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  1. Teleology past and present.Jeffrey Wattles - 2006 - Zygon 41 (2):445-464.
    Current teleology in Western biology, philosophy, and theology draws on resources from four main Western philosophers. (1) Plato’s ’Timaeus’, (2) Aristotle’s ’Physics’, (3) Kant’s ’Critique of Judgment’, (4) Hegel’s ’Philosophy of Nature’. Teleological themes persist, in different ways, in contemporary discussions; I consider two lines of criticism of traditional teleology -- by Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould -- and one line that continues traditional teleology in an updated way -- by Holmes Rolston, III. (edited).
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  • Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts.John Tooby & Leda Cosmides - 2001 - Substance 30 (1/2):6.
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  • What makes human cognition unique? From individual to shared to collective intentionality.Michael Tomasello & Hannes Rakoczy - 2003 - Mind and Language 18 (2):121-147.
    It is widely believed that what distinguishes the social cognition of humans from that of other animals is the belief–desire psychology of four–year–old children and adults (so–called theory of mind). We argue here that this is actually the second ontogenetic step in uniquely human social cognition. The first step is one year old children's understanding of persons as intentional agents, which enables skills of cultural learning and shared intentionality. This initial step is ‘the real thing’ in the sense that it (...)
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  • The Existence of God.Richard Swinburne - 1979 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    Richard Swinburne presents a substantially rewritten and updated edition of his most celebrated book. No other work has made a more powerful case for the probability of the existence of God. Swinburne gives a rigorous and penetrating analysis of the most important arguments for theism: the cosmological argument; arguments from the existence of laws of nature and the 'fine-tuning' of the universe; from the occurrence of consciousness and moral awareness; and from miracles and religious experience. He claims that while none (...)
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  • The argument from design.R. G. Swinburne - 1968 - Philosophy 43 (165):199 - 212.
    ARGUMENTS FROM DESIGN TO THE EXISTENCE OF GOD MAY TAKE AS THEIR PREMISS EITHER THE EXISTENCE OF REGULARITIES OF COPRESENCE OR THE EXISTENCE OF REGULARITIES OF SUCCESSION. THERE ARE NO VALID FORMAL OBJECTIONS TO A CAREFULLY ARTICULATED ARGUMENT OF THE LATTER TYPE. AGAINST SUCH AN ARGUMENT NONE OF THE OBJECTIONS IN HUME’S "DIALOGUES" HAVE ANY WORTH. THE ARGUMENT MAY HOWEVER GIVE ONLY A SMALL DEGREE OF SUPPORT TO ITS CONCLUSION.
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  • Objects limit human comprehension.Philip Richard Sullivan - 2009 - Biology and Philosophy 24 (1):65-79.
    This paper demonstrates that the human visual system, the primary sensory conduit for primates, processes ambient energy in a way that obligatorily constructs the objects that we ineluctably perceive. And since our perceptual apparatus processes information only in terms of objects (along with the properties and movements of objects), we are limited in our ability to comprehend ‘what is’ when we move beyond our ordinary world of midsize objects—as, for example, when we address the micro microworld of quantum physics.
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  • When is it selectively advantageous to have true beliefs? Sandwiching the better safe than sorry argument.Christopher L. Stephens - 2001 - Philosophical Studies 105 (2):161-189.
    Several philosophers have argued that natural selection will favor reliable belief formation; others have been more skeptical. These traditional approaches to the evolution of rationality have been either too sketchy or else have assumed that phenotypic plasticity can be equated with having a mind. Here I develop a new model to explore the functional utility of belief and desire formation mechanisms, and defend the claim that natural selection favors reliable inference methods in a broad, but not universal, range of circumstances.
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  • The return of the group.Kim Sterelny - 1996 - Philosophy of Science 63 (4):562-584.
    Once upon a time in evolutionary theory, everything happened for the best. Predators killed only the old or the sick. Pecking orders and other dominance hierarchies minimized wasteful conflict within the group. Male displays ensured that only the best and the fittest had mates. In the culmination of this tradition, Wynne-Edwards argued that many species have mechanisms that ensure groups do not over-exploit their resource base. The “central function” of territoriality in birds and other higher animals is “of limiting the (...)
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  • Made by each other: Organisms and their environment. [REVIEW]Kim Sterelny - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (1):21-36.
    The standard picture of evolution, is externalist: a causal arrow runs from environment to organism, and that arrow explains why organisms are as they are (Godfrey-Smith 1996). Natural selection allows a lineage to accommodate itself to the specifics of its environment. As the interior of Australia became hotter and drier, phenotypes changed in many lineages of plants and animals, so that those organisms came to suit the new conditions under which they lived. Odling-Smee, Laland and Feldman, building on the work (...)
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  • Innate ideas as a naturalistic source of metaphysical knowledge.Steve Stewart-Williams - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (4):791-814.
