In challenging the prevailing paradigm for understanding how the human mind works, Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition is certain to stimulate fruitful debate.

In Paradigms and Barriers Howard Margolis offers an innovative interpretation of Thomas S. Kuhn's landmark idea of "paradigm shifts," applying insights from cognitive psychology to the history and philosophy of science. Building upon the arguments in his acclaimed Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, Margolis suggests that the breaking down of particular habits of mind—of critical "barriers"—is key to understanding the processes through which one model or concept is supplanted by another. Margolis focuses on those revolutionary paradigm shifts— (...) such as the switch from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican worldview—where challenges to entrenched habits of mind are marked by incomprehension or indifference to a new paradigm. Margolis argues that the critical problem for a revolutionary shift in thinking lies in the robustness of the habits of mind that reject the new ideas, relative to the habits of mind that accept the new ideas. Margolis applies his theory to famous cases in the history of science, offering detailed explanations for the transition from Ptolemaic to cosmological astronomy, the emergence of probability, the overthrow of phlogiston, and the emergence of the central role of experiment in the seventeenth century. He in turn uses these historical examples to address larger issues, especially the nature of belief formation and contemporary debates about the nature of science and the evolution of scientific ideas. Howard Margolis is a professor in the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and in the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Selfishness, Altruism, and Rationality and Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, both published by the University of Chicago Press. (shrink)

In a forthcoming study I give an account of paradigm shifts as shifts in habits of mind. This paper summarizes the argument. Habits of mind, on this view, are what constitute a paradigm. Further, some particular habit of mind is ordinarily critical for a Kuhnian revolution. A contrast is drawn between this view and the "gap" view that is ordinarily implicit in analysis of the nature of of paradigm shifts.

Rachlin adds to the already long list of proposals for reducing what might be seen as social motivation to some roundabout form of self-interest. But his argument exhibits the usual limitations, and prompts questions about what drives this apparently unending quest.

Koehler is right to argue for more nuanced interpretation of base rate anomalies. These anomalies are best understood in relation to a broader class of cognitive anomalies, which are important for theory and practice. Recognizing a need for more nuanced analysis should not be taken as a license for treating the effects as “explained away.”.

Having for thirty years believed and taught the doctrine of phlogiston… I for a long time felt inimical to the new system, which represented as absurd that which I hitherto regarded as sound doctrine; but this enmity… springs only from force of habit… [Black to Lavoisier, 1791]This paper is abstracted from a forthcoming book which defends a particular answer to the question of just what it is that shifts when a paradigm shifts. The claim is that what shifts are habits (...) of mind. And in particular the claim is that the most striking cases of paradigm shift will characteristically turn on a shift in some single, uniquely critical, habit of mind: the barrier. An account of a radical discovery — discovery that prompts the Kuhnian symptoms of incommensurability, so that intuitions that seem irresistible to some seem perverse to their rivals — then characteristically turns on how some individual got past the barrier (escaped the critical habit of mind), while at least for a while others could not do so. (shrink)

The simple heuristics that may indeed usually make us smart–or at least smart enough–in contexts of individual choice will sometimes make us dumb, especially in contexts of social choice. Here each individual choice (or vote) has little impact on the overall choice, although the overall choice is compounded out of the individual choices. I use an example (risk aversion) to illustrate the point.

The point of Hegel's dissatisfaction with Kant -- Rethinking Peirce's fallibilism -- Pragmatism's future : a touch of prophecy.

What does it mean to write "This is not a pipe" across a bluntly literal painting of a pipe? René Magritte's famous canvas provides the starting point for a delightful homage by the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault. Much better known for his incisive and mordant explorations of power and social exclusion, Foucault here assumes a more playful stance. By exploring the nuances and ambiguities of Magritte's visual critique of language, he finds the painter less removed than previously thought from the (...) pioneers of modern abstraction—"confronting them and within a common system, a figure at once opposed and complementary." Foucault's brief but extraordinarily rich essay offers a startling, highly provocative view of a painter whose influence and popularity continue to grow unchecked. _This is Not a Pipe_ also throws a new, piquantly dancing light on Foucault himself. (shrink)

Tensions Regarding Epistemic Concepts The paper argues that there is no logic of scientific discovery, but there is an inference-like pattern that we can model as a "logic," retrospectively, once a discovery has been successfully made. While accepting a kind of epistemological pluralism and opportunism, the claim will be advocated that a convergent and reasonably wide-ranging normative "logic" might be constructed, one that might even work reasonably well in selected applications and might (therefore) also lead us to make congruent judgments (...) of irrationality or illogicality wherever it seems not to yield the "normatively appropriate" outcomes in otherwise comparable specimen cases. (shrink)

In LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited, Jerry Fodor argues that concept learning of any kind—even for complex concepts—is simply impossible. In order to avoid the conclusion that all concepts, primitive and complex, are innate, he argues that concept acquisition depends on purely noncognitive biological processes. In this paper, we show (1) that Fodor fails to establish that concept learning is impossible, (2) that his own biological account of concept acquisition is unworkable, and (3) that there are in fact (...) many promising general models for explaining how concepts are learned. (shrink)

Questions the research, assumptions, and intention behind Danish statistician Bj²rn Lomborg's attacks on peer-reviewed scientific theories of global warming.

Howard J. Curzer presents a fresh new reading of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which brings each of the virtues alive. He argues that justice and friendship are symbiotic in Aristotle's view; reveals how virtue ethics is not only about being good, but about becoming good; and describes Aristotle's ultimate quest to determine happiness.

[This book offers] compilation of examples from TV, newspapers, magazines, advertisements, and our nation's political dialogue.

This paper provides a sketch of a fresh conception of the “metaphysics” of culture and a sense of its conceptual power and advantages, based on a post-Darwinian account of the artifactual, hybrid nature of a person, chiefly in terms of (what I treat as terms of art) Bildung (“external” and “internal”), Sittlichkeit (both descriptive and normative), and interpretation (diversely manifested in different sectors of inquiry). I consider the (“metaphysical”) relationship between membership in the species Homo sapiens sapiens and functioning as (...) a person the generic distinction of human cultures (enlanguaged cultures), which I call Intentionality (that is, whatever is culturally significant or significative); and the bearing of the thesis on familiar philosophical quarrels and theory of the sciences. (shrink)

From the scorched-earth works of action-movie provocateurs Seijun Suzuki and Sam Peckinpah to the cargo cult soundscapes of Pere Ubu and the Czech dissidents ...

The first full-scale history of cognitive science, this work addresses a central issue: What is the nature of knowledge?

In this new lexical survey of Kant's works, Howard Caygill presents Kantian concepts and terminology in terms that will introduce and clarify his ideas for students and general readers alike.