus becoming what it will categorize as a ‘self-threatening theory’. Second, the review argues that Jovanović’s stark division of rights held by pre-legally existing groups and legally constituted collective entities undermines his account’s ability to explain collective bargaining rights of trade unions that are entrenched in some jurisdictions. (shrink)

We completely characterize the simple majority weighted voting game achievable hierarchies, and, in doing so, show that a problem about representative government, noted by J. Banzhaf [Rutgers Law Review 58, 317–343 (1965)] cannot be resolved using the simple majority quota. We also demonstrate that all hierarchies achievable by any quota can be achieved if the simple majority quota is simply incremented by one.

In Cultivating Citizens Dwight Allman and Michael Beaty bring together some of America's leading social and political thinkers to address the question of civic vitality in contemporary American society. The resulting volume is a serious reflection on the history of civil society and a rich and rewarding conversation about the future American civic order.

This article analyses the relationship between liberal multiculturalist political philosophy and religious pluralism, examining Will Kymlicka’s writings as a central example of liberal multiculturalism. The article explains that liberal multiculturalism seeks to reconcile liberalism and cultural diversity by arguing that protections of cultural identity actually protect individuals in a manner compatible with liberalism. It argues that Kymlicka’s writings manifest both an inattention to religious minorities and a misattention that privileges culture over religion. Various examples from his writings suggest that he (...) has treated religion as a side issue and given priority to culture, resulting in some rather particular factual characterizations of examples touching on religion and some practical conclusions that simply do not correspond to the importance of religion and religious diversity. The article argues that these problems constitute a potentially fatal flaw, because they mean that Kymlicka’s writings, rather than bringing together liberalism and multiculturalism, are in tension both with liberal principles of religious toleration and with key theoretical rationales for multiculturalism. Religious freedom is key to liberalism because religious participation is a key means by which believers find meaning in their lives. Multiculturalism’s theoretical rationales for recognizing cultural communities as important components of identity also apply to religious communities. If liberal multiculturalism does not treat religion appropriately, it is in tension with its own foundations. In the concluding section, the article gestures in some theoretical and policy directions, arguing for a much greater openness to religion in the public sphere in an ecumenical dialogue of cultures and religions. (shrink)

We are concerned here with recursive function theory analogs of certain problems in chromatic graph theory. The motivating question for our work is: Does there exist a recursive (countably infinite) planar graph with no recursive 4-coloring? We obtain the following results: There is a 3-colorable, recursive planar graph which, for all k, has no recursive k-coloring; every decidable graph of genus p ≥ 0 has a recursive 2(χ(p) - 1)-coloring, where χ(p) is the least number of colors which will suffice (...) to color any graph of genus p; for every k ≥ 3 there is a k-colorable, decidable graph with no recursive k-coloring, and if k = 3 or if k = 4 and the 4-color conjecture fails the graph is planar; there are degree preserving correspondences between k-colorings of graphs and paths through special types of trees which yield information about the degrees of unsolvability of k-colorings of graphs. (shrink)

Against Theory is unique in that it puts disparate thinkers from both the analytic and continental traditions into conversation on a central topic in moral philosophy. It also addresses the issue of the impact of postmodernism on ethics, unlike most of the literature on postmodernism which tends to deal with social and political issues rather than ethics. Dwight Furrow's Against Theory is a spirited assessment of two main alternatives to the theoretical approach. One approach, Furrow argues, posits moral life (...) has the form of a narrative and emphasizes the role of historical understanding or imaginative identification in recognizing moral obligation. The second postmodernist alternative, stresses that moral obligation is a feeling of being bound by a presence the source of which cannot be identified through reason or understanding. Furrow's position compellingly negotiates the tension between the living practice of ethics on the one hand, and normative ideals of equality and justice on the other. Furrow questions whether it is possible to resolve this seeming contradition. In doing so, he provides lucidly detailed examinations of such major thinkers as Bernard Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Rorty, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Francois Lyotard. Against Theory 's is a compelling examination of the continental and analytical philosophical ethical traditions. It is one od the few available books that thoroughly considers the impact of postmodernism on the subject and practice of ethics. (shrink)