International Society for Philosophy, History and Soicial Sciences of Biology
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Wednesday, 27 February 2013 16:22
Patterns of Biological and Sociocultural Evolution
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Monday, 14 January 2013 13:41
The 3-day International Conference aims to provide an interdisciplinary platform where evolutionary scholars from the exact, technological, life, human and sociocultural sciences can exchange ideas and techniques on how to conceptualize, model, and quantify biological and sociocultural evolution.
Plenary Speakers: Michael Benton, Tal Dagan, John Jungck, Carl Knappett, Daniel McShea, Alex Mesoudi, Mark Pagel, Tyler Volk, and Richard Watson.
Read more: Patterns of Biological and Sociocultural Evolution
Does Cognitive Science Need Anthropology?
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Friday, 24 August 2012 08:53
Call for papers: Panel on cognition and culture at the 17th World Congress of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Friday, 22 June 2012 16:29
3rd Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Thursday, 31 May 2012 01:05
The CEU Budapest Conference on Cognitive Development, organised by the Cognitive Development Center, is the only annual European conference focusing on cognitive development. The Third BCCCD will take place January 10-12, 2013. Invited speakers: Stanislas Dehaene (Collège de France) and Laurie Santos (Yale University). Invited symposium on 'Bayesian modeling of cognitive development' (Organizer: Noah Goodman - Stanford University). Submissions for symposium proposals and poster are welcome in all related topics and areas.
Read more: 3rd Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development
Social Norms and Cultural Dynamics
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Friday, 23 March 2012 11:06
The journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes has a Call for Papers for a Special Issue on "Social Norms and Cultural Dynamics". Guest Editors: Michael W. Morris (Columbia University), Ying-yi Hong (Nanyang Technological University), Chi-yue Chiu (Nanyang Technological University). Submission Deadline: December 30, 2012.
Why do the people in a group—a corporation, profession or nation—tend to behave in similar, characteristic ways? Why do they respond to situations and approach problems differently than do the people in other groups? Cultural differences are seen even between firms in same industry, between occupations that overlap, and between adjacent countries —groups that essentially share the same environment—so cultural patterns are not simply adaptations to different environments. Humans differ from other social animals in this tendency of groups to accumulate cultural patterns, and this may explain how we broke away from other primates in developing more complex social organization (Baumeister, 2005). To understand culture and its role in organizational behavior, researchers have grappled with two related problems at different levels of analysis. First, what psychological mechanism causes individuals to behave in culturally characteristic ways? Second, how do these processes keep a population behaving in a certain set of ways (even as the individuals in one generation are replaced by a new generation), or, in other cases, generate cultural change over time? The first problem—cultural influence—arises in traditional organizational behavior research examining the extent to which national, corporate, or occupational traditions constrain a person’s judgments, decisions, or behaviors (e.g. Earley, 1989). The second problem—cultural persistence and evolution—arises in research investigating how collective-level patterns reproduce themselves over time (e.g., Boyd & Richerson, 1985; Harrison & Carroll, 2006; Weick & Gilfillan, 1971).
Conference on Social Cognition, Engagement and the Second-Person Perspective
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Thursday, 29 December 2011 14:28
Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Cologne (Germany), May 25-27, 2012 on Social Cognition, Engagement and the Second-Person Perspective. Deadline for poster submission: March 1st, 2012
What are the psychological processes and neural mechanisms enabling social cognition? How might social cognition be modulated depending on whether one is actively engaged in social interaction with someone or merely observing others interact? What is the impact of this distinction for research methodologies in social psychology and social neuroscience as well as for our understanding of conditions like autism? In particular, this conference brings together experts from various fields to promote the prospects of a second-person approach for future research into the foundations of social cognition.
Read more: Conference on Social Cognition, Engagement and the Second-Person Perspective
Theoretical Interventions in the Anthropology of Mathematics
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Saturday, 22 October 2011 09:51
We are seeking abstracts for a session entitled "Theoretical Interventions in the Anthropology of Mathematics" (Panel Organizers: Stephen Chrisomalis and Samar Zebian) to be held at the Society for Anthropological Sciences 8th Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, Nevada, February 22-25, 2012. Deadline for abstract: November 20, 2011.
A considerable body of important research bears directly on the relationship between mathematics and aspects of language, cognition, and culture. However, disciplinary trends in anthropology and linguistics have insufficiently integrated this important work into basic theories of human behavior, cognition, and cultural variability. We are seeking papers on any aspect of mathematics, numeracy, or number systems that clarifies and expands the theoretical contribution of the social-scientific study of mathematics beyond its current purview. We particularly are interested in papers that bridge the various human sciences including cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, psychology, history, and/or philosophy.
