There is an ever-growing literature on what exactly the condition or criterion is that enables some (but not all) debunking arguments to undermine our beliefs. In this paper, I develop a novel schema for debunking argumentation, arguing that debunking arguments generally have a simple and valid form, but that whether or not they are sound depends on the particular aetiological explanation which the debunker provides in order to motivate acceptance of the individual premises. The schema has three unique features: (1) (...) it satisfies important desiderata for what any acceptable account of debunking would have to look like; (2) it is consistent with the inductively supported claim that there is no special debunking principle; and (3) it coheres with the plausible claim that what makes debunking arguments unique is that they rely on so-called genealogies for the justification of their premises. (shrink)

I have attempted to clarify some of the pathways in the development of Darwin's thinking. The foregoing examples of influence by no means include all that can be found by comparing Darwin's writings with Humboldt's. However, the above examples seem adequate to show the nature and extent of this influence. It now seems clear that Humboldt not only, as had been previously known, inspired Darwin to make a voyage of exploration, but also provided him with his basic orientation concerning how (...) and what to observe and how to write about it. An important part of what Darwin assimilated from Humboldt was an appreciation of population analysis as a tool for assessing the state of societies and of the benefits and hardships which these societies can expect to receive from the living world around them.Darwin exhibited in his Journal of Researches a casual interest in the economic and political conditions of the countries he visited, but these considerations were much less important to him than to Humboldt. Instead, Darwin, with the assistance of Lyell's Principles of Geology, shifted from Humboldt's largely economic framework to a biological one built around the species question. This shift led Darwin away from a consideration of how the population biology of animals was related to man's economy to focus instead upon how population biology fitted into the economy of nature.Humboldt's Personal Narrative served very well as a model for Darwin's Journal of Researches, thereby helping Darwin gain scientific eminence. The Journal of Researches, like virtually all of Humboldt's writings, was a contribution to scientific orthodoxy. But Darwin had, along the way, acquired an urge to do more than just add his building blocks to the orthodox scientific edifice. He decided to rearrange those blocks of knowledge into a different structure, and for that task neither Humboldt's Personal Narrative nor any other of his works could serve as a model. Humboldt had lacked the confidence which Darwin needed that biogeography and the origin of species could be understood. Humboldt had not explored very far the possible connections between biology and geology. Nor had he provided a general synthetic account of population biology. Had he done so, he might have been more explicit about the extent of his endorsement of Malthus. But even if he had, Humboldt's strong orientation toward cooperation would probably have inhibited his recognition of the importance of competition in nature.Lyell, who had also benefited from reading Humboldt, gave Darwin insights that were lacking in Humboldt's Personal Narrative. Lyell admirably demonstrated how stratigraphy, paleontology, biogeography, and population biology could be interrelated, and his reasons for doing so were essentially the same as Darwin's. Lyell's understanding of biogeography and ecology came from the writings of Augustin-Pyramus de Candolle as much as from Humboldt's, and from the former Lyell derived an appreciation for the importance of competition and also a confidence that the mysteries of biogeography could be explained.117 Furthermore, Lyell's discussion of all these subjects and also of evolution in his Principles of Geology is a good synthetic argument that was the ideal model for Darwin's greatest book.Darwin, having become convinced that species change through time, was able to synthesize in his mind the contributions which he had derived from the writings of Humboldt and Lyell as they applied to the species question. When Darwin wrote his Journal of Researches there were two large gaps in his thinking about evolution that bothered him—the mechanism of evolution and the causes of extinction. It was only after reading Malthus in 1838 that he realized, as Lyell had more or less pointed out, how important was competition in nature. He now had the general outlines for his theory, and in the 1845 abridged edition of his Journal, now retitled The Voyage of the Beagle, he inserted a fuller discussion of competition in nature which showed his awareness of its importance as an ecological factor.118. (shrink)

A theory of representation is incomplete if it states “representations areX” whereXcan be symbols, cell assemblies, functional states, or the flock of birds fromTheaetetus, without explaining the nature of the link between the universe ofXs and the world. Amit's thesis, equating representations with reverberations in Hebbian cell assemblies, will only be considered a solution to the problem of representation when it is complemented by a theory of how a reverberation in the brain can be a representation of anything.

