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Epistemology and Science Education: A Study of Epistemological Views of Teachers

2010-07-01T05:00:00Z

We ordinary folks can’t do those things. It is not because we lack the capacity but that we lack the time, inclination, and financial support which must be present to enable such a continued effort.

Educational Wisdom of African Oral Literature: African Proverbs as vehicles for Enhancing Critical Thinking Skills in Social Studies Education

2010-05-01T05:00:00Z

By Lewis Asimeng-Boahene

Preparing children to function effectively as global citizens in today's complex and ethnically polarized nations and the world, will require students who think critically about the knowledge of the histories, experiences, and the cultural practices of other parts of the world.

This paper offers African cultural heritage through proverbs as a frame for developing critical thinking skills among American students in the United States

Xhosa (South Africa) Proverb: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu 'A person is a person through persons'

Weatherwiser?

2010-05-01T05:00:00Z

The article, written by Defining Wisdom grantee Deborah Coen, reviews several books on the history of weather, including "Hurricanes and Society in the British Greater Caribbean, 1624-1783," by Matthew Mulcahy, "British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment," by Jan Golinski, and "Weather by the Numbers: The Genesis of Modern Meteorology," by Kristine C. Harper.

Read Coen's recent wisdom blog.

Link to the review.

Collective wisdom and decision making in surgical oncology

2010-05-01T05:00:00Z

by N Robson and D Rew

AIM: To describe systems for capturing and optimising collective knowledge and insight in areas of complexity and uncertainty in surgical oncology, with particular reference to the Delphi process and related systems. METHODS: Internet search engines (Google, Google Scholar) and four databases (SCOPUS, PubMed, Medline and Embase) were searched to find English language articles on the use of The Delphi Process and related systems in surgical oncology, using a variety of search terms. FINDINGS: There are a number of established systems for co-opting group knowledge and facilitating collective decision-making. These find applications in commerce, industry, government and defence. They have also been applied to problems in surgical oncology, for example using the Delphi process to optimise the management of colorectal cancers and metastases. CONCLUSIONS: Collective decision making tools find practical applications in the allocation of resources and in clinical decision making in fields of surgical oncology practice where there is a wide range of evidence and expert opinion. Such methodologies set new standards for the collating of professional expertise and for the writing of "best clinical practice" guidelines in the cancer subspecialities.

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Lab Experiments for the Study of Social-Ecological Systems

2010-05-01T05:00:00Z

by Marco A. Janssen, Robert Holahan, Allen Lee, and Elinor Ostrom

Governance of social-ecological systems is a major policy problem of the contemporary era. Field studies of fisheries, forests, and pastoral and water resources have identified many variables that influence the outcomes of governance efforts. We introduce an experimental environment that involves spatial and temporal resource dynamics in order to capture these two critical variables identified in field research. Previous behavioral experiments of commons dilemmas have found that people are willing to engage in costly punishment, frequently generating increases in gross benefits, contrary to game-theoretical predictions based on a static pay-off function. Results in our experimental environment find that costly punishment is again used but lacks a gross positive effect on resource harvesting unless combined with communication. These findings illustrate the importance of careful generalization from the laboratory to the world of policy.

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Meaning and Value in a Secular Age: Why Eupraxsophy Matters

2010-05-01T04:00:00Z

Meaning and Value in a Secular Age: Why Eupraxsophy Matters

The Writngs of Paul Kurtz

Edited by Nathan Bupp

The term eupraxsophy was first coined and introduced by Paul Kurtz in 1988 to characterize a secular orientation to life that stands in contrast to religion. Derived from three ancient Greek roots—eu (good, well); praxis (practice, conduct), and sophia (wisdom)—eupraxsophy literally means “good practice and wisdom.” Drawing upon philosophy, science, and ethics, eupraxsophy offers a thoroughly secular moral vision, which respects the place of human values in the context of the natural world and presents an empirically responsible yet hopeful picture of the human situation and the cosmos in which we abide.

Kurtz’s key writings about the theory and practice of eupraxsophy are conveniently gathered together in one place for the first time in this volume. Written with eloquence and scope, these incisive essays show how Kurtz’s brand of humanism moves above and beyond the current “new atheism.” Eupraxsophy successfully bridges the cultural divide between science and value and provides a genuine and constructive ethical alternative to religion, one that is able to deal effectively with the complexities inherent in our increasingly fragmented world.

Paul Kurtz (Amherst, NY), professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is the author or editor of more than fifty books, including The Transcendental Temptation, The Courage to Become, Embracing the Power of Humanism, plus nine hundred articles and reviews. He is the founder and chairman of the Center for Inquiry, the Council for Secular Humanism, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He has appeared on many major TV and radio talk shows, and has lectured at universities worldwide.

Nathan Bupp (Amherst, NY) is the vice president and director of communications for the Center for Inquiry and the associate editor of Free Inquiry magazine. His articles and book reviews have been published in Free Inquiry and he is a contributor to Dewey's Enduring Impact (Prometheus Books), edited by John R. Shook and Paul Kurtz.

Depth of Field/Depth of Understanding

2010-04-01T05:00:00Z

By Eric Baylin

The article is a personal account of my engagement with some recent neuroscientific theory put forth by Mary Helen Immordino‐Yang (University of Southern California) about the integral relationship between emotion and cognition. Specifically, the research suggests the necessity of engaging students on an emotional level in order to thoroughly engage them cognitively. The article outlines a process of teaching high school photography students the concept of depth of field in the context of the unfolding revelations from my engagement with the brain research. The process was one of trial and error that eventually led to some important insights about teaching and learning in general, most importantly about my own need to engage on an emotional level with the subject being taught.

