"Is the human mind unique?" Webcast of conference
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Our site has been repeatedly attacked by malware
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- Published on Saturday, 22 September 2012 21:02
The ICCI team
UCLA Conference on culture,mind, and brain:
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- Published on Tuesday, 10 April 2012 13:11
An Interdisciplinary Conference on "Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications" will take place on October 19–20, 2012 at UCLA with the support of the International Cultural Neuroscience Consortium (ICNC)
Description: Many lines of research on culture, mind, and brain can no longer be neatly separated. Some questions run together, thanks to our growing understanding of the genome, the biological roots of human sociality, and the mutual constitution of cultures and selves, as well as the complex interactions between the physical, cultural, and social environments underlying health and illness. The aim of this 2-day conference is to highlight emerging concepts, methodologies and applications in the study of culture, mind, and brain, with particular attention to: (1) cutting-edge neuroscience research that is successfully incorporating culture and the social world; (2) the context in which methods are used as well as the tacit assumptions that shape research questions; and (3) the kinds and quality of collaborations that can advance interdisciplinary research training. The conference is designed to appeal to a wide academic audience of biologists, neuroscientists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, epidemiologists, and those in related fields interested in learning about cutting-edge interdisciplinary research at the intersection of culture, mind, and brain.
David Graeber interviewed on Debt: the first 5000 years
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- Published on Sunday, 26 February 2012 00:00
David Greaber, the anarchist anthropologist, talks about his important book, Debt: The First 5000 years (Melville House, 2011):
Summer Institute on Bounded Rationality in Berlin
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- Published on Saturday, 25 February 2012 10:43
A Summer Institute on "Bounded Rationality 2012 – Foundations of an Interdisciplinary Decision Theory" Directed by Gerd Gigerenzer will take place from July 3 – 10, 2012 at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
The Summer Institute will provide a platform for genuinely interdisciplinary research, bringing together young scholars from psychology, biology, philosophy, economics, and other social sciences. Its focus will be on “decision making in the wild” – how cognition adapts to real-world decision-making environments. One of its aims is to provide participants a deeper understanding of the way humans come to grips with a fundamentally uncertain world, with an emphasis on applied contexts such as social interactions, medicine, justice, business, and politics. Graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from around the world are invited to apply by March 31, 2012. We will provide all participants with accommodation and stipends to cover part of their travel expenses. Details on the Summer Institute and the application process are available here .
Tübingen summer school on “The Evolution of Morality”
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- Published on Sunday, 19 February 2012 10:00
The Forum Scientiarum of Tuebingen University organises a summer school on “The Evolution of Morality” (June 12th – 16th, 2012). Twenty graduate students and junior scientists from all over the world will have the opportunity to work on the question of the evolution of morality with Professor Frans de Waal and Professor Gerhard Ernst. Application deadline, March 30.
Topic: What kind of new perspectives and implications can be drawn from insights of the theory of evolution for the understanding of the morality of human beings? The summer school will focus on the evolutionary fundaments of morality presenting as lecturer the primatologist Frans de Waal. Spending much time watching the behavior of apes and monkeys, de Waal brings forward the argument that the core concept of morality has already been present in the pre-social tendencies of nonhuman primates. As a consequence he attacks what he calls the "Veneer Theory", which holds that human ethics and morality - established as a cultural innovation - would only be a thin crust masking our Hobbesian brutish nature.
Read more: Tübingen summer school on “The Evolution of Morality”
Conference: Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications
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- Published on Friday, 20 January 2012 10:44
A conference on "Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications" at UCLA, October 19–20, 2012
Many lines of research on culture, mind, and brain can no longer be neatly separated. Some questions run together, thanks to our growing understanding of the genome, the biological roots of human sociality, and the mutual constitution of cultures and selves, as well as the complex interactions between the physical, cultural, and social environments underlying health and illness. The aim of this 2-day conference is to highlight emerging concepts, methodologies and applications in the study of culture, mind, and brain, with particular attention to: (1) cutting-edge neuroscience research that is successfully incorporating culture and the social world; (2) the context in which methods are used as well as the tacit assumptions that shape research questions; and (3) the kinds and quality of collaborations that can advance interdisciplinary research training.
