Using data collected among the Turkana of Kenya, I investigate specific configurations of actions found in sacrifices.I argue that Turkana sacrifice has specific cognitive effects and that those can be explained in terms of the activation of specific cognitive mechanisms. Turkana sacrifice elicits assumptions about living things and artifacts. It does that in a particular way: Living kinds are used as tools and artifacts, as if endowed with an essence. The systematic combination of such manipulations with ordinary action scripts, reoriented (...) to build ritual sequences, and the display of social orders has important effects for participants' cognition. (shrink)

Research seeking a scientific foundation for the theory of art appreciation has raised controversies at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences. Though equally relevant to a scientific inquiry into art appreciation, psychological and historical approaches to art developed independently and lack a common core of theoretical principles. Historicists argue that psychological and brain sciences ignore the fact that artworks are artifacts produced and appreciated in the context of unique historical situations and artistic intentions. After revealing flaws in the (...) psychological approach, we introduce a psycho-historical framework for the science of art appreciation. This framework demonstrates that a science of art appreciation must investigate how appreciators process causal and historical information to classify and explain their psychological responses to art. Expanding on research about the cognition of artifacts, we identify three modes of appreciation: basic exposure to an artwork, the artistic design stance, and artistic understanding. The artistic design stance, a requisite for artistic understanding, is an attitude whereby appreciators develop their sensitivity to art-historical contexts by means of inquiries into the making, authorship, and functions of artworks. We defend and illustrate the psycho-historical framework with an analysis of existing studies on art appreciation in empirical aesthetics. Finally, we argue that the fluency theory of aesthetic pleasure can be amended to meet the requirements of the framework. We conclude that scientists can tackle fundamental questions about the nature and appreciation of art within the psycho-historical framework. (shrink)

The belief in immanent justice is the expectation that the universe is designed to ensure that evil is punished and virtue rewarded. What makes this belief so ‘natural’? Here, we suggest that this intuition of immanent justice derives from our evolved sense of fairness. In cases where a misdeed is followed by a misfortune, our sense of fairness construes the misfortune as a way to compensate for the misdeed. To test this hypothesis, we designed a set of studies in which (...) we show that people who do not believe in immanent justice are nonetheless implicitly influenced by intuitions of immanent justice. Strikingly, this effect disappears when the misfortune is disproportionate compared to the misdeed: In this case, justice is not restored and participants lose the intuition of immanent justice. Following recent theories of religion, we suggest that this intuition contributes to the cultural success of beliefs in immanent justice. (shrink)

While cognitive scientists increase their tentative incursions in the social domains traditionally reserved for social scientists, most sociologists and anthropologists keep decrying those attempts as reductionist or, at least, irrelevant. In this paper, we argue that collaboration between social and cognitive sciences is necessary to understand the impact of the social environment on the shaping of our mind. More specifically, we dwell on the cognitive strategies and early-developing deontic expectations, termed naïve sociology, which enable well-adapted individuals to constitute, maintain and (...) understand basic social relationships. In order to specify the way in which the demanding character of typical social relationships can be recognized in situ, we introduce the concept of “deontic affordances”. Finally, we shed light on the continuum that might relate a primitive naïve sociology, dedicated to the processing of invariant properties of the social life and a mature naïve sociology, necessary for dealing with the variable properties of cultural forms of life. (shrink)

Bayesian reasoning has been applied formally to statistical inference, machine learning and analysing scientific method. Here I apply it informally to more common forms of inference, namely natural language arguments. I analyse a variety of traditional fallacies, deductive, inductive and causal, and find more merit in them than is generally acknowledged. Bayesian principles provide a framework for understanding ordinary arguments which is well worth developing.

In the paper, I present Christopher Gauker's critique of the view that we talk to each other as a way to make ourselves understood (the received view of linguistic communication) and his alternative theory. I show that both his critique and his alternative fail, and defend the received view of linguistic communication.

We argue that the locomotion of organisms is better understood as a form of interaction with a subjective environment, rather than as a set of behaviors allegedly amenable to objective descriptions. An organism's interactions with its subjective environment are in turn understandable in terms of its cognitive architecture. We propose a large-scale classification of the possible types of cognitive architectures, giving a sketch of the subjective structure that each of them superimposes on space and of the relevant consequences on locomotion. (...) The classification comprises a main division between nonrepresentational and representational architectures and further subdivisions. (shrink)

This article describes abductions as special patterns of inference to the best explanation whose structure determines a particularly promising abductive conjecture and thus serves as an abductive search strategy. A classification of different patterns of abduction is provided which intends to be as complete as possible. An important distinction is that between selective abductions, which choose an optimal candidate from given multitude of possible explanations, and creative abductions, which introduce new theoretical models or concepts. While selective abduction has dominated the (...) literature, creative abductions are rarely discussed, although they are essential in science. The article introduces several kinds of creative abductions, such as theoretical model abduction, common cause abduction and statistical factor analysis, and illustrates them by various real case examples. It is suggested to demarcate scientifically fruitful abductions from purely speculative abductions by the criterion of causal unification. (shrink)