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A Perspective on Epistemology and Ontology of Indian Psychology

2010-04-01T05:00:00Z

By Dharm P. S. Bhawuk

The epistemology of Indian Psychology (IP) is akin to that ofIndian Philosophy or in general the Indian world view of knowledge,truth and belief about making sense of the self and the world.In this article, the epistemological and ontological foundationsof IP are derived from a verse from the Ishopanishad and corroboratedby verses from the Bhagavad-Gita. In doing so, epistemologicalquestions like what is knowledge in IP or what knowledge (ortheories) should IP develop and how (the methodology) are answered.Similarly, ontological questions like what is the being thatis the focus of IP research or are biomechanical or spiritual-social-biologicalbeings of interest to IP are addressed. The simplicity and clarityof this derivation fulfils the twin research criteria of parsimonyand aesthetics. The role of epistemology and ontology in constructingcultural meaning for theory, method and practice of IP is discussed.

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Epistemological Beliefs and Theory of Planned Behavior: Examining Beliefs about Knowledge and Knowing as Distal Predictors of Indonesian Tertiary Students’ Intention to Study

2010-04-01T05:00:00Z

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How Planful is Routine Behavior? A Selective-Attention Model of Performance in the Tower of Hanoi

2010-04-01T05:00:00Z

by Elena G. Patsenko, Erik M. Altmann

Routine human behavior has often been attributed to plans—mental representations of sequences goals and actions—but can also be attributed to more opportunistic interactions of mind and a structured environment. This study asks whether performance on a task traditionally analyzed in terms of plans can be better understood from a “situated” (or “embodied”) perspective. A saccade-contingent display-updating paradigm is used to change the environment by adding, deleting, and moving task-relevant objects without participants’ direct awareness. Response latencies, action patterns, and eye movements all indicate that performance is guided not by plans stored in memory but by a control routine bound to objects as needed by perception and selective attention. The results have implications for interpreting everyday task performance and particular neuropsychological deficits.

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Pro-Environmental Behavior and Rational Consumer Choice: Evidence From Surveys of Life Satisfaction

2010-04-01T05:00:00Z

Heinz Welsch and Jan Kühling

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the hypothesis of decision error in environmental-friendly consumption. Existing evidence suggests that people make systematic mistakes in affective forecasting that lead to suboptimal decisions. The paper hypothesizes that such errors are important in the context of the private provision of environmental goods and shows in a simple theoretical model that decision errors imply a non-zero net marginal utility at the chosen level of environmental-friendly consumption. Using life satisfaction as a proxy for experienced utility, the empirical analysis finds a positive and significant association between life satisfaction and pro-environmental behavior, which is consistent with environmental-friendly consumption being less than individually optimal. The results are robust to controlling not only for socio-demographic characteristics but also for differences in environment-related personal attitudes.

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The Impact of Autonomy and Task Uncertainty On Team Performance: A Longitudinal Field Study

2010-04-01T05:00:00Z

by John L. Cordery, David Morrison, Brett M. Wright, Toby D. Wal

In this paper, we seek to account for modest and inconsistent empirical support for a positive relationship between team autonomy and team performance by proposing that team task uncertainty impacts on team performance and moderates the impact of increased autonomy. Task uncertainty is defined in terms of a team's lack of prior knowledge about which operational problems will arise when, and the best way of dealing with them. Results from a longitudinal field study of 17 wastewater treatment teams showed that higher levels of task uncertainty were initially associated with reduced performance, assessed in terms of the quality of treated effluent produced by the teams. An intervention designed to enhance team autonomy led to general improvements in team performance, though moderated by team task uncertainty. Under conditions of enhanced team autonomy, a positive relationship emerged between task uncertainty and team performance.

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From Moral to Legal Judgment: The Influence of Normative Context in Lawyers and other Academics

2010-03-01T06:00:00Z

Stephan Schleim, Tade M. Spranger, Susanne Erk, Henrik Walter

Various kinds of normative judgments are an integral part of everyday life. We extended the scrutiny of social cognitive neuroscience into the domain of legal decisions, investigating two groups, lawyers and other academics, during moral and legal decision-making. While we found activation of brain areas comprising the so-called ‘moral brain’ in both conditions, there was stronger activation in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and middle temporal gyrus particularly when subjects made legal decisions, suggesting that these were made in respect to more explicit rules and demanded more complex semantic processing. Comparing both groups, our data show that behaviorally lawyers conceived themselves as emotionally less involved during normative decision-making in general. A group × condition interaction in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex suggests a modulation of normative decision-making by attention based on subjects’ normative expertise.

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Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience

2010-03-01T06:00:00Z

Stephen S. Hall

"A compelling investigation into one of our most coveted and cherished ideals, and the efforts of modern science to penetrate the mysterious nature of this timeless virtue.

We all recognize wisdom, but defining it is more elusive. In this fascinating journey from philosophy to science, Stephen S. Hall gives us a dramatic history of wisdom, from its sudden emergence in four different locations (Greece, China, Israel, and India) in the fifth century B.C. to its modern manifestations in education, politics, and the workplace. We learn how wisdom became the provenance of philosophy and religion through its embodiment in individuals such as Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus; how it has consistently been a catalyst for social change; and how revelatory work in the last fifty years by psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists has begun to shed light on the biology of cognitive traits long associated with wisdom — and, in doing so, begun to suggest how we might cultivate it.

Hall explores the neural mechanisms for wise decision making; the conflict between the emotional and cognitive parts of the brain; the development of compassion, humility, and empathy; the effect of adversity and the impact of early-life stress on the development of wisdom; and how we can learn to optimize our future choices and future selves.

