Yet, in broader terms, formal epistemology is not merely a methodological tool for epistemologists, but a discipline in its own right. On this programmatic view, formal epistemology is an interdisciplinary research program that covers work by philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, statisticians, psychologists, operations researchers, and economists who aim to give mathematical and sometimes computational representations of, along with sound strategies for reasoning about, knowledge, belief, judgment and decision making.

Humans are capable of understanding an incredible variety of actions performed by other humans. Even though these range from primary biological actions, like eating and fleeing, to acts in parliament or in poetry, humans generally can make sense of each other’s actions. Understanding other people’s actions is called action understanding, and it can transcend differences in race, gender, culture, age, and social and historical circumstances. Action understanding is the cognitive ability to make sense of another person’s action by integrating perceptual (...) information about the behavior with knowledge about the immediate and sociocultural contexts of the action and with one’s own experience. Scholars are increasingly dissatisfied with monodisciplinary approaches to understanding human action. Such one-sidedness can rest upon various motives. For example, “hermeneutic interpretations” of action understanding tend to emphasize historical and cultural influences while overlooking that ultimately such influences depend upon individual cognitive processes. This has provoked criticism of the corresponding assumption that humans are born as a “blank slate” and that culture is solely responsible for all cognitive contents. However, such critique in turn easily slides into an overemphasis on the biology of human nature and a denial of sociocultural influences on cognition (Pinker, 2003). Fortunately, recent interdisciplinary endeavors have shown that an interdisciplinary approach is preferable when investigating complex functions like action understanding. The purpose of this chapter is to propose a “mechanism-based explanation” of action understanding that will provide a theoretical framework for integrating various and often conflicting disciplinary insights. (shrink)

Humans are capable of understanding an incredible variety of actions performed by other humans. Even though these range from primary biological actions, like eating and fleeing, to acts in parliament or in poetry, humans generally can make sense of each other’s actions. Action understanding is the cognitive ability to make sense of another person’s action by integrating perceptual information about the behavior with knowledge about the immediate and sociocultural contexts of the action, understanding of relevant meanings and one’s own experience. (...) Given the importance of action understanding in every domain of human life and society, and in light of the complexities that surround it, a comprehensive scientific understanding of this capacity is needed. Scholars are increasingly dissatisfied with monodisciplinary approaches to understanding human action, like when an action is interpreted only in sociocultural terms while overlooking cognitive constraints, or when an action is understood in biological terms while neglecting its psychological impact on the agent. Recent interdisciplinary endeavors demonstrate how an interdisciplinary approach is possible when investigating complex functions like action understanding. Ever more insight is gained in the mutual influences between biological, cognitive and sociocultural processes that together contribute to action and action understanding. The purpose of this chapter is to describe how a ‘mechanistic explanation’, or a ‘mechanism-based explanation’ of action understanding provides a theoretical framework for integrating various and often conflicting disciplinary insights. By applying the heuristics of ‘definition’, ‘decomposition’ and ‘localization’, researchers can determine the phenomenon that they collaboratively investigate while at the same time dividing this task into smaller component tasks of which the results must eventually be put together. Some researchers, for example, can apply a hermeneutic approach to the sociocultural environment in which action understanding takes place, while others aim to specify the cognitive processes or the neuro-electrical pathways that are activated under those conditions. After having presented a step-by-step analysis of an interdisciplinary investigation of action understanding by way of developing a mechanistic explanation the chapter closes with some suggestions for testing its result and mentions some limitations of this approach. (shrink)

What role does “discursive consciousness” play in decision-making? How does it interact with “practical consciousness?” These two questions constitute two important gaps in strong practice theory that extend from Pierre Bourdieu's habitus to Stephen Vaisey's sociological dual-process model and beyond. The goal of this paper is to provide an empirical framework that expands the sociological dual-process model in order to fill these gaps using models from cognitive neuroscience. In particular, I use models of memory and moral judgment that highlight the (...) importance of executive functions and semantic memory. I outline each model as it pertains to the aforementioned gaps in strong practice theory. I then use the models from cognitive neuroscience to create an expanded dual-process model that addresses how and when conscious mental systems override and interact with subconscious mental systems in the use of cultural ends for decision-making. Finally, using this expanded model I address the sociological debate over the use of interview and survey data. My analysis reveals that surveys and interviews both elicit information encoded in declarative memory and differ primarily in the process of information retrieval that is required of respondents. (shrink)

This study investigates the association between work-family conflict and organizational citizenship behavior and examines the mediated role of subjective happiness between and the moderated part of family support. A moderated mediation model is established based on the Conservation of Resources theory. We collected data from 386 employees of nine companies in China. This study shows that the work-family conflict of female professional employees is negatively correlated with organizational citizenship behavior, and that the relationship is mediated by subjective well-being. Furthermore, female (...) professional employees’ family support moderates the effects of work-family conflict on subjective happiness and organizational citizenship behavior, with the relationship weaker when family support is higher. This study enriches the literature on work-family conflict by using family support as a mediating mechanism for work-family conflict. It enhanced our understanding of the influencing mechanisms of organizational citizenship behavior by constructing a more detailed model. (shrink)