In his article, “Wittgenstein and Basic Moral Certainty,” Nigel Pleasants argues that killing an innocent, non-threatening person is wrong. It is, he argues, “a basic moral certainty.” He believes our basic moral certainties play the “same kind of foundational role as [our] basic empirical certaint[ies] do.” I believe this is mistaken. There is not “simply one kind of foundational role” that certainty plays. While I think Pleasants is right to affiliate his proposition with a Wittgensteinian form of certainty, he exposes (...) himself to a tension that exists in On Certainty regarding how we acquire it: is certainty natural, is it social? In this paper, I present two ways in which we come to possess certainty: a bottom-up approach, where certainty is part of our instinctual predisposition, and a top-down approach, where certainty is acquired through positive reinforcement by family and culture. (shrink)

Darwin, Sex and Statusargues that a human sociobiology that mistakes evolutionary theory for theories of psychology and culture is wrong, as are psychologies that could never have evolved or social sciences that posit impossible psychologies. Status develops theories of human self-awareness, cognition, and cultural capacity that are compatible with evolutionary theory. Recurring themes include: the importance of sexual selection in human evolution; our species' preoccupation with self-esteem and relative standing; the individual as an active strategist, regularly revising culturally provided information; (...) and awareness as an impressionmanagement device. Culture is a somewhat structured information pool that itself evolves, often in ways that reduce the genetic fitness of its participants. (shrink)

If selection at the group level is to be considered more than a mere possibility, it is important to find phenomena that are best explained at this level of selection. I argue that human religious phenomena provide evidence for the selection of a “pious gene” at the group level, which results in a human tendency to believe in a transcendental reality that encourages behavioral conformity to collective as opposed to individual interest.

This paper describes a cross-cultural research project on the relation between how people conceptualize nature and how they act in it. Mental models of nature differ dramatically among and within populations living in the same area and engaged in more or less the same activities. This has novel implications for environmental decision making and management, including dealing with commons problems. Our research also offers a distinct perspective on models of culture, and a unified approach to the study of culture and (...) cognition. We argue that cultural transmission and formation does not consist primarily in shared rules or norms, but in complex distributions of causally-connected representations across minds in interaction with the environment. The cultural stability and diversity of these representations often derives from rich, biologically-prepared mental mechanisms that limit variation to readily transmissible psychological forms. This framework addresses a series of methodological issues, such as the limitations of conceiving culture to be a well-defined system or bounded entity, an independent variable, or an internalized component of minds. (shrink)

Strong adaptationists explore complex organic design as taskspecific adaptations to ancestral environments. This strategy seems best when there is evidence of homology. Weak adaptationists don't assume that complex organic (including cognitive and linguistic) functioning necessarily or primarily represents taskspecific adaptation. This approach to cognition resembles physicists' attempts to deductively explain the most facts with fewest hypotheses. For certain domainspecific competencies (folkbiology) strong adaptationism is useful but not necessary to research. With grouplevel belief systems (religion) strong adaptationism degenerates into spurious notions (...) of social function and cultural selection. In other cases (language, especially universal grammar) weak adaptationism's 'minimalist' approach seems productive. (shrink)

The publication in 1975 of Edward O. Wilson's Sociobiology provoked a great controversy, for in that work Wilson claimed that ethics was rooted in human biology. On the first page of the book, he asserted that our deepest intuitions of right and wrong are guided by the emotional control centers of the brain, which evolved via natural selection to help the human animal exploit opportunities and avoid threats in the natural environment. In 1998, the publication of Wilson's Consilience renewed the (...) controversy, as he continued to argue for explaining ethics through the biology of the moral sentiments.Footnotes* I am grateful to the Earhart Foundation for a research grant that supported the writing of this essay. (shrink)

