International Cognition and Culture Institute

There is no such thing as sexual intercourse

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Monday, 08 February 2010 17:14; Written by Pascal Boyer

I happen to know the secret of academic success. So far I have never divulged it because, well, charity begins at home. But it looks like the field of cognition and culture might be in need of a shot in the arm, so to speak. So I agreed to part with the secret, against a small compensation negotiated with the ICCI.

There is some truth in the old adage that it takes an enormous amount of education to be truly credulous. Indeed, years of familiarity with several academic fields have convinced me that the proposition is quite literally true. Being an academic means (at least in some disciplines I am familiar with) believing a great number of impossible things before breakfast, and, it would seem, the more preposterous the better.

LIncolnWoman2

Consider for instance the academic fondness for the idea that madness is “defined by culture”, as discussed here by Ophelia Deroy. One could discuss the serious claims made by Deroy and the various issues they raise (which I did elsewhere). For the time being, note just this. The notion that there is nothing to madness, except what “culture” decrees, is counter-intuitive to most people in most societies in the world - except to Western academics. Most people in most places who had any contact with insanity inferred that something was really non-standard in some other people’s mental functioning. Hence, probably, the frisson of the notion that it is all arbitrary and changing.

To turn to more telling examples, consider relativism, which tells us that people literally live in incommensurable worlds. Or the common anthropological idea that kinship has nothing to do with reproduction and genetics. Or the literary critics who say that writing is primary and orality is a derived form of communication. Or the notion that gender is completely unrelated to sex.

The mechanism that made these strange notions popular is actually not so mysterious.

Altruistic adoption in chimpanzees?

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Wednesday, 03 February 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

In the last decade, extended altruism towards unrelated group members has been proposed to be a unique characteristic of human societies. Experimental studies on captive chimpanzees have shown, on the other hand, that they are limited in the ways they share or cooperate with others. Individuals are indifferent to the welfare of unrelated group members; they do not care about fairness, and so on (see my previous posts here and here). The behaviour of chimpanzees in the wild is quite selfish, even when some cooperation is involved. For instance, they build coalitions, but that's to climb the social ladder, or they give meat, but only so that they can get sex.

In the last issue of PLoS, however, Boesch, Bolé, Eckhardt and Boesch report 18 cases of adoption, a highly costly behavior, of orphaned youngsters by group members in Taï forest chimpanzees. Half of the orphans were adopted by males and remarkably only one of these proved to be the father. Such adoptions by adults can last for years and thus imply extensive care towards the orphans. These observations suggest that, under the appropriate socio-ecological conditions, chimpanzees do care for the welfare of unrelated group members.

Why are these chimpanzees so altruistic?

Video: A Debate on Group Selection

Details: Category: Events; Published on Tuesday, 02 February 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

On July 7th 2009, the The London Evolutionary Research Network held a extremely interesting debate on group selection in which four eminent speakers in the field discussed the motion: "Is natural selection at the group level an important evolutionary force?"

Stuart West, Professor of Evolutionary Biology, University of Oxford
Herbert Gintis, Professor of Economics, Santa Fe Intitute, University of Siena, and CEU
Samir Okasha, Professor of Philosophy of Science, University of Bristol
Mark Pagel, Professor of Biology, University of Reading

After many months of waiting, the videos have finally been uploaded online. You can now watch the debate videos here.

Experimental epidemiology: The work of Chip Heath

Details: Category: Hugo's blog; Published on Monday, 01 February 2010 23:00; Written by Hugo Mercier

The aim of the post is to bring to the attention of experimentally minded anthropologists the work of Chip Heath and his collaborators. A professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Heath describes his research as examinining "why certain ideas - ranging from urban legends to folk medical cures, from Chicken Soup for the Soul stories to business strategy myths - survive and prosper in the social marketplace of ideas." Heath has a knack for fun psychology experiments that test broader concepts of cultural transmission. In chronological order, here are some examples from his recent publications--I'll bet that many of you will find stuff that is relevant to your own research or ideas for how to test your own hypotheses.

The evolution of misbeliefs

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 31 January 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

An article entitled "The Evolution of Misbeliefs" by Ryan McKay and Daniel Dennett In Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2009) 32, 493-561, freely available here, with commentaries by (among many others) George Ainslie, Roberto Casati, Pascal Boyer, Max Coltheart, Owen Flanagan, Keith Frankish, Gary Marcus, Ruth Millikan, Ara Norenzayan, Dan Sperber, David Sloan Wilson, and a reply by the authors.

Abstract: From an evolutionary standpoint, a default presumption is that true beliefs are adaptive and misbeliefs maladaptive. But if humans are biologically engineered to appraise the world accurately and to form true beliefs, how are we to explain the routine exceptions to this rule? How can we account for mistaken beliefs, bizarre delusions, and instances of self-deception? We explore this question in some detail. We begin by articulating a distinction between two general types of misbelief: those resulting from a breakdown in the normal functioning of the belief formation system (e.g., delusions) and those arising in the normal course of that system's operations (e.g., beliefs based on incomplete or inaccurate information). The former are instances of biological dysfunction or pathology, reflecting "culpable" limitations of evolutionary design. Although the latter category includes undesirable (but tolerable) by-products of "forgivably" limited design, our quarry is a contentious subclass of this category: misbeliefs best conceived as design features. Such misbeliefs, unlike occasional lucky falsehoods, would have been systematically adaptive in the evolutionary past. Such misbeliefs, furthermore, would not be reducible to judicious - but doxastically noncommittal - action policies. Finally, such misbeliefs would have been adaptive in themselves, constituting more than mere by-products of adaptively biased misbeliefproducing systems. We explore a range of potential candidates for evolved misbelief, and conclude that, of those surveyed, only positive illusions meet our criteria.

Universal and culture-specific recognition of emotions

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 30 January 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

emotions

Participant watching the experimenter play a stimulus and indicating her response

There is an intersting forthcoming open access (available here) article of PNAS entitled "Cross-cultural recognition of basic emotions through nonverbal emotional vocalizations," by Disa Sauter, Frank Eisner, Paul Ekman, and Sophie K. Scott.