Geoffrey Miller argues that we can account for the evolution of human art and altruism via the action of sexual selection. He identifies five characteristics supposedly unique to sexual adaptations: fitness indicating cost; involvement in courtship; heritability; variability; and sexual differentiation. Miller claims that art and altruism possess these characteristics. I argue that not only does he not demonstrate that art and altruism possess these characteristics, one can also explain the origins of altruism via a form of group selection and (...) traits with the five characteristics in terms of a process I call "cultural sexual selection.". (shrink)

Reydon and Scholz raise doubts about the Darwinian status of organizational ecology by arguing that Darwinian principles are not applicable to organizational populations. Although their critique of organizational ecology’s typological essentialism is correct, they go on to reject the Darwinian status of organizational populations. This paper claims that the replicator-interactor distinction raised in modern philosophy of biology but overlooked for discussion by Reydon and Scholz provides a way forward. It is possible to conceptualize evolving Darwinian populations providing that the inheritance (...) mechanism is appropriately specified. By this approach, adaptation and selection are no longer dichotomized, and the evolutionary significance of knowledge transmission is highlighted. (shrink)

Interdisciplinarity is one of the features of modern science, defined as blurring the boundaries of disciplines and overcoming their limitations or excessive specialization by borrowing methods from one discipline into another, integrating different theoretical assumptions, and using the same concepts and terms. Often, theoretical knowledge of one discipline and technological advances of another are combined within an interdisciplinary science, and new branches or disciplines may also emerge. Biosemiotics, a field that arose at the crossroads of biology, semiotics, linguistics, and philosophy, (...) enables scientists to borrow theoretical assumptions from semiotics and extend them to different biological theories. The latter applies especially to extended synthesis, wherein culture is viewed as one of the factors influencing evolution. In the present research, the semiotic system of Ukrainian folk ornament is analyzed through the theory of fractals, key features of which are recursion and self-similarity. As a result, an assumption is made about the fractal structure of culture and social life on a conceptual level. What follows is a discussion of how this assumption can contribute to the multilevel selection theory, one of the foundations of extended synthesis, which employs the concept of self-similarity at all levels of the biological hierarchy. (shrink)

James Rachels argued against the possibility of finding some moral capacity in humans that confers upon them a unique dignity. His argument contends that Darwinism challenges such attempts, because Darwinism predicts that any morally valuable capacity able to bestow a unique dignity is likely present to a degree within both humans and non-human animals alike. I make the case, however, that some of Darwin's own thoughts regarding the nature of conscience provide a springboard for criticising Rachels's claim here. Using Darwin's (...) thoughts regarding conscience, I begin the project of grounding a revised account of human dignity in the human tendency to enshrine products of conscience within institutions. Specifically, I argue that this new account of human dignity is partly contingent upon humans creating institutions morally respectful of the values present within non-human nature. (shrink)

In every known human society, some kind—usually many kinds—of art is practiced, frequently with much vigor and pleasure, so that one could at least hypothesize that “artifying” or “artification” is a characteristic behavior of our species. Yet human ethologists and sociobiologists have been conspicuously unforthcoming about this observably widespread and valued practice, for a number of stated and unstated reasons. The present essay is a position paper that offers an overview and analysis of conceptual issues and problems inherent in viewing (...) art and/or aesthetics as adaptive, and it presents a speculative account of a human behavior of art. (shrink)

Aesthetics, like other philosophical subjects, has historically made use of «top down» methods. Recent discoveries in genetics, evolutionary psychology, paleoarchaeology, and neuroscience call for a new «naturalistic» or «bottom up» perspective. Combining these fields with behavioral biology and ethnoarts studies, I offer seven premises that underlie a new understanding of evolved predispositions of the brain/mind that all artists use to attract attention, sustain interest, and create, mold, and shape emotion. I describe aesthetic «primitives» in somatic and behavioral modalities, suggesting that (...) these were present in early sapiens and continue to influence human art making and aesthetic response today. Keywords: Aesthetic Mind; Neuroaesthetics, evolutionary aesthetics, cognitive aesthetics, evolution of art. (shrink)

Environmental ethics is generally searching for the intrinsic value in natural beings. However, there are very few holistic models trying to reflect the various dimensions of the experience-to-be a natural being. We are searching for that intrinsic value, in order to determine which species are holders of rights. In this article, I suggest a set of moral and rational principles to be used for identifying the intrinsic value of a given species and for comparing it to that of other species.

Environmental ethics is generally searching for the intrinsic value in natural beings. However, there are very few holistic models trying to reflect the various dimensions of the experience‐to‐be a natural being. We are searching for that intrinsic value, in order to determine which species are holders of rights. In this article, I suggest a set of moral and rational principles to be used for identifying the intrinsic value of a given species and for comparing it to that of other species.