یکی از صفات مهم و متمایزکنندۀ انسان نسبت به پستان‌داران نخستین، به لحاظ زیستی-تکاملی، فرهنگ است که نهادهای سیاسی و اجتماعی، سنت‌های دینی و اخلاقی را در بر می‌گیرد. بنا بر مطالعات زیستی-ژنتیکی، ادیان به عنوان یک فرهنگ جهان‌شمول از میزان ارث‌پذیری بالایی برخوردارند، به طوری که خصیصهٔ دین‌داری از نسل میان‌سال به نسل جوان‌تر به ارث می‌رسد. دیوید ویلسون زیست‌شناس آمریکایی، دین را یک «تطابق چندسطحی» و محصول تکامل فرهنگی می‌داند که در جهت مشارکت و ایجاد همبستگی بین گروه‌ها (...) شکل گرفته و آنچه باعث بقای ادیان در طول تاریخ و تنوع و تکثر آن در فرهنگ‌های مختلف بوده کارکرد تکاملی آنها در جهت همبستگی گروه‌های دینی بر مبنای واقع‌گرایی عملی است. در نظر ویلسون، بحث از واقع‌نمایی حقیقی و صدق گزاره‌های دینی هیچ وجهی ندارد و آنچه اهمیت دارد تنها جنبهٔ مفید بودن گزاره‌هاست. این نوع تبیین از علل پدید آمدن و بقای ادیان در طول تاریخ بشری به لحاظ معرفت‌شناختی چالش‌های فراوانی را پدید می‌آورد که به خصوص در ادیان گزاره‌محور و منتسب به وحی الهی قابل توجه است. در این نوشتار آرای ویلسون به تفصیل بیان می‌شود و مورد نقد و بررسی قرار می‌گیرد و بحث خواهد شد که شکل‌گیری معرفت دینی در یک دین‌دار باورمند تنها با نگاه کارکردگرایانۀ منفعت‌محور و با تکیه بر تبیین‌های تکاملی قابل تبیین نیست و نباید از نقش سایر مؤلفه‌های معرفتی-دینی، عقلی و احساسی غفلت کرد. (shrink)

Michael F. Duggan ABSTRACT: This article examines the basis for testing historical claims and proffers the observation that the historical method is akin to the scientific method in that it utilizes critical elimination rather than justification. Building on the critical rationalism of Karl Popper – and specifically the deductive component of the scientific method called ….

This book is a defence of the philosophy of common sense in the spirit of Thomas Reid and G.E. Moore, drawing on the work of Aristotle, evolutionary biology and psychology, and historical studies on the origins of early modern philosophy. It defines and explores common sense beliefs, and defends them from challenges from prominent philosophers.

Majority of the philosophers regard neurophilosophy as a highly marginal philosophical school of thought and reject it based on either principled reasons or alleged facts about the human brain. Principled objections typically include categorical rejections based on assumptions about the nature of philosophical problems and their solutions. Another objection is based on the extremely complex structure of the nervous systems, the idea that if neurophilosophical hypotheses are correct, it would mean the death of philosophy as a separate discipline and the (...) perceived exclusion of human psychological, sociological, and historical existence and meaning by neurophilosophers. Here, I argue that these rejections are largely the result of either textual misreading of Churchlands’ publications or possibly of the farfetched interpretations by Churchlands’ critics stating that “wherever Churchlands do talk about necessary conditions of understanding the mind, these conditions should be read as expressions of the sufficient conditions.” Once I show that these various objections are mistaken, I propose an objection about a serious defect in neurophilosophical practice and offer a positive suggestion for removing the defect. (shrink)

In this dissertation I examine the topics of ethics, religion, and their relationship in the work of Charles Taylor. I take Taylor's attempt to confront modern disenchantment by seeking a kind of re-enchantment as my guiding thread. Seeking re-enchantment means, first of all, defending an `engaged realist' account of strong evaluation, i.e., qualitative distinctions of value that are seen as normative for our desires. Secondly, it means overcoming self-enclosure and achieving self-transcendence, which I argue should be understood in terms of (...) transcending a `lower' mode of selfhood for a `higher' one in concern for `strong goods'. One of the main issues that Taylor raises is whether re-enchantment requires theism for its full adequacy. He advances - often as `hunches' - controversial claims regarding the significance of theism (1) for defending strong evaluative realism and (2) for motivating an ethic of universal human concern. I seek to fill out his hunches in terms of a theistic teleological perspective that is centered on the `telos of communion'. I argue that such a view is important for overcoming the problem of what Bernard Williams calls the `radical contingency' of ethical beliefs, which seems to undermine their normative authority. However, I argue that if a non-theistic view of cosmic purpose (e.g., Thomas Nagel's view) can be regarded as a viable option, then it could also help to address this problem and support a kind of re-enchantment. Taylor also advances the controversial view that (3) there is an ineradicable draw to `transcendence' in human life in connection to the quest for the meaning of life. Here he opposes certain mainstream theories of secularization that see it as a process involving the ineluctable fading away of the relevance of religion. I seek to fill out and defend Taylor's view in this matter. Besides providing a reading of Taylor's work as a whole and advancing further some of the issues he raises, I also examine his general evaluative framework based on his account of strong evaluation. In doing so I show how he provides a distinct and important perspective among contemporary moral philosophers. (shrink)