    This article starts from the assumption that there are various innate contributions to our view of the world and explores the epistemological implications that follow from this. Specifically, it explores the idea that if certain components of our worldview have an evolutionary origin, this implies that these aspects accurately depict the world. The simple version of the argument for this conclusion is that if an aspect of mind is innate, it must be useful, and the most parsimonious explanation for its (...)
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  • Charting control-space: Comments on Susan Hurley's Animal Action in the Space of Reasons.Kim Sterelny - 2003 - Mind and Language 18 (3):257-265.
    Hurley is right to reject the dichotomy between intentional agents and mere stimulus/response habit machines, and she is also right in thinking that it is important to map the space of systems for the adaptive control of behaviour. So there is much in this paper with which I agree. My disagreement concerns folk psychology. Hurley thinks that control space can be charted by asking whether and to what extent animals are intentional agents. In contrast, I doubt that the concepts of (...)
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  • Charting Control‐Space: Comments on Susan Hurley's ‘Animal Action in the Space of Reasons’.Kim Sterelny - 2003 - Mind and Language 18 (3):257-266.
    Hurley is right to reject the dichotomy between intentional agents and mere stimulus/response habit machines, and she is also right in thinking that it is important to map the space of systems for the adaptive control of behaviour. So there is much in this paper with which I agree. My disagreement concerns folk psychology. Hurley thinks that control space can be charted by asking whether and to what extent animals are intentional agents. In contrast, I doubt that the concepts of (...)
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  • Can a reductionist be a pluralist?Daniel Steel - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (1):55-73.
    Pluralism is often put forth as a counter-position to reductionism. In this essay, I argue that reductionism and pluralism are in fact consistent. I propose that there are several potential goals for reductions and that the proper form of a reduction should be considered in tandem with the goal that it aims to achieve. This insight provides a basis for clarifying what version of reductionism are currently defended, for explicating the notion of a fundamental level of explanation, and for showing (...)
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  • Book Review:The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and against the Existence of God. J. L. Mackie. [REVIEW]Steven L. Ross - 1982 - Ethics 94 (4):718-.
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  • Aesthetic judgements, artworks and functional beauty.Stephen Davies - 2006 - Philosophical Quarterly 56 (223):224-241.
    I offer an analysis of the role played by consideration of an item's functions when it is judged aesthetically. The account applies also to artworks, of which some serve extrinsic functions (such as the glorification of God and the communication of religious lore) and others have the function of being contemplated for their own sake alone. Along the way, I deny that aesthetic judgements fit the model of judgements either of free beauty or of dependent beauty, given how these two (...)
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  • Pre-Darwinian taxonomy and essentialism – a reply to Mary Winsor.David N. Stamos - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (1):79-96.
    Mary Winsor (2003) argues against the received view that pre-Darwinian taxonomy was characterized mainly by essentialism. She argues, instead, that the methods of pre-Darwinian taxonomists, in spite of whatever their beliefs, were that of clusterists, so that the received view, propagated mainly by certain modern biologists and philosophers of biology, should at last be put to rest as a myth. I argue that shes right when it comes to higher taxa, but wrong when it comes the most important category of (...)
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  • Intuitive and reflective beliefs.Dan Sperber - 1997 - Mind and Language 12 (1):67-83.
    Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a most fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher-order or "reflective" propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credal sort. Reasons to hold "reflective beliefs" are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide (...)
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  • Intuitive and Reflective Beliefs.Dan Sperber - 1997 - Mind and Language 12 (1):67-83.
    Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher‐order or‘reflective’propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credat sort. Reasons to hold reflective beliefs are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide an explicit argument (...)
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  • Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.K. Sterelny - 1996 - Mind 110 (439):845-854.
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  • Core knowledge.Elizabeth S. Spelke - 2000 - American Psychologist 55 (11):1233-1243.
    Complex cognitive skills such as reading and calculation and complex cognitive achievements such as formal science and mathematics may depend on a set of building block systems that emerge early in human ontogeny and phylogeny. These core knowledge systems show characteristic limits of domain and task specificity: Each serves to represent a particular class of entities for a particular set of purposes. By combining representations from these systems, however human cognition may achieve extraordinary flexibility. Studies of cognition in human infants (...)
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  • Intelligent design and probability reasoning.Elliott Sober - 2002 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 52 (2):65-80.
    This paper defends two theses about probabilistic reasoning. First, although modus ponens has a probabilistic analog, modus tollens does not – the fact that a hypothesis says that an observation is very improbable does not entail that the hypothesis is improbable. Second, the evidence relation is essentially comparative; with respect to hypotheses that confer probabilities on observation statements but do not entail them, an observation O may favor one hypothesis H1 over another hypothesis H2 , but O cannot be said (...)