Three issues are addressed in this commentary. (1) Wilkins & Wakefield are commended for placing the complex behavior they discuss within an evolutionary matrix. (2) They err on a number of points in regard to their treatment of this complex behavior. These involve (a) their emphasis on the evolution of conceptual structure rather than language, (b) their equation of meaning with reference, (c) their minimalist view of learning theory, and (d) their separation of the evolution of speech from that of (...) language. (3) They adopt a framework for neural preconditions that has been clearly discredited on both behavioral and neuroanatomical grounds. Finally, recent research involving modern neuroimaging techniques casts further doubt on the authors' postulated functions for the neural areas they discuss. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to defend, contra Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini (F&PP), that the theory of natural selection (NS) is a perfectly bona fide empirical unified explanatory theory. F&PP claim there is nothing non-truistic, counterfactual-supporting, of an “adaptive” character and common to different explanations of trait evolution. In his debate with Fodor, and in other works, Sober defends NS but claims that, compared with classical mechanics (CM) and other standard theories, NS is peculiar in that its explanatory models are (...) a priori (a trait shared with few other theories). We argue that NS provides perfectly bona fide adaptive explanations of phenotype evolution, unified by a common natural-selection guiding principle. First, we introduce the debate and reply to F&PP’s main argument against NS. Then, by reviewing different examples and analyzing Fisher’s model in detail, we show that NS explanations of phenotypic evolution share a General Natural Selection Principle. Third, by elaborating an analogy with CM, we argue against F&PP’s claim that such a principle would be a mere truism and thus explanatorily useless, and against Sober’s thesis that NS models/explanations have a priori components that are not present in CM and other common empirical theories. Irrespective of differences in other respects, the NS guiding principle has the same epistemic status as other guiding principles in other highly unified theories such as CM. We argue that only by pointing to the guiding principle-driven nature that it shares with CM and other highly unified theories, something no-one has done yet in this debate, one can definitively show that NS is not defective in F&PP’s sense: in the respects relevant to the debate, Natural Selection is as defective and as epistemically peculiar as Classical Mechanics and other never questioned theories. (shrink)

The nineteenth century saw the rise of Darwinism as a new paradigm for the study of nature and man mans an integral part thereof. Many scholars were intent on removing the abstract principles and universal truths of early modern philosophy in favour of understanding man's nature through more scientifically-based methods. Walter Bagehot (1826?1877) was one of the leading exponents of this view. Our focus is on one of Bagehot's famous books, Physics and Politics, or thoughts on the application of the (...) principles of `natural selection' and `inheritance' to political society. Physics and Politics can be seen as one of the most remarkable attempts to think the intertwining of politics and Darwinism. In our paper, we want to examine Bagehot's efforts to apply natural sciences to politics and philosophy and his focus on progress and the idea that such progress is inherited over generations. We want to examine in what way a Darwinian framework of thinking is actually used in Physics and Politics. Our conclusion is that perhaps Physics and Politics established a framework for the application of biological principles to political society, but it definitely did not do so for the application of Darwin's principle of natural selection. (shrink)

: This essay considers the important role attributed to education in the writings of nineteenth-century feminist Harriet Taylor Mill. Taylor Mill connected ignorance to inequality between the sexes. She called up the specter of regression into lowness and ignorance when she associated feminism with progress. As she stressed the importance of education, she constructed an 'other' to feminism, variously associated with lowness, poverty, and the primitive. She made a case for the advantages of civilization (education, enfranchisement, equality) to be opened (...) up to women. Yet Taylor Mill's position that the ignorant poor, like all humans, should be in a position of so-called "perfect equality" drifted intermittently into the view that the elevation of women to perfect equality would refine and elevate the lower classes. (shrink)

This essay considers the important role attributed to education in the writings of nineteenth-century feminist Harriet Taylor Mill. Taylor Mill connected ignorance to inequality between the sexes. She called up the specter of regression into lowness and ignorance when she associated feminism with progress. As she stressed the importance of education, she constructed an‘other’ to feminism, variously associated with lowness, poverty, and the primitive. She made a case for the advantages of civilization to be opened up to women. Yet Taylor (...) Mill's position that the ignorant poor, like all humans, should be in a position of so-called “perfect equality” drifted intermittently into the view that the elevation of women to perfect equality would refine and elevate the lower classes. (shrink)