Abstract: Emotional signals are crucial for sharing important information, with conspecifics, for example, to warn humans of danger. Humans use a range of different cues to communicate to others how they feel, including facial, vocal, and gestural signals. We examined the recognition of nonverbal emotional vocalizations, such as screams and laughs, across two dramatically different cultural groups. Western participants were compared to individuals from remote, culturally isolated Namibian villages. Vocalizations communicating the so-called "basic emotions" (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and surprise) were bidirectionally recognized. In contrast, a set of additional emotions was only recognized within, but not across, cultural boundaries. Our findings indicate that a number of primarily negative emotions have vocalizations that can be recognized across cultures, while most positive emotions are communicated with culture-specific signals.

Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics. Madrid 2010

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Friday, 29 January 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

The goal of this 4th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication (web site: http://conference.clancorpus.net/) is to promote both theoretical and applied research in pragmatics. Three parallel sessions will be held according to the following topics:

Pragmatics theories: meaning, role of context, semantics-pragmatics interface, explicature, implicature, speech act theory, etc.
Intercultural aspects of pragmatics: research involving more than one language and culture or varieties of one language, lingua franca, intercultural misunderstandings, effect of dual language and multilingual systems on the development and use of pragmatic skills
Applications: usage and corpus-based approaches, teachability and learnability of pragmatic skills, pragmatic variations within one language and across languages, developmental pragmatics, etc.

Moscow's stray dogs

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Thursday, 28 January 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

From an article in the Financial Times, fascinating both from an anthropological and a biological point of view: 'According to Poyarkov [a biologist specialising in wolves who also studies these dogs, see picture], there are 30,000 to 35,000 stray dogs in Moscow, while the wolf population for the whole of Russia is about 50,000 to 60,000. Population density, he says, determines how frequently the animals come into contact with each other, which in turn affects their behaviour, psychology, stress levels, physiology and relationship to their environment.

"The second difference between stray dogs and wolves is that the dogs, on average, are much less aggressive and a good deal more tolerant of one another," says Poyarkov. Wolves stay strictly within their own pack, even if they share a territory with another. A pack of dogs, however, can hold a dominant position over other packs and their leader will often "patrol" the other packs by moving in and out of them. His observations have led Poyarkov to conclude that this leader is not necessarily the strongest or most dominant dog, but the most intelligent - and is acknowledged as such. The pack depends on him for its survival.'

You can read here the whole article here.

Four recipes for religion

Details: Category: Harvey Whitehouse's blog; Published on Monday, 25 January 2010 23:00; Written by Harvey Whitehouse

DSCN0953

Shrine at Qixian Monastery, China (photo Harvey Whitehouse)

Over dinner the other evening, it struck me that religion is rather like ratatouille. People disagree about the ingredients of both but in fact there is no such thing as the one true recipe for either. The concepts ‘religion’ and ‘ratatouille’ are elastic and contested, and will almost certainly undergo further modification in the future. Foody fundamentalists tell us that real ratatouille is an Occitan dish originating in France but are divided into factions claiming descent from Provence (Provença ratatolha) and Nice (Niça ratatolha). According to Wikipedia (which apparently is rude to consult at the dinner table), there are four main kinds of ratatouille. Let us count the main types of religion.

Language evolution and universals

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Sunday, 24 January 2010 11:52; Written by Dan Sperber

Two ambitious papers just published offer broad contrasting views on the biological and cultural bases of human languages:

Nicholas Evans, N. , & Stephen Levinson (2009). The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 32(5), 429-492. (With commentaries and response) available here,

and W. Tecumseh Fitch 2009) Prolegomena to a Future Science of Biolinguistics. Biolinguistics, Vol 3, No 4 (2009) available here

Mad in America

Details: Category: Ophelia's blog; Published on Wednesday, 20 January 2010 08:05; Written by Ophelia Deroy

Relativity of mental illness has enjoyed the favours of philosophers for decades (Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking and, more recently Geoffrey Llyod in his Cognitive Variations). It has lead to the development of the « new cross-cultural psychiatry », heralded by Kleinman in 1977. It may become the best pop version of culture and cognition – as shown by the recent piece in the New York Times « The Americanization of mental illness », published on the 10th of january. The essay is adapted from Ethan Watters’ forthcoming book, Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.

As with many fashionable ideas, it is a bit difficult to isolate the arguments from the seductive examples. The thesis itself, as it appears in the paper, leaves room to different interpretations: « Mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories….and have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places. » What is sparked and shaped by culture? The boundary between mental illness and mental health, the distinction between mental and physical illness, or the division between kinds of mental illnesses? Some examples in the article even suggest that cultural classifications of mental illnesses converge, but give different explanations of their origins, significance or treatments. Others stress the fact that what is spreading is basically a « symptom repertoire », i.e. knowledge of how to diagnose illnesses, rather than definitions of what is diagnosed.

Moreover, as nobody challenges the idea that different cultures have different views on health and medicine, which in their turn influence the treatments people are – or are not – offered, the revolutionary potential of the thesis can be a bit hard to see.

But the paper highlights two more interesting, or disturbing points: first, that western categories of mental illnesses spread and contaminates the other cultures, and second, that this contagion is not for the best.

Na'vi Cognition and Culture

Details: Category: Nicolas' Blog; Published on Monday, 18 January 2010 23:00; Written by Nicolas Baumard

James Cameron's Avatar is about to become the most viewed film in history. While Cameron may deserve this success for his special effects and breathtaking landscapes, Pandora, the world he has created, may seem rather disappointing. It is situated several light-years away from Earth but it looks very much like our world: There are trees, and grass, as well as predators and preys, birds and monkeys and, above all, the aliens called the Na'vis are just like us, except for a blue skin and a long tail (they even have breasts for those who read Playboy for the articles). They also have language, rituals and so on! One may ask: Why such a lack of imagination? Why create a whole encyclopaedia if it is for re-inventing the Earth?

Actually, I may be unfair with Cameron. After all, the convergences between the Earth and Pandora make sense from an evolutionary point of view. Indeed, there are good reasons to expect that life on others planets might evolve as it did on Earth. Everywhere in the universe, living beings would face similar evolutionary problems: They need energy, detectors, and computational systems. And everywhere in the universe, they will discover the same solutions exactly as, on Earth, the same tricks (enzymes, sex, eyes, etc.) have been discovered again and again by different species (see for instance Conway Morris's wonderful book about convergences; see also our old reader at alphapsy).