Hall's bracing exploration of the science of wisdom allows us to see this ancient virtue with fresh eyes, yet also makes clear that despite modern science's most powerful efforts, wisdom continues to elude easy understanding."

2010-03-01T06:00:00Z

Daniel M. Hausman and Brynn Welch

One of the hottest ideas in current policy debates is “libertarian paternalism,” the design of policies that push individuals toward better choices without limiting their liberty. In their recent book, Nudge, Richard Thaler and then Obama advisor (now head of the White House’s Office of Information and regulatory Affairs), Cass Sunstein, suggest several ways in which government agencies and private organizations might “nudge” individuals toward actions that are better or them. They hope to promote libertarian paternalism as a promising foundation for bipartisanship—a way of maintaining our firm commitment to freedom of choice while also helping people make better decisions for themselves” (p. 14). They suggest “that libertarian paternalism offers a real Third Way—one that can break through some of the least tractable debates in contemporary democracies” (p. 252/255).
In this article, we address questions both about paternalism—what is it, and could there be a variety that does not limit freedom?—and about nudges—what are they, and should those who value freedom find them unobjectionable? We deny libertarian paternalism is both libertarian and paternalist and that it is as benign as Thaler and Sunstein maintain. We argue that some of their proposals constitute a istinctive variety of paternalism, whose libertarian credentials are dubious, even though their implementation would not be coercive4 and would not significantly limit freedom of choice. Our focus is on their concepts, not their policies.
After a first section that clarifies what Thaler and Sunstein take libertarian paternalism to be, section II addresses the question of what constitutes paternalism. In our view, what makes some of the policies Thaler and Sunstein call “libertarian paternalism” paternalistic is that they push people to make choices that are good for themselves by taking advantage of imperfections in human decision-making abilities. Section III then addresses the broader question concerning what limits there ought to be on nudges—that is, the use of flaws in human judgment and choice to influence people’s behavior.

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Conceptual Challenges and Directions for Social Neuroscience

2010-03-01T06:00:00Z

By Ralph Adolphs

Social neuroscience has been enormously successful and is making major contributions to fields ranging from psychiatry to economics. Yet deep and interesting conceptual challenges abound. Is social information processing domain specific? Is it universal or susceptible to individual differences and effects of culture? Are there uniquely human social cognitive abilities? What is the “social brain,” and how do we map social psychological processes onto it? Animal models together with fMRI and other cognitive neuroscience approaches in humans are providing an unprecedented level of detail and many surprising results. It may well be that social neuroscience in the near future will give us an entirely new view of who we are, how we evolved, and what might be in store for the future of our species.

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Neural Correlates of the "Aha" Experiences: Evidence From an fMRI Study of Insight Problem Solving

Actors must imagine themselves in a different world: they must adopt the perspective of multiple characters, grasp their beliefs and intentions, and feel their emotions. In this study we tested the hypothesis that actors have unusually sharp mind-reading abilities and unusually strong empathy. In Study 1, adolescent actors outperformed adolescents without acting experience in their ability to imagine the mental states expressed by pictures of peoples' eyes (a theory of mind measure), but did not excel on empathy as measured by a self-report scale. In Study 2, we replicated these findings with young adults using a different measure of theory of mind. These findings show that adolescent and adult actors are skilled in reading others' mental states, but do not report above average levels of empathy. Thus, strength in theory of mind can exist independently of strength in empathy.

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Confidence Mediates How Investment Knowledge Influences Investing Self-Efficacy

2010-02-01T06:00:00Z

by James Forbes and S. Murat Kara

A comprehensive investment literacy questionnaire surveyed potential sources (viz., knowledge, confidence) of investing self-efficacy in a large sample of working adults. As expected, the effect of investment knowledge on belief in one’s future capability of orchestrating a plan to achieve investment goals was mediated by confidence. Overall, employees’ applied investment knowledge accuracy was low: 57%. In general, investment knowledge was reliably related to confidence. However, confidence and investment knowledge accuracy were completely independent for 9 of 21 items, implying an inability to inhibit poor investment decisions or an inability to exploit investment opportunities. A policy of required investment training could be implemented so as to not impede individuals’ freedom of choice, which would likely help the truly uninformed to become more informed and ultimately successful investors.

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2010-02-01T05:00:00Z

In this chapter we examine how effective leadership varies across national and cultural boundaries. Specifically, we ask what elements of leadership are core and more universal across these boundaries? The foundation of our approach is the notion that organizations and societies have implicit leadership theories, wherein beliefs about the attributes that define effective leadership are contained in distinctive cognitive structures, or schemas. The content of such schemas shapes perceptions by individuals regarding who is and who is not a leader. While schemas about leadership are shaped by an individual's early personal experiences with and observations of those acting as leaders, a shared schema may also develop within a cultural group and influence the most effective way to lead across these cultural groups.

The Centrality of Wisdom

2010-02-01T04:00:00Z

This article begins

Considering the complexity of the world situation and the large number of problems that humanity faces, the task of achieving a heaven on earth seems daunting. Where does one start?

Is there by any chance a simplifying element, a focal point, a center from which the needed changes can flow? I believe there is. That point of origin, that central source which allows us to address any problem optimally, is wisdom. Wisdom is an all-purpose aid to creating heaven on earth. Whatever our life-focus happens to be among those ten essential heaven-on-earth elements, wisdom raises the level of our contribution.

The rest of the article makes the case fort focusing on wisdom development and closes with the question: "Because the quality of our doing can only reflect the quality of our understanding, isn’t the widespread cultivation of wisdom absolutely essential for achieving a heaven on earth?"

The full-text article is online.