En este artículo se hace una crítica de los enfoques teóricos, aquí llamados por analogía o analógicos, que pretenden abstraer conceptos darwinistas del sustrato biológico para aplicarlos a dominios ontológicos (parcialmente) distintos, estrategia adoptada por versiones de la epistemología evolutiva y, sobre todo, por la teoría memética. Para ello se utiliza el argumento de la exclusión causal, tomado en préstamo de la filosofía de la mente; se hace evidente la existencia de un paralelismo entre causalidad mental y memética, y se (...) muestra cómo cualquier posible caracterización de la segunda a partir de la primera conduce a graves problemas metafísicos y epistemológicos. En las conclusiones se esbozan, sin intención de exhaustividad, algunas ideas sobre cómo evitar posiciones reduccionistas sin adoptar una postura teórica analógica. The main purpose of this paper is criticize theoretical approaches -here called by analogy, or analogical- which aim to extract Darwinian concepts from a biological substrate to apply them to (partially) different ontological domains. This strategy is adopted by some versions of evolutionary epistemology and, especially, by memetics theory. An argument borrowed from philosophy of mind, namely, the argument of causal exclusion, is used to carry out the critique. The existence of a parallelism between memetics and mental causation will be shown, and it will be argued that any possible characterization of the first in terms of the second implies serious metaphysical and epistemological problems. In the conclusions, with no intention of completeness, some ideas on how to avoid reductionist positions, without taking an analogical posture, will be outlined. (shrink)

One of the least explored areas of C.S. Peirce's wide range of work is his contributions to psychology and the philosophy of mind. This dissertation examines the corpus of this work, especially as it relates to the subjects of mind, habit, instinct, sentiment, emotion, perception, consciousness, cognition, and community. The argument is that Peirce's contributions to these areas of investigation were both highly original and heavily influenced by the main intellectual currents of his time. An effort has been made to (...) present Peirce's philosophy without apology, within the conceptual framework and idiom of its time, and without appeal to a comprehensive view that Peirce never articulated. Nevertheless, as several noted interpreters have argued, much of this work can be viewed through the lens of Peirce's innovative theory of signs and the notion of the semiotic triad as its central unifying feature, despite the fact that the general theory was itself under continuous refinement and remained incomplete at the time of his death. Another hermeneutical device employed is William James' better known and more accessible work which, when juxtaposed with Peirce's ideas, serves to bring them into sharper relief. While general and historical in the presentation of material, this study seeks, at the same time, to engage the criticism of contemporary Peirce scholars in an attempt to account for several of the conundrums inherent in Peirce's work. Among the problems with implications for his philosophy of mind and theory of inquiry are the limitations of his theory of continuity, his negative view of the self, his somewhat ambiguous position on the relation of psychology to logic, and the metaethical puzzle arising from application of his theory of probable inference to truly fateful decisions. These problems provide an interesting perspective and lend balance to the truly insightful contributions Peirce made to the discovery of the mind. (shrink)

Four decades ago, E.O. Wilson famously declared that “the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized." One still finds Wilson’s idea echoed frequently in popular science writing today. While I’m not going to deny that evolutionary biology and other sciences have important things to tell us about morality, I think there is a lot of confusion about what exactly they can tell us, and how much they can tell us. My (...) aim here is first to make some distinctions and sort out some issues, and then to examine one overreaching claim in particular, about the explanation of our moral beliefs by appeal to evolutionary causal influences. That is a claim used by some philosophers to argue that evolutionary biology somehow forces on us either a skeptical or a purely subjectivist understanding of morality. I will explain why I think this is misguided and is a poor use of science in philosophy. (shrink)

This article aims to examine the possibility to explain the basis of moral behaviour in natural terms consistent with evolutionary theory. The defense position begins with the clarification of the concept of empathy, as done by Hume and Darwin, plus contemporary research in the areas of neuroscience, evolutionary psychology and ethology. My argument points in favor of the hypothesis that socially relevant emotions are regulators of social behaviour, being a criterion for distinguishing between moral and purely social relations. What should (...) be understood is in that bases psychobiological mechanisms of sociability, particularly empathy and social instincts, operate as regulators of normative behaviour in small groups and how this relates to the way moral distinctions are made in everyday life. The focus of this investigation will be to identify the elements that are at the root of such behaviour and explain it without resorting to metaphysical concepts. I will present empathy as the candidate to answer the question of how these mechanisms developed within the evolutionary process and how to add an intersubjective element to social relevant emotions, so that they have the strength to inhibit socially relevant behaviours. Key-Words: Empathy. Social Instincts. Moral Behaviour. (shrink)