So far, so good for the biology (as for the physics, see here for the floating mountains!). Everywhere, life is likely to re-invent photosynthesis, sex or echolocation. But what about cognition and culture? Can we expect aliens to be so humanlike? I see no good reasons to be sceptical about the Na'vis' cognition.

Cognition under the high brow

Details: Category: Pascal's blog; Published on Thursday, 14 January 2010 09:02; Written by Pascal Boyer

High Culture: Da Vinci's Last Supper (as seen in The Da Vinci Code).

We cognitive anthropologists deal with “culture” in the broad sense of distributed mental representations widespread in a social group (and many of us don’t really believe that the terms “culture” or “cultural” pick up a natural kind of representations - but that will be the topic of another post). We do not usually have much time for “culture” in the elevated sense of high culture - the sense usually associated with the names of Matthew Arnold or TS Eliot, among others.

But we should pay some attention, perhaps. True, high culture does not occur in all human societies, it is a minority pursuit wherever it does, and there may be more important problems for cognitive anthropology to solve. But it is interesting nonetheless. Wherein lies the difference between the high and low registers? Is there any cultural variation in that difference? How does it translate in terms of cognitive processes?

We academics and other literate types are often misguided in our approach to this, as we compare the best examples of high culture with the worst of the low. This was recently and vividly brought to my attention by the request of a friend and colleague, that we both read something called The Da Vinci Code, which we would then discuss in various undergraduate classes on literature, myth and history. This turned out to be a Serious Mistake.

Body movement in language and cognition

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Wednesday, 13 January 2010 23:00; Written by Emma Cohen

A study by Daniel Haun, published in the December 15th 2009 edition of Current Biology, reports cross-cultural variability in how people memorize bodily movements in space, depending on how space is encoded in the local language. Here is the first paragraph;

Predation enhances cooperation in wee little birds.

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Tuesday, 12 January 2010 23:00; Written by Daniel Haun

In a recent article entitled "The increased risk of predation enhances cooperation"published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Volume 277, Pages 513 - 518 and available here, Indrikis Krams and colleagues experimentally demonstrate an interaction between predation risk and cooperation in breeding songbirds. It is worth reading in the light of current discussions about the co-evolution of warfare and cooperation (for example: Bowles, 2008).

Does power increase hypocrisy?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Friday, 08 January 2010 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

An article entitled "Power Increases Hypocrisy: Moralizing in Reasoning, Immorality in Behavior" by Joris Lammers, Diederik A. Stapel, and Adam D. Galinsky coming out in Psychological Science and available here illustrates how insights into 'power', a notion central in the standard social sciences, can be gained through a cognitive and experimental approach. Abstract under the fold.

Cross potatoes

Details: Category: Brian's blog; Published on Thursday, 07 January 2010 16:11; Written by Brian

holypotato

"It was 7:30 PM, December 4th, 2005. The second Sunday of advent, in Joshua Tree, California. Personal Chef Karin Winkler started to prepare dinner. While thinking about upcoming Christmas, she was peeling and cutting a potato. Everything appeared to be normal. When she was peeling and cutting the second potato in half, a miracle happened: the symbol of a perfectly shaped holy cross appeared on both halves of the potato."

I stumbled recently upon a picture of a cross potato, and in the course of searching for more information about it I found that there have been a number of these things.

Essentialist animals?

Details: Category: Helen De Cruz's blog; Published on Monday, 04 January 2010 23:00; Written by Helen De Cruz

Over the past few decades, there has been a lot of research published on 'psychological essentialism', which has been observed cross-culturally in young children. Essentialism is the tendency to think about animals, plants and social categories in terms of hidden 'essences'. The earliest experiments that indicated psychological essentialism in children were by Frank Keil (1989, Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) who asked preschoolers what would happen if an animal was surgically altered to look like a member of another species. For example, would a raccoon that is surgically modified to look and smell like a skunk actually be a skunk? Young children believed that the creature would still be a raccoon. Three-year-olds and four-year-olds believe that also an apple seed, planted in a flowerpot would still grow out to be an apple tree, or that a cow raised by foster parent pigs would still exhibit normal bovine behavior (Gelman & Wellman, 1991. Insides and essences: Early understandings of the non-obvious. Cognition, 38, 213–244). What is more, children are even more essentialist than adults. For instance, Indian preschoolers believe a Brahmin child remains Brahmin, even when raised by untouchables; Five-year-olds believe that French babies brought up by English-speaking parents will grow up to speak French. Essentialism has been documented in several non-western cultures, indicating that this psychological tendency may be a stable part of human cognition (Gelman 2004, Psychological essentialism in children. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 404–409).

This raises the question: Is essentialism restricted to humans, or does it also occur in other species? Obviously, the experimental procedures I just discussed all rely on language, so experimental design should be radically adapted to probe psychological essentialism in other animal leibniz3 s. Yesterday, I was observing (in an unsystematic way) my cat's behavior (an adult male), and his behavior motivated me to think that essentialism may have its roots in the way animals make concepts.

Let me elaborate. Since he was a young kitten, Leibniz, my cat, has been playing with balls of various sizes and in various materials. Ping pong balls, small rubber balls with bells, soft, fluffy balls, etc. Whenever he is presented with a ball and he is in a playful mood, he will gently tap the ball with his front paw. Occasionally, he sees a ball that is obviously too large to play with. Even then, he will try to tap the ball with his front paw (as he did a moment after the picture was taken) and gives up only after a few tries.

Is Imitation Necessary?

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Monday, 04 January 2010 21:30; Written by Dan Sperber

In an article entitled "Social Learning Mechanisms and Cumulative Cultural Evolution: Is Imitation Necessary?" published in Psychological Science, Volume 20 Issue 12, Pages 1478 - 1483 and available here, Christine A. Caldwell and Ailsa E. Millen make an interesting contribution to the development of experimental studies of cultural transmission and to the discussion of the role of imitation vs. emulation.