The Process of Personal Change Through Reading Fictional Narratives: Implications for Psychotherapy Practice and Theory.

2009-12-01T06:00:00Z

2009-12-01T06:00:00Z

Ryan T. McKay, Daniel C. Dennett

From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this rule? How can we account for mistaken beliefs, bizarre delusions, and instances of self-deception? We explore this question in some detail. We begin by articulating a distinction between two general types of misbelief: those resulting from a breakdown in the normal functioning of the belief formation system (e.g., delusions) and those arising in the normal course of that system's operations (e.g., beliefs based on incomplete or inaccurate information). The former are instances of biological dysfunction or pathology, reflecting “culpable” limitations of evolutionary design. Although the latter category includes undesirable (but tolerable) by-products of “forgivably” limited design, our quarry is a contentious subclass of this category: misbeliefs best conceived as design features. Such misbeliefs, unlike occasional lucky falsehoods, would have been systematically adaptive in the evolutionary past. Such misbeliefs, furthermore, would not be reducible to judicious – but doxastically noncommittal – action policies. Finally, such misbeliefs would have been adaptive in themselves, constituting more than mere by-products of adaptively biased misbelief-producing systems. We explore a range of potential candidates for evolved misbelief, and conclude that, of those surveyed, only positive illusions meet our criteria.

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Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

"Can Do" Attitudes: Some Positive Illusions Are Not Misbeliefs

Owen Flanagan

McKay & Dennett (M&D) argue that positive illusions are a plausible candidate for a class of evolutionarily “selected for” misbeliefs. I argue (Flanagan 1991; 2007) that the class of alleged positive illusions is a hodge-podge, and that some of its members are best understood as positive attitudes, hopes, and the like, not as beliefs at all.

Read this reply.

Adaptive Misbelief or Judicious Pragmatic Acceptance?

Keith Frankish

This commentary highlights the distinction between belief and pragmatic acceptance, and asks whether the positive illusions discussed in section 13 of the target article may be judicious pragmatic acceptances rather than adaptive misbeliefs. I discuss the characteristics of pragmatic acceptance and make suggestions about how to determine whether positive illusions are attitudes of this type.

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Why We Don't Need Built-in Misbeliefs

Carol S. Dweck

In this commentary, I question the idea that positive illusions are evolved misbeliefs on the grounds that positive illusions are often maladaptive, are not universal, and may be by-products of existing mechanisms. Further, because different beliefs are adaptive in different situations and cultures, it makes sense to build in a readiness to form beliefs rather than the beliefs themselves.

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2009-11-01T05:00:00Z

By Wesley J. Wildman

Brains are amazing organs in all creatures with central nervous systems and especially in human beings. But they are not perfect. Without forgetting the larger success story of cognitive evolution, I want to explore the way that cognitive biases sometimes produce errors in both religious and secular social settings and how such errors can be diagnosed and corrected when they occur. This will involve noticing that error diagnosis and correction is a process that certain social groups have a vested interest in resisting or neglecting, in some respects, while the very same social groups may furnish resources that support the detection of cognitive errors, in other respects.

This presents a moral quandary for both secular and religious groups. Should we educate children to be fully aware of their cognitive vulnerability to advertising, thereby learning how to resist and eventually become immune to one of the fundamental power sources of modern market economies? Should religious groups explain to young people their cognitive tendencies to posit the action of supernatural beings whether or not any such action exists, even though this may disrupt the power of religious groups to forge bracing social togetherness that supports psychologically useful coping skills? While I do not seek to answer such complex moral questions in this paper, I do argue that knowledge of cognitive biases and the resulting tendencies to cognitive error, self-defeating behaviors, and self-deception should be made available to those individuals and groups who are interested in promoting a high degree of critical self-awareness in the analysis of beliefs and behaviors in both secular and religious contexts.

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Beholding the Logos: The Church, the Environment, and the Meaning of Man

2009-11-01T05:00:00Z

By Christopher J. Thompson

To behold the heavens and gaze upon the infinite expanse of a star-studded sky, indeed to ponder any vista of creation's splendor is to be drawn not merely into the mystery of creation, the intricacies of cause and effect; rather, to ponder the mystery of things is to be inevitably drawn into the meaning of the human person. The splendor of being thrusts us back upon ourselves and calls us to question the meaning of our own existence. ¹

Does our Catholic intellectual tradition help us navigate such questions? Is there a distinctive Catholic voice crying in the wilderness?

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Optimal Predictions in Everyday Cognition: The Wisdom of Individuals or Crowds?

2009-11-01T05:00:00Z

by Michael C. Mozer, Harold Pashler and Hadjar Homaei

Griffiths and Tenenbaum (2006) asked individuals to make predictions about the duration or extent of everyday events (e.g., cake baking times), and reported that predictions were optimal, employing Bayesian inference based on veridical prior distributions. Although the predictions conformed strikingly to statistics of the world, they reflect averages over many individuals. On the conjecture that the accuracy of the group response is chiefly a consequence of aggregating across individuals, we constructed simple, heuristic approximations to the Bayesian model premised on the hypothesis that individuals have access merely to a sample of k instances drawn from the relevant distribution. The accuracy of the group response reported by Griffiths and Tenenbaum could be accounted for by supposing that individuals each utilize only two instances. Moreover, the variability of the group data is more consistent with this small-sample hypothesis than with the hypothesis that people utilize veridical or nearly veridical representations of the underlying prior distributions. Our analyses lead to a qualitatively different view of how individuals reason from past experience than the view espoused by Griffiths and Tenenbaum.