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  • Beyond Barbour or back to basics? The future of science-and-religion and the Quest for unity.Taede A. Smedes - 2008 - Zygon 43 (1):235-258.
    Abstract.Reflecting on the future of the field of science-and-religion, I focus on three aspects. First, I describe the history of the religion-and-science dialogue and argue that the emergence of the field was largely contingent on social-cultural factors in Western theology, especially in the United States. Next, I focus on the enormous influence of science on Western society and on what I call cultural scientism, which influences discussions in science-and-religion, especially how theological notions are taken up. I illustrate by sketching the (...)
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  • The Relation Between Essentialist Beliefs and Evolutionary Reasoning.Andrew Shtulman & Laura Schulz - 2008 - Cognitive Science 32 (6):1049-1062.
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  • The evolution of multiple memory systems.David F. Sherry & Daniel L. Schacter - 1987 - Psychological Review 94 (4):439-454.
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  • On Cultural Conceptualisations.Farzad Sharifian - 2003 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 3 (3):187-207.
    This paper first elaborates on the notions of conceptualisation and cultural conceptualisations. Cultural conceptualisations enable the members of a cultural group to think, so to speak, in one mind. These conceptualisations are not equally imprinted in the minds of people but are rather represented in a distributed fashion across the minds in a cultural group. Two major kinds of cultural conceptualisations are cultural schemas and cultural categories. These group-level conceptualisations emerge from and act as the locus for the interactions between (...)
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  • Evolutionary theory meets cognitive psychology: A more selective perspective.Lawrence Shapiro & William Epstein - 1998 - Mind and Language 13 (2):171-94.
    Quite unexpectedly, cognitive psychologists find their field intimately connected to a whole new intellectual landscape that had previously seemed remote, unfamiliar, and all but irrelevant. Yet the proliferating connections tying together the cognitive and evolutionary communities promise to transform both fields, with each supplying necessary principles, methods, and a species of rigor that the other lacks. (Cosmides and Tooby, 1994, p. 85).
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  • Bayesianism, convergence and social epistemology.Michael J. Shaffer - 2008 - Episteme 5 (2):pp. 203-219.
    Following the standard practice in sociology, cultural anthropology and history, sociologists, historians of science and some philosophers of science define scientific communities as groups with shared beliefs, values and practices. In this paper it is argued that in real cases the beliefs of the members of such communities often vary significantly in important ways. This has rather dire implications for the convergence defense against the charge of the excessive subjectivity of subjective Bayesianism because that defense requires that communities of Bayesian (...)
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  • How well do we know our own conscious experience? The case of human echolocation.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2000 - Philosophical Topics 28 (5-6):235-46.
    Researchers from the 1940's through the present have found that normal, sighted people can echolocate - that is, detect properties of silent objects by attending to sound reflected from them. We argue that echolocation is a normal part of our conscious, perceptual experience. Despite this, we argue that people are often grossly mistaken about their experience of echolocation. If so, echolocation provides a counterexample to the view that we cannot be seriously mistaken about our own current conscious experience.
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  • How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience?Eric Schwitzgebel & Michael S. Gordon - 2000 - Philosophical Topics 28 (2):235-246.
    Researchers from the 1940's through the present have found that normal, sighted people can echolocate - that is, detect properties of silent objects by attending to sound reflected from them. We argue that echolocation is a normal part of our perceptual experience and that there is something 'it is like' to echolocate. Furthermore, we argue that people are often grossly mistaken about their experience of echolocation. If so, echolocation provides a counterexample to the view that we cannot be mistaken about (...)
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  • Children's thoughts on the origin of species: A study of explanatory coherence.Ala Samarapungavan & Reinout W. Wiers - 1997 - Cognitive Science 21 (2):147-177.
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  • Teleological semantics.Mark Rowlands - 1997 - Mind 106 (422):279-304.
    Teleological theories of content are thought to suffer from two related difficulties. According to the problem of indeterminacy, biological function is indeterminate in the sense that, in the case of two competing interpretations of the function of an evolved mechanism, there is often no fact of the matter capable of determining which function is the correct one. Therefore, any attempts to construct content out of biological function entail the indeterminacy of content. According to the problem of transparency, statements of biological (...)
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  • Cosmological arguments.William L. Rowe - 2004 - In William Mann (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Religion. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. pp. 103–116.
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  • An Inquiry Into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense.Thomas Reid - 1997 - Cambridge University Press. Edited by Elizabeth Schmidt Radcliffe, Richard McCarty, Fritz Allhoff & Anand Vaidya.
    Thomas Reid, the Scottish natural and moral philosopher, was one of the founding members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Reid believed that common sense should form the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He criticised the sceptical philosophy propagated by his fellow Scot David Hume and the Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world did not exist outside the human mind. Reid was also critical of the theory of ideas propagated (...)