Abstract: Cumulative cultural evolution has been suggested to account for key cognitive and behavioral attributes that distinguish modern humans from their anatomically similar ancestors, but researchers have yet to establish which cognitive mechanisms are responsible for this kind of learning and whether they are unique to humans. Here, we show that human participants' cumulative learning is not always reliant on sources of social information commonly assumed to be essential. Seven hundred participants were organized into 70 microsocieties and completed a task involving building a paper airplane. We manipulated the availability of opportunities for imitation (reproducing actions), emulation (reproducing end results), and teaching.Each condition was independently sufficient for participants to show cumulative learning. Because emulative learning can elicit cumulative culture on this task, we conclude that accounts of the unusual complexity of human culture in terms of species-unique learning mechanisms do not currently provide complete explanations and that other factors may be involved.

Jingle Bell - Punjabi Tadka

Details: Category: Dan's blog; Published on Thursday, 24 December 2009 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

When we started this blog, we hoped that anthropologists among our readers would be willing to contribute 'pictures of the week', photos (or videos) that would illustrate in a suggestive manner a theme of cognition-and-culture relevance, but we had very little success and, sadly, we have all but given up. Here however is video not from an ethnographer but suggested by 3QuarksDaily and borrowed from YouTube that illustrates in a pleasant and timely manner how cultural items borrowed in another culture get transformed in the direction of a better integration to their novel environment.

Original creation by: Nupur. Music by: Amartya Rahut.

Culture and Perception

Details: Category: Simon's blog; Published on Wednesday, 23 December 2009 23:00; Written by Simon Barthelme

While taking a break, we are happy to republish some of our favorite 'oldies but goodies'. This one was first put online in December of last year (2008). It was the first installment of a series of posts on Richard Nisbett's theory of culture and perception. Enjoy!

In a lively account published in Trends In Cognitive Sciences (see here), Nisbett and Miyamoto (2005) made the case for "cultural" influences on perception. The crux of the argument is this : visual perception in Americans is more analytical, while in Asians it is more holistic. Americans pay attention to details, Asians to the larger picture. Americans examine objects in isolation, Asians are more sensitive to context. In the authors' own words (p. 469):

"[...], we believe there is considerable evidence that shows that Asians are inclined to attend to, perceive and remember contexts and relationships whereas Westerners are more likely to attend to, perceive and remember the attributes of salient objects and their category memberships. It should be noted that the perceptual and attentional differences just described are in general quite large, sometimes even close to one standard deviation. Indeed, in the typical study, Asians and Westerners were found to behave in qualitatively different ways."

The evidence referred to above consists of psychological experiments that compared the behaviour of Westerners and Asians using mostly well-established paradigms. Change blindness, for example, is a popular staple of visual psychology: people often fail to detect large differences between two pictures shown in succession.

Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Wednesday, 23 December 2009 10:21; Written by Dan Sperber

Jennifer J. Pokorny and Frans B. M. de Waal show that "Monkeys recognize the faces of group mates in photographs" (PNAS December 22, 2009 vol. 106 no. 51 21539-21543)

PokornyWaal

Subjects need to select the odd facial image from among four. On this trial, the odd image is a member of group 1 (Top Left) compared with three members of group 2. For monkeys living in group 1 this trial represents the In-group Odd condition, but for those living in group 2 it is the Out-group Odd condition.(©2009 by National Academy of Sciences)

Abstract: Nonhuman primates posses a highly developed capacity for face recognition, which resembles the human capacity both cognitively and neurologically. Face recognition is typically tested by having subjects compare facial images, whereas there has been virtually no attention to how they connect these images to reality. Can nonhuman primates recognize familiar individuals in photographs? Such facial identification was examined in brown or tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella), a New World primate, by letting subjects categorize facial images of conspecifics as either belonging to the in-group or out-group. After training on an oddity task with four images on a touch screen, subjects correctly identified one in-group member as odd among three out-group members, and vice versa. They generalized this knowledge to both new images of the same individuals and images of juveniles never presented before, thus suggesting facial identification based on real-life experience with the depicted individuals. This ability was unexplained by potential color cues because the same results were obtained with grayscale images. These tests demonstrate that capuchin monkeys, like humans, recognize whom they see in a picture.

Golden bell and Iron shirt

Details: Category: Brian's blog; Published on Thursday, 17 December 2009 23:00; Written by Brian Malley

In some traditions there is an interesting gap betweeen what people think they are going to learn from the tradition and what actually ends up being transmitted. Recently I found a nice example of that while practicing Qi Gong.

In his classic Seventy-two arts of Shaolin (Zhong, 2004) Jin Jing Zhong describes the training method “Covering with a golden bell.”

This exercise is a hard one, it strengthens both outside (muscles, bones, sinews) and inside (the inner organs). It is the most important hard exercise out of all 72 Arts. This exercise is rather complicated and difficult. It is necessary to make a mallet of stuff and strike with it on the whole surface of the body, on the front and the back. At first you will feel some pain but after training for a long time feeling of pain will gradually disappear. At that time the mallet of stuff can be replaced with a wooden one. When you feel no pain from blows, the wooden mallet can be replaced with an iron one. Bring to perfection until you feel no pain from blows.

If you practise this method for two or three years, your breast and your back will become strong like stone or iron; it is of no importance whether the enemy punches or kicks, it will do no harm. Even a sword blow will not do any injury to a man who practises the skill of “Gold Bell.” Chest and back bones of that man become compacted like a single whole. It is necessary to use tinctures to cure bruises of muscles and bones after blows with mallets or falls (somersaults).

Similar in method and aim are two other special training methods, “Iron shirt” and “Iron bull.” All promise that, after several years of hard training, the devotee’s body will be invulnerable to normal blows and even to edged weapons such as swords and spears.

Now, if you are thinking, “bullshit,” then don’t worry, I am too. But hold on.

Uta and Chris Frith on the social brain

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Tuesday, 15 December 2009 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

In the special issue of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B entitled "Personal perspectives in the life sciences for the Royal Society's 350th anniversary", a freely available article on "The social brain: allowing humans to boldly go where no other species has been" by Uta Frith and Chris Frith ( Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 12 January 2010 vol. 365 no. 1537 165-17). Also a video interview of Uta and Chris here. Abstract below the fold.

Conversation Hackers

Details: Category: Olivier's blog; Published on Saturday, 12 December 2009 23:00; Written by Olivier Morin

Olivier Morin and Sophie Claudel

Human argumentation is at the center of recent (and less recent) psychological work. We are learning a lot about our ability to argue. But the motivation behind human arguing is less well known. What makes us want to argue back at other people, even when we know they won't be convinced ? Internet Trolls know a few answers to that question. We are studying their culture from the inside.