Read more: Conference: Culture, Mind, and Brain: Emerging Concepts, Methods, Applications
International Conference on Thinking 2012 London
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- Published on Friday, 20 January 2012 10:06
The 7th International Conference on Thinking will take place on the 4th to 6th July 2012 at Birkbeck College and University College London focusing on the most recent research on thinking from psychological, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience perspectives. To submit papers, posters, or symposia proposals and to register please go to http://www.ict2012.bbk.ac.uk/. Deadline for submission: 31 March 2012.
Summer School "Images: Content, recognition, classification"
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- Published on Sunday, 08 January 2012 16:23
A CNRS Summer School on : "Images: Content, recognition, classification", Paris, July 1-5, 2012. Organization: Roberto Casati, Institut Nicod, CNRS-ENS-EHESS, Anouk Barberousse, Université de Lille 1, Alberto Voltolini, Università degli Studi di Torino. Deadline for applications: Feb 10, 2012.
How do we interpret images’ content? How do we tell images from other visual media? What can images represent? What ontology better describes their content? How do humans and machines recognize and classify images? Images are universal instruments of representation and communication. In many intellectually complex activities (the execution of plans and projects, the identification of people and places, navigation, data collection, medical diagnoses) the use of images is essential. Their interpretation requires little teaching (as opposed to, say, that of written language). But at the same time images are inherently ambiguous, and their interpretation may pose difficult problems. This is particularly evident now that countless images are available in online archives. Their content is often made explicit by annotations (captions, tags, place and time stamps). Software for automatic image interpretation has developed at an impressive rate in recent years, but some problems remain hard to tackle, especially when moving from the identification of instances of objects (tokens) or the recognition of simple categories (plants, vehicles) to attempts to work with more complex categories. Ontological/philosophical issues interface here with widening knowledge about cognitive processes and technological development.
Read more: Summer School "Images: Content, recognition, classification"
Summer Course on "Problems of the Self", CEU, Budapest, June 25-July 5, 2012
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- Published on Tuesday, 27 December 2011 13:20
Summer Course on "Problems of the Self", CEU, Budapest, June 25-July 5, 2012. Application deadline: February 15, 2012
Brief Course Description:
The course aims to present the state of the art in research on the self from philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, sociology, and cognitive anthropology. Themes revolve around the nature of the self, as revealed through self-consciousness, body perception, action and joint action, and its embedding in society and culture. Historical and developmental perspectives provide other angles on the self. The course presents a unique opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion on the self from multiple perspectives. It is directed at advanced graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty working in philosophy, psychology, cognitive neuroscience and cognate disciplines.
Read more: Summer Course on "Problems of the Self", CEU, Budapest, June 25-July 5, 2012
Summer school on Theories of Communication in Riga (July 2012)
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- Published on Thursday, 01 December 2011 22:40
There will be an International Summer School at the University of Latvia, Riga, 8-18 July 2012, on the theme: Theories of Communication. What linguistic knowledge and interpretive mechanisms are required to explain the phenomena of inferential communication? Should we favour an explanation rooted in Relevance Theory? And what insight can a pragmatic approach give us into the evolution of human communication? These and other questions will be the focus of the 2012 edition of the International Summer School in Cognitive Sciences and Semantics. Among the topics explored will be the following: (i) information structure, (ii) temporal reference, (iii) indirect speech acts, (iv) non-literal uses of language, in particular, metaphor and related tropes, including hyperbole, simile, sarcasm and irony, (v) hinting, (vi) the nature of word meaning, (vii) cooperation and antagonism in conversation, (viii) slurs, and (ix) the idea of a dynamic lexicon.
Invited organizers: Ernie Lepore (Rutgers University, US) & Dan Sperber (Central European University, Budapest, H, & CNRS, Paris, FR). Faculty: Elisabeth Camp (University of Pennsylvania, US), Robyn Carston (University College London, UK), Ivona Kucerova (McMaster University, Canada), Ernie Lepore (Rutgers University, US), Peter Ludlow (Northwestern University, US), Dan Sperber (Central European University, Budapest, H, & CNRS, Paris, FR), Matthew Stone (Rutgers University, US), Deirdre Wilson (University College London, UK).