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Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

The Wisdom of Individuals: Exploring People’s Knowledge About Everyday Events Using Iterated Learning

2009-11-01T05:00:00Z

by Stephan Lewandowsky, Thomas L. Grifﬁths, Michael L. Kalish

Determining the knowledge that guides human judgments is fundamental to understanding how people reason, make decisions, and form predictions. We use an experimental procedure called ‘‘iterated learning,’’ in which the responses that people give on one trial are used to generate the data they see on the next, to pinpoint the knowledge that informs people’s predictions about everyday events (e.g., predicting the total box ofﬁce gross of a movie from its current take). In particular, we use this method to discriminate between two models of human judgments: a simple Bayesian model (Grifﬁths & Tenenbaum, 2006) and a recently proposed alternative model that assumes people store only a few instances of each type of event in memory (MinK; Mozer, Pashler, & Homaei, 2008). Although testing these models using standard experimental procedures is difﬁcult due to differences in the number of free parameters and the need to make assumptions about the knowledge of individual learners, we show that the two models make very different predictions about the outcome of iterated learning. The results of an experiment using this methodology provide a rich picture of how much people know about the distributions of everyday quantities, and they are inconsistent with the predictions of the MinK model. The results suggest that accurate predictions about everyday events reﬂect relatively sophisticated knowledge on the part of individuals.

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Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.

The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Dreams to Tap into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life

2009-11-01T05:00:00Z

by Jeremy Taylor

"Renowned dream expert Jeremy Taylor can help you discover how the hidden messages in your dreams can change your life. In The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Dreams to Tap Into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life, Taylor shows us how dreams can be the keys to gaining insight into our past and our conflicts, as well as excursions into the fantastic realm of creative inspiration.

This book provides readers with specific, hands-on techniques to help them remember and interpret their dreams, establish a dream group, and learn the universal symbolism of dreaming.

Full of case histories and a thoughtful chapter about dreams as clues to the evolution of consciousness, this updated, revised and expanded edition of Where People Fly and Water Runs Uphill is a life- changing and potentially world-changing work..."

Link to the publisher.

"I Was a Boy with Power to Talk" (Conf. 1.8.13): Augustine and Ancient Theories of Language Acquisition

2009-11-01T05:00:00Z

By Tarmo Toom

This study compares Augustine's remarks on language acquisition in the Confessions with those of Stoics, Epicureans, and Pyrrhonists and assesses the similarities and differences of the respective accounts. It studies a specific issue in Augustine's philosophy of language, language acquisition, which so far and in connection with ancient theories has received only passing attention.

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Cortex and Memory: Emergence of a New Paradigm

2009-11-01T05:00:00Z

Joaquín M. Fuster

Converging evidence from humans and nonhuman primates is obliging us to abandon conventional models in favor of a radically different, distributed-network paradigm of cortical memory. Central to the new paradigm is the concept of memory network or cognit—that is, a memory or an item of knowledge defined by a pattern of connections between neuron populations associated by experience. Cognits are hierarchically organized in terms of semantic abstraction and complexity. Complex cognits link neurons in noncontiguous cortical areas of prefrontal and posterior association cortex. Cognits overlap and interconnect profusely, even across hierarchical levels (heterarchically), whereby a neuron can be part of many memory networks and thus many memories or items of knowledge.

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Fast and Frugal Heuristics: Tools of Social Rationality

2009-11-01T05:00:00Z

Ralph Hertwig and Stefan M. Herzog

Homo economicus cannot help but be puzzled by people's baffling array of social behaviors that conflict with economic theory. To accommodate these “deviant” behaviors within the standard view of rationality, defined in terms of probability theory, logic and rational choice theory, economists and psychologists tend to inject some psychology into the rational choice framework. In contrast, we propose to start afresh: We put forth the thesis that humans' social intelligence is not qualitatively different from their nonsocial intelligence, and that important aspects of both kinds of intelligence can be modeled in terms of boundedly rational fast and frugal heuristics. These heuristics can be ecologically and socially rational in that they exploit the structure of physical and social environments as well as evolved capacities to foster performance both in games against nature and in social games.

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2009-11-01T05:00:00Z

By: Monique M. H. Pollman and Catrin Finkenauer

Understanding is at the heart of intimate relationships. Itis unclear, however, whether understanding—partners’subjective feeling that they understand each other—orknowledge—partners’ accurate knowledge of each other—ismore important for relationship well-being. The present articlepits these two types of understanding against each other andinvestigates their effects on relationship well-being. In aprospective study among 199 newlywed couples, partners’self-reported and perceived understanding and their knowledgein different domains were assessed. Understanding was independentof knowledge. Self-reported and perceived understanding predictedrelationship well-being but neither type of knowledge did. Thus,subjectively feeling that one understands and is understoodby one’s partner appears to be more important to relationshipwell-being than actually knowing and being known by one’spartner.

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Toward a Relativity Theory of Rationality

2009-11-01T05:00:00Z

2009-10-01T05:00:00Z

by Wade Davis

"Over the past decade, many of us have been alarmed to learn of the rapidly accelerating extinction of our planet's diverse flora and fauna. But how many of us know that our human cultural diversity is also going extinct at a shocking rate? Biologists estimate that 18% of mammals and 11% of birds are threatened, while botanists anticipate the loss of 8% of flora. Meanwhile, of the 7,000 languages in the world today, 50% will disappear in our lifetime. Languages are merely the canaries in the coalmine: what of the poetry, songs, knowledge, and ways of seeing encoded in these disappearing voices?

In The Wayfinders, acclaimed anthropologist Wade Davis offers a gripping account of this urgent crisis. He leads us on a fascinating tour through a handful of indigenous cultures and worldviews while reminding us of the encroaching dangers posed by unchecked globalization. An enlightening, awe-inspiring, and cautionary look at vanishing cultures and languages from one of the world's most celebrated and distinguished anthropologists."