"Just consider how terrible the day of your death will be. Others will go on speaking and you won't be able to argue back" - Ram Mohun Roy (HT: Hugo)

A few weeks ago, the web was all abuzz about with one of those stories people are so fond of discussing online. A Canadian woman, who couldn't work because of a depression, lost her sick-leave benefits over a few photographs that were displayed on Facebook. She was smiling on the photographs. The anecdote provoked widespread outrage and rekindled the endless debate over Internet privacy.

But the story in itself did not interest Steve that much. Where other people see a scandal, Steve sees an opportunity for fun. That night, he logged himself on a forum devoted to discussing the condition and problems of depressive people - one among a dozen medical forums where Steve, under a variety of aliases, is a regular. He quickly spotted the thread where the Facebook scandal was being discussed, licked his lips, and began typing something like this:

"It serves her right, if you ask me. You can't defraud insurance companies and think of yourself as a responsible person. It's not the victimless crime it appears to be. Depression is not a real disease anyways."

He clicked 'Send', and waited for the angry reactions to pour in.

The study of cognition and culture today

Details: Category: Events; Published on Friday, 11 December 2009 08:08; Written by Lucien Dontask

A special series of lectures supported by the LSE Annual Fund, organised by the department of anthropology of the LSE and the International Cognition and Culture Institute. All lectures to be held at 6pm the London School of Economics, Seligman Library, room A607, Old Building, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE.
The videos of the lectures will be available here, at the Cognition and Culture Institute !

Tuesday January 12th: Paul Harris (Harvard), "Do children think that miracles are just fairy stories?"
Monday January 18th: Susan Carey (Harvard), "The origin of concepts"
Tuesday February 2nd.: Maurice Bloch (LSE), "Reconciling social science and cognitive science views of the self, the person, the individual etc..."
Thursday February 18th: Stanislas Dehaene (College de France), "How do humans acquire novel cultural skills? The neuronal recycling model"
Monday March 1st: Tanya Luhrmann (Stanford), "Hearing God: how American evangelicals learn to experience God as real"
Monday March 8th: Pascal Boyer (Washington), "The naturalness of social institutions: evolved cognition as the foundation of social norms"
Thursday March 18th: Natalie Sebanz (Radboud), "Acting together: How people share actions, tasks, and memories"
Tuesday April 27th: Tim Ingold (Aberdeen), "To learn is to improvise a movement along a way of life"
Monday May 17th: Vanessa Fong (Harvard), "Transformations of Cultural Models as they Pass
from Parent to Child in a Globalized World: Evidence from Two Longitudinal Studies of Chinese Families"
Monday May 24th: Rob Boyd (UCLA) - Monday May 24, "Culture as an evolutionary phenomenon"
Thursday June 10th: Hannes Rakoczy (Gottingen), "The early ontogeny of collective intentionality and normativity"
Wednesday June 16th: Rogers Brubaker (UCLA), "Doing things with categories: the cognitive
turn in the study of ethnicity"
Wednesday June 30th: Lera Boroditsky (Stanford), "How do the languages we speak shape the way we think?"

Three Questions for Simon Baron-Cohen

Details: Category: Emma's blog; Published on Tuesday, 08 December 2009 23:00; Written by Emma Cohen

This is the first of what I hope will be a regular, informal interview slot, in which I put 3 questions to people who are researching in areas that may be of interest to ICCI members and readers. We hope you enjoy hearing from them. I haven’t asked interviewees to commit to post-interview discussion, though I’m hopeful that we’ll interview many of our own members. Your reactions and comments are always welcome. Thanks in advance to our interviewees!

Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Trinity College, and Director of the Autism Research Centre in Cambridge. He is widely known for his work on Theory of Mind, empathy, and autism. He has coordinated and consulted on a wide range of educational and health programmes, including the DVD series, The Transporters, created especially for children with autism. A host of publications, current projects, and prizes are listed on his webpage.

Three Questions

What finding from your recent research has most excited you?

My research into the link between foetal testosterone (FT) and empathy has been keeping me pretty excited for a number of years, in part because it's so counter-intuitive. When we think of empathy we imagine all sorts of social factors might be influences, such as the quality of parenting you received as a child or the stability of your early family environment. I don't doubt that experience counts for a lot, but it has been eye-opening for me to see that FT levels measured in the amniotic fluid in the womb correlate significantly with later empathy levels in the child [see here]. My excitement for this research topic is driven by trying to understand how this molecule - a sex steroid hormone - could be involved in empathy.

The obvious answer is that the hormone is affecting brain development, so it was with great excitement that we put the children (whose FT levels were known) into the MRI brain scanner.

Summer Institute in Cognitive Science: The origins of language

Details: Category: Call for Papers; Published on Monday, 07 December 2009 23:22; Written by Benoît Dubreuil

Summer Institute in Cognitive Science: The origins of language. 21-30 June 2010, Montreal: When in human evolution did language appear? Did it appear suddenly or gradually? What were the physiological, cognitive, and social prerequisites of language? The Summer Institute, organized by the Cognitive Science Institute (UQAM, Montreal), the Université René Descartes (Paris) and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig), will bring together 40 of the world leading specialists of these questions, among which Michael Arbib, Terrence Deacon, Stevan Harnad, Ray Jackendoff, Giacomo Rizzolatti, Duane Rumbaugh, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, Dan Sperber, Kim Sterelny, Maggie Tallerman, Ian Tattersall, Michael Tomasello, Stephanie White, and David Sloan Wilson.

The scope of natural pedagogy theory (II): uniquely human?

Details: Category: Pierre Jacob's blog; Published on Sunday, 06 December 2009 23:00; Written by Pierre Jacob

This is the second post in a series of two installments by Pierre Jacob, dwelling on Gergely and Csibra's work on human communication. In Pierre's first post, we saw that these experiments show that, as suggested by relevance theory, human can detect communicative intentions quite early. Now Pierre turns to a second issue.

