Emotion plays an important role in securing social stability. But while emotions like fear, anger, and guilt have received much attention in this context, little work has been done to understand the role that anxiety plays. That’s unfortunate. I argue that a particular form of anxiety—what I call ‘practical anxiety’—plays an important, but as of yet unrecognized, role in norm-based social regulation. More specifically, it provides a valuable form of metacognition, one that contributes to social stability by helping individuals negotiate (...) the challenges that come from having to act in the face of unclear norms. (shrink)

Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...) motivation behind the cultural turn in cognitive science, and situates some of its central findings with respect to the questions that animate it and the debates that it has inspired. Woven throughout the entry are examples of how the cognitive science of culture, and especially its elevated concern with different forms of diversity and variation, continues to influence and be influenced by philosophers. -/- One cluster of philosophical work falls within the traditional subject matter of philosophy of science, in this case of the cognitive and social sciences. Philosophers have analyzed and assessed the methods and evidence central to the scientific study of cognition and culture, and have offered conceptual scrutiny, clarification, and synthesis. Research in a second vein sees philosophers themselves contributing more directly to cognitive scientific projects, (co)constructing theories, helping build computational models, even gathering empirical data. A third kind of work is naturalistic philosophy or philosophy of nature, wherein philosophers seek to use results from the cognitive science of culture to inform or transform debates over long-standing philosophical questions, including questions about the nature of philosophy and philosophical methodology itself. (shrink)

Both biosemiotics and evolutionary epistemology are concerned with how knowledge evolves. (Applied) Evolutionary Epistemology thereby focuses on identifying the units, levels, and mechanisms or processes that underlie the evolutionary development of knowing and knowledge, while biosemiotics places emphasis on the study of how signs underlie the development of meaning. We compare the two schools of thought and analyze how in delineating their research program, biosemiotics runs into several problems that are overcome by evolutionary epistemologists. For one, by emphasizing signs, biosemiotics (...) needs to delineate a semiotic threshold, which is a problem not encountered by evolutionary epistemologists. Instead, the latter recognizes that all organisms are knowers that evolve knowledge, which they recognize to extend toward phenomena produced by organisms such as behavior, cognition, language, culture, science, and technology. Secondly, biosemiotics attempts at continuing adaptationist notions on how organisms relate to their environment, while especially Applied Evolutionary Epistemology comes to redefine the nature of the organism–environment relationship in such a way that it recognizes the spatiotemporal boundedness of existence, which in turn makes adaptationist accounts obsolete. (shrink)

Social evolution theory provides a wide array of successful evolutionary explanations for cooperative traits. However and surprisingly, a number of cases of unexplained cooperative behaviour remain. Shouldn’t they cast doubt on the relevance of the theory, or even disconfirm it? This depends on whether the theory is akin to a research programme such as adaptationism, or closer to a theory – a set of compatible, confirmable hypotheses. In order to find out, we focus on the two main tenets of social (...) evolution theory, namely reciprocity explanations and kin selection. Reciprocity-based explanations are extremely hard to confirm. This is due, first to the multiple realisability of explanatory processes, factors and strategies, despite apparent reasons to the contrary; second, to the high quantity, and limited availability of data needed to eliminate or back up such explanations. One of our target cases vividly illustrates these limitations. Moreover, kin selection, while relatively easy to disconfirm in particular cases, seems to enjoy a more limited explanatory scope than previously thought. Overall, social evolution theory turns out to be neither a research programme nor a theory, but a heterogeneous scientific entity, composed of parts that are amenable to confirmation and others barely so. (shrink)

Review of Cooperation and its Evolution, edited by Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott, and Ben Fraser.

The scientific investigation of music requires contributions from a diverse array of disciplines. Given the diverse methodologies, interests and research targets of the disciplines involved, we argue that there is a plurality of legitimate research questions about music, necessitating a focus on integration. In light of this we recommend a pluralistic conception of music—that there is no unitary definition divorced from some discipline, research question or context. This has important implications for how the scientific study of music ought to proceed: (...) we show that some definitions are complementary, that is, they reflect different research interests and ought to be retained and, where possible, integrated, while others are antagonistic, they represent real empirical disagreement about music’s nature and how to account for it. We illustrate this in discussion of two related issues: questions about the evolutionary function of music, and questions of the innateness of music. These debates have been, in light of pluralism, misconceived. We suggest that, in both cases, scientists ought to proceed by constructing integrated models which take into account the dynamic interaction between different aspects of music. (shrink)