Link to the publisher.

2009-09-30T22:00:00Z

By Konrad Banicki. The main purpose of this article is to undertake a conceptual investigation of the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm: a psychological project initiated by Paul Baltes and intended to study the complex phenomenon of wisdom. Firstly, in order to provide a wider perspective for the subsequent analyses, a short historical sketch is given. Secondly, a meta-theoretical issue of the degree to which the subject matter of the Baltesian study can be identified with the traditional philosophical wisdom is addressed. The main result yielded by a careful conceptual analysis is that the philosophical and psychological concepts of wisdom, though not entirely the same, are at least parallel. Finally, one of the revealed aspects of the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm, i.e. its relative neglect of the non-cognitive and personal aspects of wisdom is brought to the fore. This deficiency, it is suggested, can be remedied by the application of the virtue ethics' conceptual framework.

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Fitness “kinematics”: biological function, altruism, and organism–environment development

2009-09-01T05:00:00Z

by Marshall Abrams

Abstract: It’s recently been argued that biological fitness can’t change over the course of an organism’s life as a result of organisms’ behaviors. However, some characterizations of biological function and biological altruism tacitly or explicitly assume that an effect of a trait can change an organism’s fitness. In the first part of the paper, I explain that the core idea of changing fitness can be understood in terms of conditional probabilities defined over sequences of events in an organism’s life. The result is a notion of “conditional fitness” which is static but which captures intuitions about apparent behavioral effects on fitness. The second part of the paper investigates the possibility of providing a systematic foundation for conditional fitness in terms of spaces of sequences of states of an organism and its environment. I argue that the resulting “organism–environment history conception” helps unify diverse biological perspectives, and may provide part of a metaphysics of natural selection.

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Autonomy, Experience, and Reflection. On a Neglected Aspect of Personal Autonomy

2009-09-01T05:00:00Z

By Claudia Blöser, Aron Schöpf and Marcus Willaschek

The aim of this paper is to suggest that a necessary condition of autonomy has not been sufficiently recognized in the literature: the capacity to critically reflect on one’s practical attitudes (desires, preferences, values, etc.) in the light of new experiences. It will be argued that most prominent accounts of autonomy—ahistorical as well as history-sensitive—have either altogether failed to recognize this condition or at least failed to give an explicit account of it.

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The Validity of a New, Self-report Measure of Multiple Intelligence

2009-09-01T05:00:00Z

By Adrian Furnham

In all, 187 participants completed a new, self-report measure of eight multiple intelligences (Haselbauer 2005), a General Knowledge test (Irwing et al. Personality and Individual Differences 30:857–871, 2001), a measure of Approaches to Learning Styles (Biggs 1987), a measure of the Big Five personality traits (Costa and McCrae 1992), as well as gave their own estimated scores on the Gardner (1999) multiple intelligences. Alpha co-efficients were modest with only three of the eight test-derived, multiple intelligence scores being over .70. ‘Linguistic’ and Mathematical intelligence alone were correlated with General Knowledge. Five of the eight ‘intelligences’ were correlated both with Extraversion and Openness. Regressions indicated that ‘Intrapersonal intelligence’ was closely linked with Stability and Conscientiousness; ‘Interpersonal intelligence’ with Extraversion; ‘Linguistic intelligence’ with Openness; ‘Mathematical intelligence’ with Agreeableness and Conscientiousness. Correlations between self-estimated and test-derived emotional intelligence showed correlations ranging from r = .18 to r = .56 for similar type ‘intelligences’. This study provides modest evidence for the concurrent and construct validity of this measure. It requires more psychometric evidence of validity before it is used.

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Varieties of (Scientific) Creativity: A Hierarchical Model of Domain-Specific Disposition, Development, and Achievement

2009-09-01T05:00:00Z

Dean Keith Simonton

Prior research supports the inference that scientific disciplines can be ordered into a hierarchy ranging from the "hard" natural sciences to the "soft" social sciences. This ordering corresponds with such objective criteria as disciplinary consensus, knowledge obsolescence rate, anticipation frequency, theories-to-laws ratio, lecture disfluency, and age at recognition. It is then argued that this hierarchy can be extrapolated to encompass the humanities and arts and interpolated within specific domains to accommodate contrasts in subdomains (e.g., revolutionary versus normal science). This expanded and more finely differentiated hierarchy is then shown to have a partial psychological basis in terms of dispositional traits (e.g., psychopathology) and developmental experiences (e.g., family background). This demonstration then leads to three hypotheses about how a creator's domain-specific impact depends on his or her disposition and development: the domain-progressive, domain-typical, and domain-regressive creator hypotheses. Studies published thus far lend the most support to the domain-regressive creator hypothesis. In particular, major contributors to a domain are more likely to have dispositional traits and developmental experiences most similar to those that prevail in a domain lower in the disciplinary hierarchy. However, some complications to this generalization suggest the need for more research on the proposed hierarchical model.