Read more: Summer school on Theories of Communication in Riga (July 2012)
EHBEA Conference 2012
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- Published on Friday, 28 October 2011 16:28
A message from Jamie Tehrani:
This year's European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association Conference is being hosted by Durham University on 25-28th March 2012. On behalf of the local organising committee I would like to warmly invite members of the Institute to come along and consider giving a talk. The deadline for the submission of abstracts for presentations is 25th November 2011. Further details about the conference, deadlines and registration can be found on the website: http://www.dur.ac.uk/jeremy.kendal/EHBEA2012/Welcome.html
Patrick Suppes Prize for Nancy Nersessian
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- Published on Wednesday, 04 May 2011 14:19
Nancy Nersessian has been awarded the inaugural Patrick Suppes Prize for Philosophy of Science. This award to Nancy Nersessian is a nice recognition of what can be done with interdisciplinary approaches taking into account both cognition and culture. Indeed, her work consists in describing "the cognitive and cultural mechanisms that lead up to scientific innovation, both theoretical and experimental."
In her book, Creating Scientific Concepts, Nancy Nersessian provides detailed analyses of model based reasoning, which she shows to be at the heart of conceptual change. He work includes both very detailed analyses of individual scientists' cognitive processes and a specification of the role of the social, cultural and material environments. For instance, she has been illustrating with case studies the theory of distributed cognition, and enriching it with new ideas and concepts. Her methodology includes mainly cognitive history and cognitive ethnography.
Workshop: 'Naturalistic approaches to culture?'
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- Published on Monday, 11 April 2011 23:00
The European Science Foundation's Standing Committee for the Humanities (SCH) organizes a workshop on naturalistic approaches to culture. on the lake Balaton in Hungary, 4-7 September 2011. 
The aim of the workshop is to initiate a long-term initiative of the SCH, in favour of interdisciplinary and inter-European exchanges of ideas in this domain. Key speakers will be Gergely Csibra, Ágnes Kovács, Olivier Morin, Eugenia Ramirez-Goicoechea and Peter Richerson.
The ESF offers, on a competitive basis, awards to early career scholars to participate in the workshop. A group of 20 early career researchers will be selected by open competition and invited to actively participate in the event, including the presentation of a poster. The ESF award will cover travel costs (up to a maximum of €350), meals and accommodation (3 nights). Deadlline for applications, May 16. The Call for participation can be downloaded here.
Evolutionary Theory and the Ultimate–Proximate Distinction in the Human Behavioral Sciences
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- Published on Thursday, 10 February 2011 14:59
The January issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science publishes a paper by Thomas Scott-Phillips, Thomas Dickins, and Stuart West entitled "Evolutionary Theory and the Ultimate-Proximate Distinction in the Human Behavioral Sciences." (also discussed here by Rob Kurzban) Although this distinction is well-known and widely used in evolutionary and cognitive approaches, the authors point out that in several areas, including the study of the evolution of cooperation, cultural transmission, and epigenetics debates are fraught with confusions between ultimate ands proximal explanations. They show, for instance, that 'strong reciprocity', as advocated by Ernst Fehr and others, often presented as a solution to the ultimate question "why do we cooperate", is only a solution about the proximal question "how do we cooperate".
Here is the abstract:
To properly understand behavior, we must obtain both ultimate and proximate explanations. Put briefly, ultimate explanations are concerned with why a behavior exists, and proximate explanations are concerned with how it works. These two types of explanation are complementary and the distinction is critical to evolutionary explanation. We are concerned that they have become conflated in some areas of the evolutionary literature on human behavior. This article brings attention to these issues. We focus on three specific areas: the evolution of cooperation, transmitted culture, and epigenetics. We do this to avoid confusion and wasted effort—dangers that are particularly acute in interdisciplinary research. Throughout this article, we suggest ways in which misunderstanding may be avoided in the future.
Neuroscience 'boot camp'
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- Published on Thursday, 13 January 2011 17:01
The University of Pennsylvania announces their 3rd annual Neuroscience Boot Camp, July 31-August 10. The website is here.
Blogroll update
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- Published on Wednesday, 12 January 2011 17:59
We just updated our long neglected blogroll with some interesting blogs: Games with words, Robert Kurzban's blog, Konrad Talmont Kaminski's Just another desidaimon, Tom Rees' Epiphenom.