Street’s (Philos Stud 127(1):109–166, 2006) Darwinian Dilemma purports to show that evolutionary considerations are in tension with realist theories of value, which include moral realism. According to this argument, moral realism can only be defended by assuming an implausible tracking relation between moral attitudes and moral facts. In this essay, I argue that this tracking relation is not as implausible as most people have assumed by showing that the three main objections against it are flawed. Since this is a key (...) premise in the reasoning, I conclude that the Darwinian Dilemma against moral realism can be resisted. (shrink)

Humans are standouts in their propensity to trade. More specially, the kind of trading found in humans—featuring the exchange of many different goods and services with many different others, for the mutual benefit of all the involved parties—far exceeds anything that is found in any other creature. However, a number of important questions about this propensity remain open. First, it is not clear exactly what makes this propensity so different in the human case from that of other animals. Second, it (...) is not clear why other animals did not acquire this propensity to the extent that humans did. Third, it is not clear what explains the fact that the extent to which humans engage in trade is culturally highly variable. The paper argues that at the heart of the human-animal divergence in this propensity is the particular socio-cultural environment in which humans evolved. This has led them to sometimes, but not always, acquire the cognitive technology (writing, algebra, tallying devices, money, etc.) to support a sophisticated disposition and capacity for reciprocal cooperation, and deep and wide concepts of property and exchange value. (shrink)

Cooperation admits of degrees. When factory workers stage a slowdown, they do not cease to cooperate with management in the production of goods altogether, but they are not fully cooperative either. Full cooperation implies that participants in a joint action are committed to rendering appropriate contributions as needed toward their joint end so as to bring it about, consistently with the type of action and the generally agreed upon constraints within which they work, as efficiently as they can, where their (...) contributions are sensitive to information (where available) about how others are contributing in the sense that they adjust as needed their contributions in light of information about how others are contributing to ensure effective pursuit of their joint end, where this includes rendering aid to other participants if needed, insofar as they are able. Full cooperation entails those cooperating are engaged in a joint intentional action. Some prominent studies of joint intentional action focus exclusively on cases of full cooperation (notably that of Michael Bratman (2014)). But not all joint intentional action is fully cooperative. One example is the work slowdown. Another example is provided by competitive games like chess and football, or sports like boxing and wrestling, where participants are clearly not intending to contribute to the pursuit of all of the goals of the others engaged in the activity, even when those goals are internal to the type of activity in question, but instead intend actively to frustrate some of them. In this paper, I provide a taxonomy of forms of non-cooperative behavior within the context of behavior that is still to some degree cooperative, and I argue that the minimal conditions of joint intentional action define minimal cooperative behavior, that is, that minimally joint intentional action is per se minimally cooperative behavior. I define in precise terms what that comes to, and how it is possible in cases in which it seems that one or more participants are in one or more ways acting so as to frustrate the contributions of other participants to their joint action. (shrink)

Recent studies in the evolution of cooperation have shifted focus from altruistic to mutualistic cooperation. This change in focus is purported to reveal new explanations for the evolution of prosocial behavior. We argue that the common classification scheme for social behavior used to distinguish between altruistic and mutualistic cooperation is flawed because it fails to take into account dynamically relevant game-theoretic features. This leads some arguments about the evolution of cooperation to conflate dynamical scenarios that differ regarding the basic conditions (...) on the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. We use the tools of evolutionary game theory to increase the resolution of the classification scheme and analyze what evolutionary inferences classifying social behavior can license. (shrink)

One of the major developments in cancer research in recent years has been the construction of models that treat cancer as a cellular population subject to natural selection. We expand on this idea, drawing upon multilevel selection theory. Cancer is best understood in our view from a multilevel perspective, as both a by-product of selection at other levels of organization, and as subject to selection at several levels of organization. Cancer is a by-product in two senses. First, cancer cells co-opt (...) signaling pathways that are otherwise adaptive at the organismic level. Second, cancer is also a by-product of features distinctive to the metazoan lineage: cellular plasticity and modularity. Applying the multilevel perspective in this way permits one to explain transitions in complexity and individuality in cancer progression. Our argument is a reply to Germain’s scepticism towards the explanatory relevance of natural selection for cancer. The extent to which cancer fulfills the conditions for being a paradigmatic Darwinian population depends on the scale of analysis, and the details of the purported selective scenario. Taking a multilevel perspective clarifies some of the complexities surrounding how to best understand the relevance of evolutionary thinking in cancer progression. (shrink)

Commentators have tended to focus on the conceptual framework of our article, the contrast between genetic and associative accounts of mirror neurons, and to challenge it with additional possibilities rather than empirical data. This makes the empirically focused comments especially valuable. The mirror neuron debate is replete with ideas; what it needs now are system-level theories and careful experiments – tests and testability.