This essay considers the important role attributed to education in the writings of nineteenth-century feminist Harriet Taylor Mill. Taylor Mill connected ignorance to inequality between the sexes. She called up the specter of regression into lowness and ignorance when she associated feminism with progress. As she stressed the importance of education, she constructed an‘other’ to feminism, variously associated with lowness, poverty, and the primitive. She made a case for the advantages of civilization to be opened up to women. Yet Taylor (...) Mill's position that the ignorant poor, like all humans, should be in a position of so-called “perfect equality” drifted intermittently into the view that the elevation of women to perfect equality would refine and elevate the lower classes. (shrink)

An avid reader of Nietzsche, the German radical feminist Helene Stöcker referred in 1893 to the Verfrühung of the modern woman, her prematurity. She used references to Mill, Bebel, Darwin, Galton, and Nietzsche among others to develop a concept of women's untimely modernity. This paper considers how a number of concepts of time, transformation, biological futurity, and putative agency over nature became, for Stöcker, the basis for a feminist claim to autonomy, agency, and reproductive rights. The paper goes on to (...) ask how some of these concepts and their context could also have provided the implicit resources to resist their conversion by Stöcker. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to accentuate those features that distinguish Levinasian ethics from the egoism that prevails in management thought. It focuses on differences in the constitution of the subject, how Levinas seeks an ethics that goes beyond the subjective point of view that structures the self as being self-present, self-interested, free and systematic and relates to others through this perspective. Levinas's concepts are critically discussed by reading these alongside Jacques Lacan and Adam Smith, which enable observations (...) to be made about Levinas's concept of the Same and about the difference he effects between human and the nonhuman. It is concluded that it can be easy to misread Levinas in key respects in ways that may act to assimilate his thought to egoism. (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to accentuate those features that distinguish Levinasian ethics from the egoism that prevails in management thought. It focuses on differences in the constitution of the subject, how Levinas seeks an ethics that goes beyond the subjective point of view that structures the self as being self‐present, self‐interested, free and systematic and relates to others through this perspective. Levinas's concepts are critically discussed by reading these alongside Jacques Lacan and Adam Smith, which enable observations (...) to be made about Levinas's concept of the Same and about the difference he effects between human and the nonhuman. It is concluded that it can be easy to misread Levinas in key respects in ways that may act to assimilate his thought to egoism. (shrink)

The cell assembly is an important concept for cognitive psychology. Cognitive processing will to a large extent depend on the relations that can exist between different assemblies. A potential relation between assemblies can already be seen in the occurrence of (classical) conditioning. However, the resulting associations between assemblies only produce behavioristic processing or so-called regular computation. Higher-level cognitive abilities most likely result from nonregular computation. I discuss the possibility of this form of computation in terms of cell assemblies.

The intentional stance is the strategy of prediction and explanation that attributes beliefs, desires, and other states to systems and predicts future behavior from what it would be rational for an agent to do, given those beliefs and desires. Any system whose performance can be thus predicted and explained is an intentional system, whatever its innards. The strategy of treating parts of the world as intentional systems is the foundation of but is also exploited in artificial intelligence and cognitive science (...) more generally, as well as in evolutionary theory. An analysis of the role of the intentional stance and its presuppositions supports a naturalistic theory of mental states and events, their content or intentionality, and the relation between levels of explanation and neurophysiological or mechanistic levels of explanation. As such, the analysis of the intentional stance grounds a theory of the mind and its relation to the body. (shrink)

W&S correctly ask if groups can be like individuals in the harmony and cooperation of their parts, but in their answer, they ignore the importance of the difference between genetically related and unrelated components, and also misconstrue the import of the Hutterites.

The aim of this paper is to explore a new framework for personality assessment that may function as sanity nosology of personality traits: the Positive Personality Model. The recent publication of DSM-5 created the opportunity to assess personality traits as dimensional constructs (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). In Section III, five maladaptive personality traits are proposed as the maladaptive versions of Five Factor Model (FFM) traits (Costa and McCrae, 1985). This approach draws on the existing idea of conceptualizing pathological and typical (...) personality traits as part of a continuum. It places DSM-5’s maladaptive traits in a sickness pole and FFM’s traits in a “typical” pole. This spectrum, however, does not include a positive perspective that represents healthy behavior: a sanity nosology. The Positive Traits Inventory-5 (PTI-5; de la Iglesia and Castro Solano, 2018) is a measure designed to assess the positive reverse of the Personality Inventory for DSM-5-Adult (PID-5; Krueger, Derringer, Markon, Watson and Skodol, 2013). The 220 positive personality criteria were studied psychometrically using a sample of 1902 Argentinean adults from the general population (Mage = 39.10, SD = 13.81, Min = 18, Max = 83; 50.1% females, 49.9% males). Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses resulted in a five-factor solution. The dimensions were labeled Sprightliness, Integrity, Serenity, Moderation, and Humanity and subsumed under the denomination of Positive Personality Model (PPM). Analyses of convergent validity provided some grounds for interpreting the five positive traits as positive versions of the pathological traits and the typical traits. When tested for its predictive capability on mental health, the PPM outperformed the variance explained by the FFM. It is concluded that the PPM may constitute a positive pole in the continuum of personality traits –possibly functioning as a sanity nosology– and that it is somewhat more related to optimal functioning than to typical trait models. The PPM should be confirmed in other populations, its predictive capability ought to be tested with other relevant variables, and longitudinal studies should be done to analyze the stability of the traits over time. (shrink)