Vote on whether you think "the language we speak shapes how we think"
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- Published on Monday, 20 December 2010 14:11
The Economist is hosting a debate in which readers may vote on whether or not they believe that "the language we speak shapes how we think."
On the official FOR side: Lera Boroditsky / On the official AGAINST side: Mark Lieberman
So far, opening statements and rebuttals have been posted, as well as comments by the moderator and readers of the site. In addition, Dan Slobin has contributed his reaction, and Lila Gleitman's will be posted on Tuesday. The results of the vote will be announced on Thursday.
So far, the yays have it...
Savage Minds on anthropology, science and truth
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- Published on Wednesday, 01 December 2010 10:11
In a recent post, Benson Saler commented on the AAA's decision to drop the "science" label for anthropology. In this post Savage Minds blogger Rex criticizes the critics of the decision. Anthropology, he argues, doesn't need to be scientific in order to be true.
Rob Kurzban's new blog on evolutionary psychology
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- Published on Tuesday, 19 October 2010 15:18
Robert Kurzban (University of Pennsylvania) has launched his new blog. He comments (almost daily!) on articles, news and books related to evolutionary psychology. You may learn the many errors in Buller's recent article against Evolutionary psychology, where to publish evolutionary psychology, or why we always locate our bed in the same place in a room. A must-read if you are interested in the origins of our many cognitive abilities!
Scott Atran on religion and political violence
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- Published on Friday, 20 August 2010 15:24
Sc
ott Atran gave a lecture entitled "For Friends and Faith: Understanding the Paths and Barriers to Political Violence" at Hampshire College in the lecture series on science and religion. The abstract: "Many creatures will fight to the death for their close kin, but only humans fight and sacrifice unto death for friends and imagined kin, for brotherhoods willing to shed blood for one another. The reason for brotherhoods-- unrelated people cooperating to their full measure of devotion--are as ancient as our uniquely reflective and auto-predatory species. Different cultures ratchet up these reasons into great causes in different ways. Call it love of God or love of group, it matters little in the end... especially for young men, mortal combat in a great cause provides the ultimate adventure and glory to gain maximum esteem in the eyes of many and, most dearly, in the hearts of their peers. This century's major terrorist incidents are cases in point."
The video of the lecture is available here and that of the Q&A session here.
Clay Shirky on "cognitive surplus"
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- Published on Thursday, 01 July 2010 11:53
Clay Shirky teaches at New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program a course named “Social Weather.” He’s the author of Here Comes Everybody, about the power of crowds, and the new Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. In this TED Talk, he presents the main idea of this last book.
Our mini-grant competition: The winners
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- Published on Saturday, 22 May 2010 04:02
Here are the winners of the 2010 mini-grant competition organised by the International Cognition and Culture Institute and funded by the Programme in Culture & Cognition at the LSE to encourage anthropologists to perform in the field an experimental study on children’s and adults’ reasoning about human social kinds:
- Tamara Hale (LSE): "Essentialism without groups in an afro-descendent village in Peru."
- Cristina Moya (UCLA): "The evolution of ethnic categorization: Cross-cultural and developmental tests of innate priors in urban US and the Peruvian altiplano."
- Zohar Rotem (The New School for Social Research, New York): "The role of linguistic difference in bilingual children’s essentialist reasoning about social kinds in Israel"
- Cătălina Tesar and Radu Umbreş (University College London): "Blood, beakers and dowries. An inquiry into essentialist thinking about kinship and ethnicity among Cortorari Roma in Romania"
We congratulate the winners and express our gratitude to all the participants in the competition!
for a brief description of the winning projets,
Workshop: Language as an Evolutionary System
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- Published on Sunday, 11 April 2010 23:00
These two days of talks and discussion will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to discuss the value of applying evolutionary thinking to the cultural evolution of language as well as the commonalities and differences between various existing applications.