In principle, all patients deserve to receive optimal medical treatment equally. However, in situations in which there is scarcity of time or resources, medical treatment must be prioritized based on a triage. The conventional guidelines of medical triage mandate that treatment should be provided based solely on medical necessity regardless of any non-medical value-oriented considerations (“worst-first”). This study empirically examined the influence of value-oriented considerations on medical triage decision–making. Participants were asked to prioritize medical treatment relating to four case scenarios (...) of an emergency situation resulting from a car collision. The cases differ by situational characteristics pertaining to the at-fault driver, which were related to culpability attribution. In three case scenarios most participants gave priority to the most severely injured individual, unless the less severely injured individual was their brother. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of a vehicle-ramming terror attack most participants prioritized the less severely injured individual (“victim-first”). Our findings indicate that when caregivers are presented with concrete highly conflictual triage situations their choices may be based on value-oriented considerations related to contextual characteristics of the emergency situation. Philosophical and practical ramifications of our findings are discussed. (shrink)

Three experiments examined whether children and adults would use temporal information as a cue to the causal structure of a three-variable system, and also whether their judgements about the effects of interventions on the system would be affected by the temporal properties of the event sequence. Participants were shown a system in which two events B and C occurred either simultaneously (synchronous condition) or in a temporal sequence (sequential condition) following an initial event A. The causal judgements of adults and (...) 6-7-year-olds differed between the conditions, but this was not the case for 4-year-olds' judgements. However, unlike those of adults, 6-7-year-olds' intervention judgements were not affected by condition, and causal and intervention judgements were not reliably consistent in this age group. The findings support the claim that temporal information provides an important cue to causal structure, at least in older children. However, they raise important issues about the relationship between causal and intervention judgements. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to reconsider certain assumptions about conceptual structure which have become influential in recent Cognitive Science and which are associated in particular with the Cognitive Linguistics research agenda. I will outline three areas within the Cognitive Linguistics theory of concepts which seem to create some difficulties in their present formulation: the 'embodied cognition' idea, the function of imagery and the role of metaphor in the structure of concepts.

The aim of this article is to show that empirical evidence suggests that no particular causal process of essence acquisition is constitutive for essentialism in folksociology. Innate potential and biological inheritance, however powerful they may be for the human cognitive mind in the domain of folkbiology, are far from necessary in essentialist folksociological classifications. Essentialism in folksociology is not defined by any particular causal process of essence acquisition. Even when we are able to detect the innateness in a particular folksociology, (...) we should always look for other features of essentialism. The article reviews some influential cognitive proposals concerning folksociology, and provides arguments and empirical evidence collected in Western Ukraine in favour of the claim that the innateness is not the constitutive part of sociology, let alone of psychological essentialism. (shrink)

Although debates continue, studies of cognition in infancy suggest that knowledge begins to emerge early in life and constitutes part of humans' innate endowment. Early-developing knowledge appears to be both domain-specific and task-specific, it appears to capture fundamental constraints on ecologically important classes of entities in the child's environment, and it appears to remain central to the commonsense knowledge systems of adults.

Cognitive developmental evidence is sometimes conscripted to support ''naturalized epistemology'' arguments to the effect that a general epistemic stance leads children to build theory-like accounts of underlying properties of kinds. A review of the evidence suggests that what prompts conceptual acquisition is not a general epistemic stance but a series of category-specific intuitive principles that constitute an evolved ''natural metaphysics''. This consists in a system of categories and category-specific inferential processes founded on definite biases in prototype formation. Evidence for this (...) system provides a better understanding of the limited ''plasticity'' of ontological commitments as well as a computationally plausible account of their initial state, avoiding ambiguities about innateness. This may provide a starting point for a ''naturalized epistemology'' that takes into account evolved properties of human conceptual structures. (shrink)

The behavioral sciences have flourished by studying how traditional and/or rational behavior has been governed throughout most of human history by relatively well-informed individual and social learning. In the online age, however, social phenomena can occur with unprecedented scale and unpredictability, and individuals have access to social connections never before possible. Similarly, behavioral scientists now have access to “big data” sets – those from Twitter and Facebook, for example – that did not exist a few years ago. Studies of human (...) dynamics based on these data sets are novel and exciting but, if not placed in context, can foster the misconception that mass-scale online behavior is all we need to understand, for example, how humans make decisions. To overcome that misconception, we draw on the field of discrete-choice theory to create a multiscale comparative “map” that, like a principal-components representation, captures the essence of decision making along two axes: aneast–westdimension that represents the degree to which an agent makes a decision independently versus one that is socially influenced, and anorth–south dimensionthat represents the degree to which there is transparency in the payoffs and risks associated with the decisions agents make. We divide the map into quadrants, each of which features a signature behavioral pattern. When taken together, the map and its signatures provide an easily understood empirical framework for evaluating how modern collective behavior may be changing in the digital age, including whether behavior is becoming more individualistic, as people seek out exactly what they want, or more social, as people become more inextricably linked, even “herdlike,” in their decision making. We believe the map will lead to many new testable hypotheses concerning human behavior as well as to similar applications throughout the social sciences. (shrink)