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What Do ‘We’ Know That ‘They’ Don’t? Sociologists’ versus Non-Sociologists’ Knowledge

2009-09-01T05:00:00Z

Anne Mesny

This paper attempts to clarify or to reposition some of the controversies generated by Burawoy’s defense of public sociology and by his vision of the mutually stimulating relationship between the different forms of sociology. Before arguing if, why, and how, sociology should or could be more ‘public’, it might be useful to reflect upon what it is we think we, as sociologists, know that ‘lay people’ do not. This paper thus explores the public sociology debate’s epistemological core, namely the issue of the relationship between sociologists’ and non-sociologists’ knowledge of the social world. Four positions regarding the status of sociologists’ knowledge versus lay people’s knowledge are explored: superiority (sociologists’ knowledge of the social world is more accurate, objective and reflexive than lay people’s knowledge, thanks to science’s methods and norms), homology (when they are made explicit, lay theories about the social world often parallel social scientists’ theories), complementarity (lay people’s and social scientists’ knowledge complement one another. The former’s local, embedded knowledge is essential to the latter’s general, disembedded knowledge), and circularity (sociologists’ knowledge continuously infuses commonsensical knowledge, and scientific knowledge about the social world is itself rooted in common sense knowledge. Each form of knowledge feeds the other). For each of these positions, implications are drawn regarding the terms, possibilities and conditions of a dialogue between sociologists and their publics, especially if we are to take the circularity thesis seriously. Conclusions point to the accountability we face towards the people we study, and to the idea that sociology is always performative, a point that has, to some extent, been obscured by Burawoy’s distinctions between professional, critical, policy and public sociologies.

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The Unconscious Eye Opener: Pupil Dilation Reveals Strategic Recruitment of Resources Upon Presentation of Subliminal Reward Cues

2009-09-01T05:00:00Z

Erik Bijleveld, Ruud Custers, and Henk Aarts

No abstract available.

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2009-09-01T05:00:00Z

By Grégoire Mallard, Michèle Lamont, Joshua Guetzkow

Epistemological differences fuel continuous and frequently divisive debates in the social sciences and the humanities. Sociologists have yet to consider how such differences affect peer evaluation. The empirical literature has studied distributive fairness, but neglected how epistemological differences affect perception of fairness in decision making. The normative literature suggests that evaluators should overcome their epistemological differences by ‘‘translating’’ their preferred standards into general criteria of evaluation. However, little is known about how procedural fairness actually operates. Drawing on eighty-one interviews with panelists serving on five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions in the social sciences and the humanities, we show that (1) Evaluators generally draw on four epistemological styles to make arguments in favor of and against proposals. These are the constructivist, comprehensive, positivist, and utilitarian styles; and (2) Peer reviewers define a fair decision-making process as one in which panelists engage in ‘‘cognitive contextualization,’’ that is, use epistemological styles most appropriate to the field or discipline of the proposal under review.

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Empathic forecasting: How do we predict other people's feelings?

2009-09-01T05:00:00Z

By Pollmann, Monique; Finkenauer, Catrin

When making affective forecasts, people commit the impact bias. They overestimate the impact an emotional event has on their affective experience. In three studies we show that people also commit the impact bias when making empathic forecasts, affective forecasts for someone else. They overestimate the impact an emotional event has on someone else's affective experience (Study 1), they do so for friends and strangers (Study 2), and they do so when other sources of information are available (Study 3). Empathic forecasting accuracy, the correlation between one person's empathic forecast and another person's actual affective experience, was lower than between-person forecasting correspondence, the correlation between one person's empathic forecast and another person's affective forecast. Empathic forecasts do not capture other people's actual experience very well but are similar to what other people forecast for themselves. This may enhance understanding between people.

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Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

The Romance of Learning from Disagreement. The Effect of Cohesiveness and Disagreement on Knowledge Sharing Behavior and Individual Performance Within Teams

2009-09-01T05:00:00Z

By Marianne van Woerkom and Karin Sanders | Journal of Business and Psychology

2009-08-01T05:00:00Z

By Angela M. Brant and et al.

"The genetic and environmental trends in IQ development were assessed in 483 same-sex twin pairs in the Colorado longitudinal twin study using maximum-likelihood model-fitting analysis. The twins were assessed periodically from ages 1 to 16. Results show a decreasing influence of shared environment and an increasing influence of heritability across development, with large and increasing age to age stability of genetic influences. Non-shared environment contributes almost exclusively to age to age change. Similar analyses were conducted designating the top 15% of the sample as having high IQ at each age. The developmental etiology of high IQ did not significantly differ from that found for the continuous measure in this relatively novel analysis. These results demonstrate early stability in etiological influences on IQ and have potential implications for gene-finding efforts, suggesting that samples selected for high IQ can be used to find genetic variation that will be applicable to the full range of the IQ distribution, although conclusive demonstration that the same genes are indeed involved was beyond the scope of this study."

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Discounting future green: Money versus the environment

2009-08-01T05:00:00Z

In 3 studies, participants made choices between hypothetical financial, environmental, and health gains and losses that took effect either immediately or with a delay of 1 or 10 years. In all 3 domains, choices indicated that gains were discounted more than losses. There were no significant differences in the discounting of monetary and environmental outcomes, but health gains were discounted more and health losses were discounted less than gains or losses in the other 2 domains. Correlations between implicit discount rates for these different choices suggest that discount rates are influenced more by the valence of outcomes (gains vs. losses) than by domain (money, environment, or health). Overall, results indicate that when controlling as many factors as possible, at short to medium delays, environmental outcomes are discounted in a similar way to financial outcomes, which is good news for researchers and policy makers alike.

by Hardisty, David J.; Weber, Elke U.

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Pushing moral buttons: The interaction between personal force and intention in moral judgment

2009-08-01T05:00:00Z

By Joshua D. Greene, et al. (Joshua Green is a wisdom grantee).