Linguistics has traditionally been cautious of analogies between evolution in language an in biology. Common ancestry and descent were proposed earlier for languages than for biological species, but while biological evolution has flourished into a science with solid theories that generate testable hypothesis, the study of the cultural evolution of language -- evolution that is independent of changes in the human genome -- is only beginning to test its innumerable, often speculative and unrigorous, theories. McMahon (1994) concluded that the way forward is Darwinian thinking. Since then, a number of independent proposals have convergently applied explicit analogies with the elements and processes of the evolutionary synthesis (Mayr & Provine, 1998) to cultural language dynamics. They all assume that language evolution and change are caused by cultural mechanisms such as social transmission and language usage in context.
LSE symposium on Personhood in a Neurobiological Age
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- Published on Sunday, 21 March 2010 23:00
An open and free Symposium on Personhood in a Neurobiological Age - Brain, Self and Society, at the LSE, 13 September 2010.
"It seems that we have learned more about the brain in the last decade than over the previous millennia of human history. But to what extent are developments in the 'new brain sciences' leading to a mutation in our understanding of selfhood? Are we in the midst of a move from ‘soul to brain', a radical restructuring of our understanding of human ‘psychology' and the rise of a ‘neuronal self'? If so, in what ways, and with what consequences, for individuals and for society, and for our ways of governing ourselves and others?"
Read more: LSE symposium on Personhood in a Neurobiological Age
Jerry Fodor vs. Elliott Sober on Who Got What Wrong
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- Published on Sunday, 21 March 2010 23:00
For those who want more on the topic, here is, at Blogginghead.tv, a very earnest discussion between Jerry Fodor and Elliott Sober on Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini's What Darwin Got Wrong.
Workshop: Culture and Cognition in Asia
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- Published on Friday, 12 March 2010 09:13
March 11th – 12th, 2010, National University of Singapore, Asia Research Institute.
Research in both the social and cognitive sciences has increasingly focused on the complex dynamic between cultural meaning and practices with cognitive processes. From the sociology of science to the anthropology of religion, cultural studies have taken a cognitive turn to explore a wide range of topics including distributed cognition in technological systems, memory and religious rituals, and the neuroeconomics of decisions about risk. Cognitive neuroscientists have likewise begun to more closely examine how culture influences cognition in areas such as perception and attention, healing and placebo effects, language processing and speech disorders, and even the psychosomatics of meditation. Emerging out of this multidisciplinary interest in culture and cognition is a new understanding of the plasticity of embodiment that emphasizes change in how cultural practices, human cognition and behavior, and even the natural environment influence each other. Cultural change and neurocognitive plasticity are the result of active human agency rather than purely passive inscription by social, technological, or biological systems.
3 Quarks Daily's Arts and Literature Prize: Nicolas Baumard on the universality of music in the competition
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- Published on Tuesday, 02 March 2010 23:00
The great 3 Quarks Daily blog is holding a competition for the best Arts and Literature blog post and one of Nicolas Baumard's posts on our blog, "The universality of music: Cross-cultural comparison, the recognition of emotions, and the influence of the the Backstreet Boys on a Cockatoo," has been nominated. You have only until Sunday, March 7, 2010 to look here at the various nominees (several of which are quite outstanding, including from a cognition and culture point of view) and to vote for the one you prefer. The three winners will be chosen from a shortlist by Robert Pinsky.
Video: A Debate on Group Selection
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- Published on Tuesday, 02 February 2010 23:00
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.
The study of cognition and culture today
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- Published on Friday, 11 December 2009 08:08
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?"
Meeting: Culture evolves
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- Published on Saturday, 28 November 2009 11:34
Discussion meeting organized by Andrew Whiten, Robert Hinde, Christopher Stringer and Kevin Laland as part of a wider Festival of Science to celebrate the Royal Society's 350th anniversary. The meeting will take place at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre in London, UK on June 27-29, 2010.
Summary: The capacity for culture is a product of biological evolution - yet culture itself can also evolve, generating cultural phylogenies. This highly interdisciplinary joint meeting with the British Academy will address new discoveries and controversies illuminating these phenomena, from the roots of culture in the animal kingdom to human, cultural evolutionary trees and the cognitive adaptations shaping our special cultural nature.