Natural pedagogy has also recently cast an interesting light onto the second question raised by Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance approach to ostensive-inferential communication: to what extent is it distinctive of human cognition? Unlike great apes, domesticated dogs have co-evolved with humans for several thousand years. As a result and unlike great apes, they are widely believed to exhibit some understanding of human referential intentions expressed in communicative gestures, such as pointing (Hare and Tomasello, 2005). Range, Viranyi and Huber (2007) have adapted Gergely et al.’s (2002) paradigm to test the propensity of domestic dogs to engage in the selective imitation of a model’s behavior.

The Biological Link Between Music and Speech

Details: Category: Publications; Published on Saturday, 05 December 2009 23:00; Written by Dan Sperber

In PLoS One, two researchers from the Duke Institute for Brain Science, Kamraan Z. Gill and Dale Purves, publish an article providing "A Biological Rationale for Musical Scales" and freely available here.

Abstract: Scales are collections of tones that divide octaves into specific intervals used to create music. Since humans can distinguish about 240 different pitches over an octave in the mid-range of hearing, in principle a very large number of tone combinations could have been used for this purpose. Nonetheless, compositions in Western classical, folk and popular music as well as in many other musical traditions are based on a relatively small number of scales that typically comprise only five to seven tones. Why humans employ only a few of the enormous number of possible tone combinations to create music is not known. Here we show that the component intervals of the most widely used scales throughout history and across cultures are those with the greatest overall spectral similarity to a harmonic series. These findings suggest that humans prefer tone combinations that reflect the spectral characteristics of conspecific vocalizations. The analysis also highlights the spectral similarity among the scales used by different cultures.

Read also the press release from the Duke Institute entitled "The Biological Link Between Music and Speech," reporting research showing that the musical scales most commonly used over the centuries are those that come closest to mimicking the physics of the human voice, and that we understand emotions expressed through music because the music mimics the way emotions are expressed in speech.

Can you tell the language of the mother from her baby's cry?

Details: Category: Nicolas Claidière's blog; Published on Wednesday, 02 December 2009 23:00; Written by Nicolas Claidière

A recently published article by Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe and Kathleen Wermke entitled "Newborns' Cry Melody Is Shaped by Their Native Language" shows evidence that newborns' cry melody is influenced by the native language of their mother. The authors analysed the melody contours of 1254 cries (selected from 2500 recordings) from 30 French and 30 German monolingual families. They normalized each cry duration and measured the time at which the maximum pitch was reached and the time at which the maximum intensity was reached. Babies from both German and French group produced various cries with very different melodies, but in mean there was a significant difference between the melody of German baby cries and of French baby cries. We can therefore conclude that, on average, the baby cries' melodies are closer to the melody of their mother's tongue than to that other tongues (but see Mark Liberman Language Log post for some methodological issues).

This study provides the first evidence of the fact that newborns sound production is influenced by the language of their parents. From previous studies we knew that newborns prefer to hear language to which they have been exposed prenatally (e.g. DeCasper, A.J., and Fifer, W.P. (1980). "Of human bonding: Newborns prefer their mothers’ voices". Science 208, 1174–1176) and we also knew that infant's babbling is heavily influenced by the language of their caregivers (see the work by Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies, e.g. B de Boysson-Bardies, L Sagart, C Durand (1984). Discernible differences in the babbling of infants according to target language. Journal of Child Language). Yet, babbling only starts at around 7 month of age and by that time infants have already learned specific features their mother tongue, they can already categorize vowels for instance. So it is quite a surprise to see that newborn's cries can be influenced by their mother tongue.

More Articles...

Page 10 of 17

Is this more than illegal tipping, and if so, how?

Dan Sperber

Thursday, 23 May 2013 16:52

Tips (to waiters, taxis, etc) are paid (1) because of precedent: if they are customarily given, it is more of a decision not to give rather than to give - with precedents producing an anchoring effect, being stingy in tipping may have reputational costs, and so on (2) because it is a normal part of the income for some professions so tipping may be a moral thing to do (3) because these are professions where typically people can treat customers etc. more or less well, so that a tip may be a sensible investment.

In the medical case nicely described by Denis, there is the added fact that such tipping is illegal. Any other important difference? We may feel that doctors should treat all patients equally well, but then we should object to private medecine or surgery, and so on when it can fix its prices and offer better services to patients who can pay more. My guess is that even people who don't object might still see tipping doctors are immoral.

The general point is this: this case might be best approached within a discussion of tipping in general, a discussion very well worth having from avariety of points of view: cultural, economic, rational choice, reputation, and so on.

Anyhow Denis, get well soon!

The 'gratitude trap' where Hungarian patients keep falling , Denis Tatone

The envelope that makes the Romanian medical system go around

Radu Umbres

Tuesday, 21 May 2013 21:45

Denis, your story strikes a Romanian chord. The situation around here is even worse, from what I can tell. But it is quite a fascinating question, with different answers from different points of view.

For an economist, it is a matter of price formation. In the state system, Romanian doctors are paid a fixed (and miserable) wage, largely unrelated to quality or effort. The incentive to pocket bribes is huge, and patients know it so well. In the private sector (with transparent and varied prices for medical services), bribes are almost unheard of. Also, there is a more or less efficient market for bribes. Patients find out how much a doctor expects, usually from past patients, or from other doctors. Surgeons receive more than GPs, professors more than debutants, etc.

But I think there is something more about "medical envelopes", from a cognitive point of view. First of all, there is a vast asymmetry of competence between doctors and patients, which gives the former a large freedom of action. Is this pill better, or another one? Surgery or not? Home treatment or hospitalisation? To make things worse, the post-hoc reckoning is not very helpful, since most decisions may be medically justified, but you might also end up dead. The patient is at the mercy of the practitioner since she does not know what choices are better. The best way to make sure one gets the proper treatment is to insure the benevolence of the doctor, and a bribe is the simplest path to gain the doctor's amity.

Second, there is something special about this particular social exchange: the patient is dealing in an ultimate value - her health. Something everyone in Romania says is that there is no price too high to be healthy. (Paradoxically, giving up smoking somehow does not make the list - self-hint-hint-nudge-nudge). If people would risk not bribing a policeman to avoid a fine, they are extremely unlikely to jeopardise their health in this manner. One cannot afford to stick to abstract principles (like discouraging corruption) when her life is at stake.