In some cases people judge it morally acceptable to sacrifice one person’s life in order to save several other lives, while in other similar cases they make the opposite judgment. Researchers have identified two general factors that may explain this phenomenon at the stimulus level: (1) the agent’s intention (i.e. whether the harmful event is intended as a means or merely foreseen as a side-effect) and (2) whether the agent harms the victim in a manner that is relatively “direct” or “personal”. Here we integrate these two classes of findings. Two experiments examine a novel personalness/directness factor that we call personal force, present when the force that directly impacts the victim is generated by the agent’s muscles (e.g., in pushing). Experiments 1a and b demonstrate the influence of personal force on moral judgment, distinguishing it from physical contact and spatial proximity. Experiments 2a and b demonstrate an interaction between personal force and intention, whereby the effect of personal force depends entirely on intention. These studies also introduce a method for controlling for people’s real-world expectations in decisions involving potentially unrealistic hypothetical dilemmas.

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Social Science & Human Flourishing: The Scottish Enlightenment & Today

2009-08-01T05:00:00Z

By Ryan P. Hanley, a wisdom grantee.

The Scottish Enlightenment is commonly identified as the birthplace of modern social science. But while Scottish and contemporary social science share a commitment to empiricism, contemporary insistence on the separation of empirical analysis from normative judgment invokes a distinction unintelligible to the Scots. In this respect the methods of modern social science seem an attenuation of those of Scottish social science. A similar attenuation can be found in the modern aspiration to judge the outcome of institutions or processes only with regard to efficiency. While the tenet that efficiency is preferable to inefficiency is central to Scottish social thought, the Scots regarded maximization of quantifiable returns as only one among three ends that well-functioning institutions and processes promote. Scottish social science speaks also of virtue and liberty where ours speaks only of utility. This essay develops these differences in three sections. Its first section compares Scottish and contemporary understandings of social science methods. Its second section examines how these differing methodologies inform their differing conceptions of human flourishing and particularly led Scottish social science to focus on virtue and freedom in addition to wealth. The essay concludes by calling attention to three movements in social science today which might help us recover the best features of Scottish social science.

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Image from Flickr Creative Commons.

2009-08-01T05:00:00Z

George I. Christopoulos, Philippe N. Tobler, Peter Bossaerts, Raymond J. Dolan, and Wolfram Schultz

Decision making under risk is central to human behavior. Economicdecision theory suggests that value, risk, and risk aversioninfluence choice behavior. Although previous studies identifiedneural correlates of decision parameters, the contribution ofthese correlates to actual choices is unknown. In two differentexperiments, participants chose between risky and safe options.We identified discrete blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) correlatesof value and risk in the ventral striatum and anterior cingulate,respectively. Notably, increasing inferior frontal gyrus activityto low risk and safe options correlated with higher risk aversion.Importantly, the combination of these BOLD responses effectivelydecoded the behavioral choice. Striatal value and cingulaterisk responses increased the probability of a risky choice,whereas inferior frontal gyrus responses showed the inverserelationship. These findings suggest that the BOLD correlatesof decision factors are appropriate for an ideal observer todetect behavioral choices. More generally, these biologicaldata contribute to the validity of the theoretical decisionparameters for actual decisions under risk.

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Mindfulness and Psychotherapy

2009-08-01T05:00:00Z

By Ann Gleig

"This edited collection provides a useful and clear overview of the increasing adoption of mindfulness practice by psychotherapeutic and medical communities. Defining mindfulness as the "awareness of present experience with acceptance," the central question of this volume is how to integrate mindfulness into different schools of psychotherapy, such as cognitive-behavioral, humanistic, and psychodynamic. Eleven chapters thoughtfully interweave clinical vignettes, empirical data, and practical instructions to apply mindfulness to issues such as depression, anxiety, and trauma and to promote mindfulness practice for both therapist and patient. What makes a book written primarily "by clinicians for clinicians" interesting to religious studies scholars? Two themes are particularly relevant: first, as Buddhist scholar Oldenski notes in his solid overview of the traditional Buddhist context of mindfulness, the contemporary appearance of mindfulness in Western psychotherapy is a significant instance of the modern cultural adaptation of Buddhism. Second, several of the essays imply that a mindfulness-based psychotherapy can itself become a spiritual practice in fostering qualities such as connection, acceptance, love, and truth. The question remains as to whether the psychotherapeutic embrace of mindfulness should be problematized for diluting Buddhism or celebrated for elevating psychotherapy. One thing is clear though: it is the commitment to the alleviation of suffering that fundamentally unites the Buddha (framed in these essays as essentially a psychologist) and contemporary psychotherapists."

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Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right

2009-08-01T05:00:00Z

By Terry Regier and Paul Kay

"The Whorf hypothesis holds that we view the world filtered through the semantic categories of our native language. Over the years, consensus has oscillated between embrace and dismissal of this hypothesis. Here, we review recent findings on the naming and perception of color, and argue that in this semantic domain the Whorf hypothesis is half right, in two different ways: (1) language influences color perception primarily in half the visual field, and (2) color naming across languages is shaped by both universal and language-specific forces. To the extent that these findings generalize to other semantic domains they suggest a possible resolution of the debate over the Whorf hypothesis."

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Nicholas Maxwell in Context: The Relationship of His Wisdom Theses to the Contemporary Global Interest in Wisdom

2009-08-01T03:00:00Z

This chapter in Leemon McHenry's book acknowledges Nicholas Maxwell's quest since the early 1980s:

Maxwell has called for a shift in academic focus from knowledge acquisition for its own sake to “what is of value in life” for human beings. Knowledge acquisition is to continue, of course, but now in the service of realizing that which is widely beneficial. As he has put it: “The basic task of rational inquiry is to help us develop wiser ways of living, wiser institutions, customs and social relations, a wiser world.”

Macdonald then goes on to show that while the revolution of academia that Maxwell hoped for has not occurred, there has been a serious evolution of academia in that direction.

The full-text article is online.