Speakers: Confirmed speakers include Professor Luc-Alain Giraldeau, Dr Alex Thornton, Professor Susan Perry, Professor Carel van Schaik, Dr Simon Reader, Dr Dietrich Stout, Professor Naama Goren-Inbar, Professor Francesco d'Errico, Dr Marta Mirazon Lahr, Professor Stephen Shennan FBA, Professor Ruth Mace FBA, Professor Russell Gray, Dr Mark Collard, Dr Joe Henrich, Dr Luke Rendell, Professor Barry Hewlett, Dr Derek Lyons, Professor Gergely Csibra, Dr Hélène Roche, Professor Paul Harris FBA, Professor Andrew Whiten FBA and Professor Kevin Laland.
You can find the full program here and register for the event here.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Thank you all for the very interesting discussion!
First, I would like to recommend a paper by Paul Rubin entitled “Folk Economics," where some of the views that have come out of the discussion are treated in an evolutionary framework.
In addition, I would like to mention that during my doctorate I have worked on the intellectual aversion for the market economy from a historical angle, studying the implications of the rhetorical phenomenon of the personification of money in the English literature of the early modern period. Comparing the economic views expressed by satyrical dramatists and pamphleteers to those of the economists of the time, aka the “early mercantilists,” I found out that the characterization of money as a supernatural force that takes hold of human behavior (a “visible god,” as Shakespeare called it) reveals a naive understanding on the part of the writers of the social and economic transformation taking place at the time. Most of them overlooked the economic implications of that transformation, and construed it merely as a process of corruption of traditional ethical values. This investigation led me to conclude that a promising line of research on the aversion for the market economy might consist in understanding how lay people make sense of complex economic ideas.
Let me give you a hint. When economists use such concepts as rationality, profit, cost, trade, competition, and so on, they are using words that embed a whole set of assumptions, a shared knowledge that defines the economic way of thinking. On the other hand, also common people are exposed to this jargon in their daily life: they often use the same words, but they arguably attach to it a different, non-technical meaning. How does that meaning form? Drawing on the culture and cognition research program, I have hypothesized that it forms according to the way people relate their own understanding on the word in question with real-world examples of which they have personal experience. More generally, our opinion on matters on which we have no special competence may emerge from the relation we establish between the delusively familiar ideas involved in them and our own interpretation of the small piece of world we see around us.
I have more fully developed this hypothesis here. I’ve recently also uploaded a draft here, in which I explore the topic of the aversion to the market using as a case study the Italian movies of the economic boom era. It turns out, that the Italian filmmakers, just as the English dramatists of a few centuries earlier, were quite wary of the capitalistic development of the country.
Let us suppose that there is a characteristic (or a set thereof) which determines the functioning of epistemic vigilance, and let us suppose that this characteristic varies between individuals. Simply put, some individuals are more gullible than others, everything else being held constant. These individuals are unversed in worldly matters, or they have an inclination to believe everything they are being told, or an inclination to trust everyone. Maybe they present a combination of these features. Among these, only the most gullible ones would fall for a 419 Nigerian scam. (I am referring to current circumstances, not to those of initial scams). You must have never paid attention to web security to have never heard about the scam, and you must be very trusting of people to put your money into their hands, or as greedy as to make you blind to the telltale signs. I’d say you are lot more gullible than almost everyone I know - your characteristics of epistemic vigilance make you a clear outlier.
But victims of fool’s errands are no outliers. Although, (in my estimation) most novice workers fall for the prank, I would consider their epistemic vigilance as entirely warranted by the situation. By warranted, I mean that they are as vigilant as required to function as competent social actors given that they know apprentices should trust their masters, that their technical competence is low and obscure terms will appear in conversations, etc. They know no more and no less than the average novice and are as gullible (in terms of personal characteristics - see above) as the next guy. Moreover, they are as epistemically vigilant when they leave to search for a “pipe-stretcher” as when searching for a “round about” (a real tool with funny-sounding name used for pipelines). What differentiates a fool’s errand from a normal request is the malicious intention of pranksters. The “initiated” know that victims cannot tell the difference between a real and an imaginary tool, that victims trust them with expertise and professionalism, etc. The dice are loaded from the start against the “fool”, and the prankster knows it.