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  • A Contextual Approach to Scientific Understanding.Henk W. de Regt & Dennis Dieks - 2005 - Synthese 144 (1):137-170.
    Achieving understanding of nature is one of the aims of science. In this paper we offer an analysis of the nature of scientific understanding that accords with actual scientific practice and accommodates the historical diversity of conceptions of understanding. Its core idea is a general criterion for the intelligibility of scientific theories that is essentially contextual: which theories conform to this criterion depends on contextual factors, and can change in the course of time. Our analysis provides a general account of (...)
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  • Natural Kinds.W. V. O. Quine - 2011 - In Robert B. Talisse & Scott F. Aikin (eds.), The Pragmatism Reader: From Peirce Through the Present. Princeton University Press. pp. 234-248.
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  • Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis.Jesse J. Prinz - 2002 - MIT Press.
    In Furnishing the Mind, Jesse Prinz attempts to swing the pendulum back toward empiricism.
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  • Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and Their Perceptual Basis.Andrew Woodfield - 2004 - Mind 113 (449):210-214.
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  • Two-year-olds use artist intention to understand drawings.Melissa Allen Preissler & Paul Bloom - 2008 - Cognition 106 (1):512-518.
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  • Toward a Science of Other Minds: Escaping the Argument by Analogy.Daniel J. Povinelli, Jesse M. Bering & Steve Giambrone - 2000 - Cognitive Science 24 (3):509-541.
    Since Darwin, the idea of psychological continuity between humans and other animals has dominated theory and research in investigating the minds of other species. Indeed, the field of comparative psychology was founded on two assumptions. First, it was assumed that introspection could provide humans with reliable knowledge about the causal connection between specific mental states and specific behaviors. Second, it was assumed that in those cases in which other species exhibited behaviors similar to our own, similar psychological causes were at (...)
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  • Naturalizing the space of reasons.Bill Pollard - 2005 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13 (1):69 – 82.
    Given the Sellarsian distinction between the space of causes and the space of reasons, the naturalist seeks to articulate how these two spaces are unproblematically related. In Mind and World (1996) John McDowell suggests that such a naturalism can be achieved by pointing out that we work our way into the space of reasons by the process of upbringing he calls Bildung. 'The resulting habits of thought and action', writes McDowell, 'are second nature' (p. 84). In this paper I expose (...)
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  • Towards a new functional anatomy of language.David Poeppel & Gregory Hickok - 2004 - Cognition 92 (1-2):1-12.
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  • Warranted Christian Belief.P. Helm - 2001 - Mind 110 (440):1110-1115.
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  • The prospects for natural theology.Alvin Plantinga - 1991 - Philosophical Perspectives 5:287-315.
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  • Why the big Bang singularity does not help the Kal M cosmological argument for theism.J. Brian Pitts - 2008 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 59 (4):675-708.
    The cosmic singularity provides negligible evidence for creation in the finite past, and hence theism. A physical theory might have no metric or multiple metrics, so a ‘beginning’ must involve a first moment, not just finite age. Whether one dismisses singularities or takes them seriously, physics licenses no first moment. The analogy between the Big Bang and stellar gravitational collapse indicates that a Creator is required in the first case only if a Destroyer is needed in the second. The need (...)
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  • So how does the mind work?Steven Pinker - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (1):1-38.
    In my book How the Mind Works, I defended the theory that the human mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation. Jerry Fodor claims that 'the mind doesn't work that way'(in a book with that title) because (1) Turing Machines cannot duplicate humans' ability to perform abduction (inference to the best explanation); (2) though a massively modular system could succeed at abduction, such a system is implausible on other grounds; and (3) evolution adds nothing to our understanding (...)
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  • Natural language and natural selection.Steven Pinker & Paul Bloom - 1990 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4):707-27.
    Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers (...)
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  • Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds.Derek C. Penn, Keith J. Holyoak & Daniel J. Povinelli - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (2):109-130.
    Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological continuity between human and nonhuman animals masks an equally profound discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. To wit, there is a significant discontinuity in the degree to which human and nonhuman animals are able to approximate (...)
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  • What is a work of art?Harold Osborne - 1981 - British Journal of Aesthetics 21 (1):3-11.
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  • Fodor on cognition, modularity, and adaptationism.Samir Okasha - 2003 - Philosophy of Science 70 (1):68-88.
    This paper critically examines Jerry Fodor's latest attacks on evolutionary psychology. Contra Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Fodor argues (i) there is no reason to think that human cognition is a Darwinian adaptation in the first place, and (ii) there is no valid inference from adaptationism about the mind to massive modularity. However, Fodor maintains (iii) that there is a valid inference in the converse direction, from modularity to adaptationism, but (iv) that the language module is an exception to the (...)
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  • Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives.Ara Norenzayan, Scott Atran, Jason Faulkner & Mark Schaller - 2006 - Cognitive Science 30 (3):531-553.
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