Debates on the contingency of history have largely focused on the history of life. This article targets the supposed contingency of human history. It does not defend a global claim about the overall contingency of history. Rather, it aims to identify and explain the difference between robust and fragile historical trajectories. It does so by considering a set of contrasting cases and identifying critical differences among the cases. The analysis shows that one important source of contingency is the historical emergence (...) of command-and-control institutions; one important source of robustness is the existence of population-level processes structured by relatively stable institutions. (shrink)

In many traditional, small-scale societies, death and other misfortunes are commonly explained as a result of others’ malign occult agency. Here, we call this family of epistemic tendencies “the agential view of misfortune.” After reviewing several ethnographic case studies that illustrate this view, we argue that its origins and stability are puzzling from an evolutionary perspective. Not only is the agential view of misfortune false; it imposes costs on individuals and social groups that seem to far outweigh whatever benefits the (...) view might provide. We thus doubt that the agential view of misfortune is explainable in terms of adaptive effects. However, neither does it seem readily explainable as a consequence of belief formation strategies that are on the whole adaptive (as is plausibly the case for certain other of our false beliefs, including some that are costly). Accordingly, we contend that the commonness of the agential view of misfortune demands a special evolutionary explanation of some kind. We provide a partial explanation of this phenomenon by highlighting the adaptive benefits that often flow to occult specialists in environments where the agential view of misfortune is entrenched. What this does not explain, however, is the general lack of resistance we observe in response to occultists’ exploitative behaviours over (cultural) evolutionary timescales. We conclude by canvassing a few possible explanations for this puzzling lack of resistance, and while we commit ourselves to none, we do find one option more promising than the others. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn a recent paper published in this journal, Eric Funkhouser argues that some of our beliefs have the primary function of signaling to others, rather than allowing us to navigate the world. Funkhouser’s case is persuasive. However, his account of beliefs as signals is underinclusive, omitting both beliefs that are signals to the self and less than full-fledged beliefs as signals. The latter set of beliefs, moreover, has a better claim to being considered as constituting a psychological kind in its (...) own right than the set of beliefs Funkhouser identifies. (shrink)

People report believing weird things: that the Earth is flat, that senior Democrats are subjecting kidnapped children to abuse, and so on. How can people possibly believe things like this? Some philosophers have recently argued for a surprising answer: people don’t believe these things at all. Rather, they mistake their imaginings for beliefs. They are shmelievers, not believers. In this paper, I consider the prospects for this kind of explanation. I argue that some belief reports are simply insincere, and that (...) much of the evidence for shmeliefs can be explained by the content of the beliefs reported, rather than by the attitude people take to them. But some reported beliefs are good candidates for being shmeliefs. I consider how shmeliefs are acquired and sustained, and why they might be harmful despite not being seriously believed. (shrink)

Recent work in the cognitive sciences has argued that beliefs sometimes acquire signaling functions in virtue of their ability to reveal information that manipulates “mindreaders.” This paper sketches some of the evolutionary and design considerations that could take agents from solipsistic goal pursuit to beliefs that serve as social signals. Such beliefs will be governed by norms besides just the traditional norms of epistemology. As agents become better at detecting the agency of others, either through evolutionary history or individual learning, (...) the candidate pool for signaling expands. This logic holds for natural and artificial agents that find themselves in recurring social situations that reward the sharing of one’s thoughts. (shrink)

The idea that only complex brains can possess genuine representations is an important element in mainstream philosophical thinking. An alternative view, which I label ‘liberal representationalism’, holds that we should accept the existence of many more full-blown representations, from activity in retinal ganglion cells to the neural states produced by innate releasing mechanisms in cognitively unsophisticated organisms. A promising way of supporting liberal representationalism is to show it to be a consequence of our best naturalistic theories of representation. However, several (...) philosophers and scientists have recently argued against this strategy. In the paper I counter these objections in defense of liberal representationalism. (shrink)

How can we think about things in the outside world? There is still no widely accepted theory of how mental representations get their meaning. In light of pioneering research, Nicholas Shea develops a naturalistic account of the nature of mental representation with a firm focus on the subpersonal representations that pervade the cognitive sciences.