To sum up, I would say that deceivers in each case are angling for different fish in different waters. 419’ers search for the easy prey, the most gullible individuals from an immense pool of unknown recipients. They send out the lure and expect the golden fish, yet know nothing about potential victims. Organisers of fool’s errands are shooting fish in a barrel, since they have control over specific victims in advantageous institutional settings ( distribution of knowledge,structure of command, authority of social roles, etc). This explains the vast difference in success rates between the two forms of deception: one is addressed to millions of users to “capture” a few, the other aims at a handful to ensnare most of them. In order to make the contrast clearer, I venture to say that most people tricked in “fool’s errands” would avoid Nigerian scams. A victim of 419 starting as an apprentice is doomed by the double handicap of institutionalised ignorance and personal gullibility. On a more amusing line, 419 artists would like to replicate the power of fool’s errand practitioners, such as by cracking into the email database of “I am wealthy and I trust unknown people too much” Anonymous.
The interesting theoretical implication suggested by your comment addresses the level at which we evaluate epistemic vigilance. On the one hand, we have the level of personal traits of gullibility. On the other hand, we have the level of structures of knowledge distribution. Can we pry them apart analytically? Empirically, it is problematic since it is very possible that forms of deception take into account both levels. For example, one would not attempt a “fool’s errand” with a highly suspicious apprentice bound to ask questions defusing the prank. Perhaps scammers try to eliminate segments of likely targets according to their web expertise (this is Herley’s argument).
One example comes to mind where both levels are addressed by scammers. On La Rambla in Barcelona, extremely well organised groups of con men play the three card trick. They target individuals with scarce local knowledge - tourists - by using a “touristy” location. However, their hope lies with the most gullible (greedy? drunk? careless?) tourists which can be parted with their money. The population of likely “marks” is selected by con artists (at the level of distributed social competence), while the actual mark selects himself by betting on the rigged game (at the level of individual characteristics).
Sorry for the long reply which mostly stated the obvious and restated in a less concise form your keen observations - but I think there is something theoretically interesting here: is epistemic vigilance only something “in the head”? Or do we need to rely upon an externalist perspective in which levels or mechanisms of epistemic vigilance can only be judged in the context of wider institutions of knowledge production and distribution? On my part, I think future explorations in the latter direction are promising.
P.S. Thinking about gains: fool’s errands are about hearty laughs and humiliating social initiation. Three card tricks aim for the quick buck, 50 euros made in a few minutes, a score of marks per day. 419 target the rare and precious victim, stripped of considerable sums after a prolonged investment in deceptive maneuvers. An association between kinds of gain and kinds of exploited weakness in epistemic vigilance?
Your two posts on the targets of fool's errands and scams raise the question: are the victims less epistemically vigilant than is usually the case?
It seems that authors of fool's errands and scams exploit the normal mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. In the case of fool's errands, as you nicely explained, they exploit expert status. For instance, if you are a newcomer in a construction site, the best thing for you to do is to trust what a veteran tells you, and go for the "pipe-stretcher" ... whatever this might be. Your trust is well calibrated to the situation thanks to your epistemic vigilance, and this is exploited by the authoritative person making the joke.
In the case of scams, you point out all the argumentation that comes with a mail and the ensuing procedures. Your alternative explanation of the persistence of Nigeria in scams is to say that, for historical reasons, the place allows for low cost production of arguments. If Herley's filtering hypothesis is true, then those that are filtered out are those that know about scams more than those that are more epistemically vigilant.
Cognitive mechanisms of epistemic vigilance are not foolproof mechanisms. Bounded rationality applies to all domains. So vigilant people can be tricked in believing false information.
This is why I'm wondering whether what is targeted in fool's errands and scams is:
(a) personality traits taking the form of general gullibility and low epistemic vigilance, or
(b) ignorance in some specific domains and the communicative context
(just discovered this site and post, both very interesting !).
(i) what you call the moral-economic fallacy is also called "Montaigne Fallacy" after his claim "that the profit of one man is the damage of another".
(ii) it might be useful pointing out that though economic exchange has to be mutually beneficial ex ante, is does not have to be so ex post. People exchange because they think they will all benefit from those exchanges, but might be disapointed afterwards. Denying that exchanges are, by necessity, mutually beneficial ex post is not a fallacy, and might perhaps help explain the moral-economic fallacy: having bought a disapointing product leads us to retrospectively construe the exchange as unfair.