Finally, there is something like a Maussian gift in the affair: one passes a fat envelope even without the explicit mention of an economic exchange. It is not that the surgeon would not operate without being bribed - the patient just shows gratitude without visible economic reckoning. Of course, under the veil of generosity stands the solid self-interest of the patient. The fat envelope is meant to make sure that no scalpel is lost in her belly. But no-one says it out loud. It's a "I know that you know that I know etc" which makes sure that the transaction is smooth and polite.

To end with a personal anecdote: I was (and to some extent I still am) very wary of giving out envelopes to doctors. A little bit of moral prudishness, a little bit of fear (what if he feels insulted?), a bit of monetary unsaviness. Those who are more competent in these matters reassured me: "just put the envelope on his desk - he knows what to do next" After all, he is the expert, and I am not.

The condescension factor

Denis Tatone

Sunday, 19 May 2013 14:40

This is a comment wrote by Eva Zemandl on Facebook about the article above. I'm copy-pasting it here with her permission.

"Very well-rounded analysis. A few thoughts. First, I am glad you mentioned nurses in your comment* because in the article you discount this, perhaps unintentionally. I remember my aunt consistently bribing the nurses when my uncle was recovering from a stroke for several months in the hospital. Also, I've had many conversations with my family here in Hungary about this, trying to understand the rationale behind this irrational system (I'm originally from the US). I think both motivations could be at play here. I got the impression that, in addition to the bribe, people are still very sensitive to the "wage supplement" aspect. That is, most people I've talked to find the wages of doctors and other health care providers rather deplorable. Even if GMs are a considerable expense for my working class family members, they seems to use the wage supplement as a way to render this dysfunctional reality more palatable somehow. I also think there is a third factor at work here - but I think it's linked to the others. I've witnessed situations where doctors behave very condescendingly toward patients or their families, despite a hefty bribe of some 20,000 HUF. Part of that harks back to the days of the socialist regime - when the power of public authorities was unquestioned. As one of my Hungarian friends likes to say about health clinics here: "they just want to make you feel like they still have power over you." When my aunt and I went to visit my cousin in critical care last year, the doctor didn't want to give us the time of day. We didn't give her a tip, but we kept pressing her for answers. I said to her, "is it a virus or a bacteria?" The doctor looked at me like a deer in headlights. I think she was surprised I even knew the difference. She opened up quite a lot to us after that and we never gave her a tip. Finally- and I'll get off my soapbox - private insurance systems are not necessarily more transparent. The US being a case in point. There is a great (surprisingly) 28-pg TIME article about this, "The bitter pill: why medical bills are killing us." I'm sue you'd find it relevant. Anyway, thanks so much for posting this!!"

*This is the comment by me which Eva refers to:

"I should have also added that, in fact, there is GM directed to nurses when they are perceived as the primary caretakers. Usually this is the case for families having elderly parents in retirement houses."

The firefighters calendar

Guillaume Dezecache

Saturday, 18 May 2013 17:08

Thanks for this brilliant post, Denis!

That GM thing reminds me of a funny routine that happens in France: around the end of the year, firemen and mailmen knock at your door to sell (ugly) calendars. Folk wisdom holds that if you don't buy the calendar, firemen will not rush if there is a fire in your house. Similarly, mailmen will be more likely to lose important mail you receive. What is striking is that this belief seems to carry on though it makes complete non-sense. I bet the situation is a bit different as for GM: the physician obviously remembers you and s/he is more likely to act benevolently towards you with a bit of extra money...

Not Quite So Simple

Grazzi Yoon

Monday, 01 April 2013 22:08

Azzouni certainly has the bona fides to weigh in on this. But it seems to me that the pure sociology of it isn't quite so simple.

Take Wiles' first proof of Taniyama-Shimura. It had an error, but it took concerted efforts by extreme experts to locate it. But that's not the end of the story. It turns out that he and Richard Taylor were able to ascertain that piecing together two parts of the theory that didn't quite seem to work on their own was in fact enough to 'patch' the proof together (Wiles himself says as much).

So, Yes, the original proof was wrong. To a much lesser extent, Perelman didn't fill in all the blanks in his landmark proof of Poincare, leading to a (minor scandal) where two other mathematicians claimed to give the "first" proof based on the "ideas of" Perelman and Hamilton.

The question is this: if someone had done the patching of Wiles' proof for him, would THEY be the prover? How large does the hole have to be? When an error is found, who gets to decide whether it is trivial, whether it wrecks the proof entirely, and who will be the one credited with the insight that makes the whole thing work?

These are not trivial matters, and the issue isn't apportioning credit, but deciding what an error truly is. Typos don't count. Proving incorrect results certainly do. But what about "generally correct" ideas that eventually lead to a proof? How loose do those ideas have to be?

I don't think there's ANY argument about when large, demonstrable errors have been found in published proofs. But there are many other cases -- like de Branges' purported proof of the Riemann Hypothesis -- that fall through these neat cracks.

Why do mathematicians always agree? , Christophe Heintz

The Logical Basis of Kinship Terminologies

Dwight Read

Saturday, 30 March 2013 08:17

In respect to kinship terminologies, Levinson's question, "What constrains this exuberant diversity of systems?", is not answered by Kemp and Regier's analysis for one simple reason: Terminologies have a structure and logic, like grammars for language, that determine the possible range of kinship terminologies. Kemp and Regier assume any partition of the space of genealogical relations is a potential terminology and then show that existing terminologies occupy only a small portion of this space due, they assert, to a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness. This would be like saying a sentence can be any subset of all possible vocabulary words, then asserting that the realized languages have sentences that are a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness, but ignoring the fact that the simplicity and usefulness of sentences is created through the grammar of the language that constrains what are admissible sentences. The same is true for kinship terminologies, and the answer to Levinson's question has already been made by showing that kinship terminologies have a generative structure that determines the corpus of kinship terms, starting from the primary kin terms of a terminology, along with kinship concepts that are expressed in the terminology (such as reciprocity of kin terms), and the kinship structural properties embedded in a particular terminology (Read 1984, 2001, 2007, 2009; Read and Behrens 1990; Leaf and Read 2012, among others). For example, the difference giving rise to the fundamental division of terminologies into descriptive versus classificatory (bifurcate merging) terminologies derives from two different ways that sibling relations are conceptualized in different societies: (1) a sibling is the child of my parent other than myself (descriptive terminologies) or (2) siblings are those persons who have parents in common (classificatory terminologies) (Bennardo and Read 2007; Read, Fischer and Leaf 2013). Trying to understand kinship terminologies (and hence kinship systems) without first working out the generative logic of a terminology is like trying to understand languages without working out the grammar of a language. Extensive work has already been published on the generative logic of kinship terminologies and this work makes evident what constrains the variability in kinship terminologies that Levinson asks about.

