The consensus formulation of cumulative culture characterizes cumulative traditions as information transmitted by high-fidelity learning that generates incremental improvement over time. While this formulation is effective for studying paradigmatic cases (for example, Holocene-era hominin toolkits), it is less so at capturing and explaining putative cases at the margins—for instance, some recurrent behaviours observed in social animal species. This article argues against the consensus formulation in favour of a minimal one, which links cumulative culture to what we call ‘copying know-how’ and (...) the transmission of trait form. As we argue, these elements are better able to characterize putative instances of marginal cumulative culture. Yet by rejecting incremental improvement, the minimal formulation raises a tricky empirical problem we call ‘mere recurrence’: distinguishing cumulative culture from other processes that sustain recurrent behaviour. We highlight three broad types of processes that generate mere recurrence, distinguishing them from copying know-how. Finally, we put the assembled conceptual tools to use in a case study, distinguishing the accounts of cultural epidemiologists from those working on the zone of latent solutions—arguing against those that have tried to align the two. (shrink)

The primary aim of the article is to take a fresh look at the debate between amodal and grounded (modality-specific) theories of conceptual representations by formulating what I call the challenge from (global) supramodality. The challenge proceeds from the observation that, in recent years, many neuroscience data suggest that extensive portions of what are traditionally considered modality-specific cortices are in fact supramodal in nature; that is, they can process external information independently from the perceptual modality. According to a strong or (...) global interpretation of these data, the entire brain has a task-specific and sensory-independent organization. Within this extreme view, the traditional distinction between modality-specific and amodal representations loses much of its sense. The article aims to explore the implications of (global) supramodality for the debate on the conceptual format. I shall argue that none of the (few) attempts to deal with this issue is ultimately successful, so the challenge remains unsolved. (shrink)

In a recent article, Menon has argued that the no alternatives argument can only be significant if the priors for numbers of alternatives are tuned in an implausible way (gerrymandered, as he calls it). In this article, I demonstrate that priors needed for making a no alternatives argument significant are in line with what can be plausibly assumed in a successful research field.

In light of Hawking radiation’s empirical undetectability, physicists have attempted to establish it as universal—as a phenomenon that should appear regardless of the possible details of quantum gravity, whatever those details might be. But, as pointed out in a recent article by Gryb, Palacios, and Thébault, these universality arguments for Hawking radiation seem broadly unconvincing compared to the Wilsonian renormalization-group universality arguments for condensed matter physics. Motivated by their apparent failure, compared with the overwhelming success of universality arguments in so (...) many other contexts, I address the question: in which situations should we expect to be able to construct successful universality arguments? In other words, which situations are ‘universality-argument-apt’? I distinguish between two notions of success for a universality argument: ‘strength’ and ‘relevance’. I argue that we should only expect to be able to construct universality arguments that are successful in the sense of being significantly relevant to a given domain if we know enough about how that domain’s micro-physics is structured, we are able to empirically test the domain’s macro-behaviour, or if we are in both situations at once. These conditions are useful, most obviously, as a clarification of what universality arguments can do. But I argue that they are also useful for two less direct reasons: they clarify the status of analogue experimentation and thereby show us where we stand in our search for empirical confirmation of Hawking radiation. (shrink)

An important feature of many conventions is that the agents use an asymmetry to coordinate their behaviour. We call these ‘correlated conventions’. However, a puzzle arises: since any asymmetry works as well as any other, what are the relevant asymmetries on which a given population founds its correlated conventions? In order to gain traction on this question we need an account of both the invention and evolution of correlated conventions. Invention has remained largely unexplored in the literature. In this article (...) we provide a simple model of the origin and subsequent dynamics of correlated conventions. This model can serve as a base for future investigation. (shrink)

We make some remarks on the mathematics and metaphysics of the hole argument, in response to a recent article in this journal by Weatherall. Broadly speaking, we defend the mainstream philosophical literature from the claim that correct usage of the mathematics of general relativity ‘blocks’ the argument.

Information cascades are troubling and well studied because apparently individually rational responses to evidence can lead entire communities to conform (participate in cascades), and hence to converge on the wrong answer. Yet existing theory cannot explain why a robust, substantial minority of people in experimental studies do not conform. Groups achieve improved reliability thanks to these non-conformists. I use simulations to study cascade problems in an evolutionary setting. The results show that although conforming maximizes expected fitness, non-conformists can persist and (...) often flourish in the population. The reason is that by its nature, conformity carries an evolutionary cost. (shrink)

Douven observes that Schurz’s meta-inductive justification of induction cannot explain the great empirical success of induction, and offers an explanation based on computer simulations of the social and evolutionary development of our inductive practices. In this article, I argue that Douven’s account does not address the explanatory question that Schurz’s argument leaves open, and that the assumption of the environment’s induction-friendliness that is inherent to Douven’s simulations is not justified by Schurz’s argument.

Various writers have attempted to use the sender–receiver formalism to account for the representational capacities of biological systems. This article has two goals. First, I argue that the sender–receiver approach to representation cannot be complete. The mammalian circadian system represents the time of day, yet it does not control circadian behaviours by producing signals with time of day content. Informative signalling need not be the basis of our most basic representational capacities. Second, I argue that representational capacities are primarily about (...) control, and only when specific conditions obtain does this control require informative signalling. (shrink)

Some philosophers have argued that we do not hear sounds as located in the environment. Others have objected that this straightforwardly contradicts the phenomenology of auditory experience. And from this they draw metaphysical conclusions about the nature of sounds—that they are events or properties of vibrating surfaces rather than waves or sensations. I argue that there is a minimal, but recognizable, notion of audition to which this phenomenal objection does not apply. While this notion doesn’t correspond to our ordinary notion (...) of auditory experience, it does—in conjunction with our lack of an uncontroversial individuation of the senses and recent interest in distinctively multisensory features of perceptual experiences—raise the possibility of more expansive notions of audition, including some that do plausibly count as corresponding to our everyday notion of audition, that lack the spatial phenomenology cited in the objection. Until this possibility is ruled out, the phenomenal objection and metaphysical conclusions drawn from it remain inconclusive. (shrink)

I argue that a particular approach to satisfying the broad predictive ambitions of the sciences demands law confirmation. On this approach I confirm non-nomic generalizations by confirming there are no actually realized ways of causing disconfirming cases. This gives causal generalizations a crucial role in prediction. I then show how rational judgements of relevant causal similarity can be used to confirm that causal generalizations themselves have no actual disconfirmers, providing a distinctive and clearly viable methodology for inductively confirming them. Finally, (...) I argue that for agents in our epistemic position, using this methodology to confirm causal generalizations of adequate breadth will commonly demand law confirmation. I make a prima facie assessment of the methodology’s fit with scientific practice and briefly consider the prospects for associated analyses of laws. (shrink)

The principle of total evidence says that all relevant information should be considered when making an inference about a hypothesis. In this article, we argue that the criminalist’s paradox from the literature on the methodology of forensic science constitutes a counterexample against the principle of total evidence. The paradox arises, for example, when a forensic scientist uses the results from other forensic procedures to inform their own analysis. In such cases, their results can become more reliable, but at the same (...) time also dependent on those other forensic results and therefore less useful for decisions in court cases. Consequently, such influences are generally avoided in forensic science. We argue that structurally similar problems plague also other scientific disciplines, anticipate an objection to the counterexample, and propose two new versions of the principle of total evidence that do not fall prey to the criminalist’s paradox. (shrink)