Psychological evidence suggests that laypeople understand the world around them in terms of intuitive ontologies which describe broad categories of objects in the world, such as ‘person’, ‘artefact’ and ‘animal’. However, because intuitive ontologies are the result of natural selection, they only need to be adaptive; this does not guarantee that the knowledge they provide is a genuine reflection of causal mechanisms in the world. As a result, science has parted ways with intuitive ontologies. Nevertheless, since the brain is evolved (...) to understand objects in the world according to these categories, we can expect that they continue to play a role in scientific understanding. Taking the case of human evolution, we explore relationships between intuitive ontological and scientific understanding. We show that intuitive ontologies not only shape intuitions on human evolution, but also guide the direction and topics of interest in its research programmes. Elucidating the relationships between intuitive ontologies and science may help us gain a clearer insight into scientific understanding. (shrink)

Despite their divergent metaphysical assumptions, Reformed and evolutionary epistemologists have converged on the notion of proper basicality. Where Reformed epistemologists appeal to God, who has designed the mind in such a way that it successfully aims at the truth, evolutionary epistemologists appeal to natural selection as a mechanism that favors truth-preserving cognitive capacities. This paper investigates whether Reformed and evolutionary epistemological accounts of theistic belief are compatible. We will argue that their chief incompatibility lies in the noetic effects of sin (...) and what may be termed the noetic effects of evolution, systematic tendencies wherein human cognitive faculties go awry. We propose a reconceptualization of the noetic effects of sin to mitigate this tension. (shrink)

In this paper, we distinguish two different approaches to cultural evolution. One approach is meme-centered, the other organism-centered. We argue that in situations in which the meme- and organism-centered approaches are competing alternatives, the organism-centered approach is in many ways superior. Furthermore, the organism-centered approach can go a long way toward understanding the evolution of institutions. Although the organism-centered approach is preferable for a broad class of situations, we do leave room for super-organismic or sub-organismic explanations of some cultural phenomena.

How music and speech evolved is a mystery. Several hypotheses on their origins, including one on their joint origins, have been put forward but rarely tested. Here we report and comment on the first experiment testing the hypothesis that speech and music bifurcated from a common system. We highlight strengths of the reported experiment, point out its relatedness to animal work, and suggest three alternative interpretations of its results. We conclude by sketching a future empirical programme extending this work.

To study animal welfare empirically we need an objective basis for deciding when an animal is suffering. Suffering includes a wide range ofunpleasant emotional states such as fear, boredom, pain, and hunger. Suffering has evolved as a mechanism for avoiding sources ofdanger and threats to fitness. Captive animals often suffer in situations in which they are prevented from doing something that they are highly motivated to do. The an animal is prepared to pay to attain or to escape a situation (...) is an index ofhow the animal about that situation. Withholding conditions or commodities for which an animal shows (i.e., for which it continues to work despite increasing costs) is very likely to cause suffering. In designing environments for animals in zoos, farms, and laboratories, priority should be given to features for which animals show inelastic demand. The care ofanimals can thereby be based on an objective, animal-centered assessment of their needs. (shrink)

Anjan Chatterjee has promoted an analogy between the Bengalese finch and the human artist. With reduced selective pressure from females due to its domestication, the male finch’s song has become more elaborate. Similarly, art’s lack of a practical function facilitates the creative generativity shown by artists. I argue that this analogy is flawed on both sides. Only recently has some art been regarded as non-functional. And the elaboration of the finch’s song is an effect of female selection under the conditions (...) of domestication. (shrink)

Goldstein reported multiple cases of failure to categorise colours in patients that he termed amnesic or anomic aphasics. These patients have a particular difficulty in producing perceptual categories in the absence of other aphasic impairments. We hold that neuropsychological evidence supports the view that the task of colour categorisation is logically impossible without labels.