References

Bennardo, G. and D. Read 2007. Cognition, Algebra, and Culture in the Tongan Kinship Terminology. Journal of Cognition and Culture 7: 49-88.

Leaf, M. and D. Read. (2012) Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane. Lanham: Lexington Press

Read, D. l984. An algebraic account of the American kinship terminology. Current Anthropology 25: 4l7-440

Read, D. 2001 What is Kinship? In The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David Schneider and Its Implications for Anthropological Relativism, R. Feinberg and M. Ottenheimer eds. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Pp. 78-117.

Read, D. 2007. Kinship Theory: A Paradigm Shift. Ethnology 46(4):329-364

Read, D. 2009. Another Look at Kinship: Reasons Why a Paradigm Shift is Needed. Algebra Rodtsva 12:42-69.

Read, D. and C. Behrens. 1990. KAES: An expert system for the algebraic analysis of kinship terminologies. J. of Quantitative Anthropology 2:353-393.

Read, D., Fischer, M. and M. Leaf. 2013. What are kinship terminologies, and why do we care? A computational approach to analyzing symbolic domains. Social Science Computer Review 31(1): 16-44.

Is kinship back? , Dan Sperber

Reclaiming Kinship

Saturday, 30 March 2013 05:55

Yes, kinship is back -- or more accurately, it is reclaiming its original vigor. Haven't you heard of the Kinship Circle? For each of the past three years, and as part of this year's annual meeting of the Amerian Anthropological Association as well, we have had highly successful sessions on kinship. The sessions have been integrated with the themes of each of the meetings. We have had an international group of scholars from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Qatar and the United States, presenting a wide range of papers, ranging from more "classic" questions about kinship systems to current research that is challenging some of our theoretical ideas about what constitutes kinship. The papers from the first two sessions will be published shortly.
Dwight Read
Fadwa El Guindi

mathematicians do disagree! significantly so

William (Bill) Lawless

Friday, 29 March 2013 18:14

Dear learned scholar of mathematicians, I disagree with your premise that mathematicians do not disagree, and, being wonderful souls, are easily converted to consensus. No less a scholar, intellectual and role model than Von Neumann (1961), the founder of game theory, argued against your premise. In fact, he bemoaned that unlike physicists, mathematicians who don't agree behave in an unsocial manner by striking out in new directions, leaving their conflicts unresolved. In his article, the first in his collected works, Von Neumann wished that mathematicians disagreed as physicists did. Whenever conflict arose between two physicists (e.g., Bohr and Einstein), physicists refused to ignore it, often bringing their field to a standstill until a resolution was found (i.e., consensus via debate, unlike your fanciful example of consensus without debate). I have long cherished Von Neumann's insight, and his remarkable paper on mathematicians. BTW, in my research, I too have found that consensus without conflict is indeed possible, except that none of the participants can agree on the result.

Von Neumann, J. (1961). The mathematician. Collected works, Pergamon.

Gullibility and pigheadedness

Hugo Mercier

Monday, 18 March 2013 07:02

Thanks Radu and Christophe for a great post and a great exchange. Just a quick note to point out that the professor mentioned in the story is also described as rarely paying attention to the opinions of others. People had told him he was walking into a trap and he dismissed their advice. As in most other cases, the problem is not really sheer gullibility, but poor discrimination in who to trust, including a large part of refusing to be influenced by some communicated information.

Why do scammers persist in saying they are from Nigeria? , Radu Umbres

A scientist's gullibility

Christophe Heintz

Sunday, 10 March 2013 14:19

Your hypothesis, Radu, that scam targets personality traits more than they exploit the situations has a corroborating story just out in the news (brought to my attention by Denis Tatone): Paul Frampton, a great physicist, has fallen victim of scam, mistakenly thinking that he was corresponding with a young beautiful model and eventually ending up in jail for transporting 2kg of cocaine.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-the-bikini-model-and-the-suitcase-full-of-trouble.html?_r=3&

People concur in saying that Frampton is unusually gullible.

This story of an incredibly gullible scientist (or so it seems) might also be relevant to your remark that the optimality of epistemic vigilance can only be measured in view of its fit to the milieu. An optimal epistemic vigilance would enable people to believe most of the true things they are told and to disbelieve most of the false things they are told (especially the costly one). The inconvincible sceptic as well as the gullible has less than optimal epistemic vigilance. The optimal vigilance fall in between, but its precise position depends on whether the environment is full of false claims or not. It would be interesting to know whether there are different cognitive developments of epistemic vigilance depending on the type of environment in which a child grows up. This could account for some variability across individuals.

As for scientists, they are supposed to instantiate high epistemic vigilance. So how can Frampton be at the same time so gullible and a good physicist? I see two non-exclusive possibilities:

(1) Frampton exercises epistemic vigilance, but only in the domain of physics. This can happen because the scientific environment fosters argumentative abilities. By contrast, Frampton did not wish or need to convince others that he was having a relation with a beautiful model. He did not need to find good reasons for his beliefs and did not wish to adress counter-arguments. Hugo Mercier pointed to me that this difference in the argumentative context could explain the fact that Newton, with so great achievements in physics, did so badly in chemistry/alchemy. There was in alchemy no need to convince others; it was a secret enterprise.

(2) Frampton does not exercise much epistemic vigilance, but does well in physics nonetheless because the process of checking the plausibility of claims is distributed to others. Only very selected information arrives to his creative mind. This is thanks to the process through which scientific information comes to be distributed---the review process for instance. In science, epistemic vigilance is distributed across individuals and institutionalised. In that context, some gullibility might be an advantage. The schoolgirl, in any case, does better by believing the apparently crazy things that her teacher says (e.g. sound is the vibration of matter). At the research level also, it can pay to believe improbable hypotheses; it means pursuing a high risk, high reward research programme.

Nav view search

Navigation

Search

Latest blog posts

Related Sites

More Articles...

Additional information

Latest comments