(More below the fold)
Read more: Theoretical Interventions in the Anthropology of Mathematics
The Knowledge Commons: Research and Innovation in an Unequal World
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Friday, 08 July 2011 22:33
The St Antony's International Review (a peer-reviewed, academic journal established by graduate members of St Antony's College at the University of Oxford) is publishing a 'Call for Papers':
"The problem of common-pool management is an ancient and enduring question in public policy and governance. ...Yet much of the literature concerning the problems and benefits of common-pool systems does not obviously apply to the knowledge commons. Knowledge is distinct from limited resources like pastures in several regards. First, knowledge is composed of individuals’ cognitions, rather than material objects. Second, while pastures might be depleted by overgrazing, the knowledge commons seems to be threatened by what Paul David calls “over-fencing”: if key bodies of knowledge are closed off, then it is difficult to innovate. Third, knowledge exchange and innovation are arguably crucial for economic growth. Finally, a lack of knowledge about oneself and one’s environment deprives one of an essential human virtue: the ability to act as a knower"
Abstracts due July 30, 2011, Papers due November 18, 2011. More here
Cognitio - Nonhuman Minds: Animal, Artificial or Other Minds
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Saturday, 18 December 2010 13:03
3, 4, 5 July 2011 - UQÀM, Montreal
Cognitio is a young researcher's conference now held every two years at the Université du Québec à Montréal, under the auspices of its Cognitive Science Institute. Over the past several years, Cognitio has been a colloquium where many facets of the human mind were explored. We looked at the relationship between mind and its material substrate (2004), at human decision making (2005), at situated minds (2006), at social cognition (2007) and at the evolution of minds and cultures (2009).
The time has come to turn our attention to "nonhuman minds": to reflect on other minds, on minds that could have been and on minds that could be. Do our primate cousins have minds? And what about other animals? Does it make sense to think of "robot minds" and "artificial minds" in general?
This year, Cognitio will be held at the Université du Québec à Montréal on July 3rd, 4thand 5th 2011, just prior to the joint meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP) and the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP). Submission of proposals for the conference is done through the EasyChair system. We are only asking for 600 words abstracts. EasyChair will allow you to upload a PDF paper if you want to, but only your abstract will be evaluated. The deadline for submissions is March 15th, 2011.
Workshop on the Social Brain (Cambridge, April 2011)
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Monday, 22 November 2010 10:13
The MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (Cambridge, England) is organising a worshop on "The Social Brain: Evolution, development, psychopathology and future directions" (Scientific Organisers: Dr Dean Mobbs, Prof. Trevor Robbins, and Prof. Ian Goodyer) on the 12th and 13th April, 2011. Application Deadline: 15th January, 2011. The aim: The aim of this workshop is to provide audience members with state of the art coverage of social neuroscience and make translational and theoretical connections between human brainimaging, comparative research, and neuropsychiatric disorders. We aim to keep the workshop small and extremely interactive.
Faculty: Ernst Fehr, Chris Frith, Uta Frith, Nicky Clayton, Robin Dunbar, Molly Crockett, Ben Seymour, Matt Lieberman, Jason Mitchell, Nikolaus Steinbeis, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Matthew Rushworth, John O'Doherty, Brian Knutson, Henrik Ehrsson, Tania Singer, Wako Yoshida, Nick Humphrey, Predrag Petrovic, Cindy Hagan, and Simon Baron-Cohen.
Read more: Workshop on the Social Brain (Cambridge, April 2011)
Society for Psychological Anthropology Meetings, April 2011
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Sunday, 21 November 2010 13:43
The Society for Psychological Anthropology Biennial Meetings will take place in Santa Monica, CA March 31-April 3, 2011. The theme: "Subjects and Their Milieux in Late Modernity: The Relevance of Psychological Anthropology to Contemporary Problems and Issues" : "In this conference, we continue to innovate within psychological anthropology and reach across subdisciplinary and disciplinary boundaries to explore new areas of practice and theory for the second decade of the 21st century. ... We will focus especially on the relevance of psychological anthropology to problems and issues in the contemporary world--from changing families, workplaces and local communities to religious groups, professions, and transnational institutions like consumer capitalism, world religions, and NGOs. ... Examples of possible panels and papers are ones on child and adolescent development; overlaps between psychological and medical anthropology; transforming perspectives on family, gender, and sexuality; memory and trauma; narrative and identity in institutional contexts; and rethinking theories and research strategies to explore new forms of communication, communities, and being alone. ...Both individual papers (15 minutes) and full panels (1 hour and 45 minutes) are welcome. Younger scholars are particularly encouraged to suggest panel, paper, or discussion group topics."
The deadline for submitting panel and paper proposals is December 1, 2010. More here.
Discovery in the social sciences
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Saturday, 13 November 2010 23:00
A workshop on "Discovery in the social sciences: Towards an empirically-informed philosophy of social science" will take place at the University of Leuven, Belgium, March 22-23, 2011. The aim of this workshop is to bring together scholars who are working in the philosophy of the social sciences, especially those interested in scientific practice. The theme is discovery in the social sciences. The keynote speakers are Alison Wylie (University of Washington) and Jack Vromen (Erasmus University Rotterdam). We invite submissions of extended abstracts (about 1000 words), and we are especially eager to hear from young researchers. Submission deadline for abstracts: 31 December, 2010. Here is the workshop's website.
Pragmatics of religious transmission
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Sunday, 05 September 2010 15:10
At the 10th international SIEF (Societé Internationale d´Ethnologie et de Folklore) Congress, "People make places - ways of feeling the world" to take palce in Lisbon, 17 to 21 April 2011, a call for papers (deadline: October 15) on "The pragmatics of religious transmission: contexts, case studies and theoretical departures" for a panel convened by Ruy Blanes (University of Lisbon), Vlad Naumescu (Central European University), and Arnaud Halloy (Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis):
"The issue of religious transmission and learning has become a thriving topic in the contemporary anthropology of religion. Driven by the creative tension between cognitive and culturalist approaches it prompts interesting debates and exchanges, and the exploration of new methodological and heuristic paths addressing the problem of transmission.
In this panel we invite our colleagues to explore pragmatic contexts of religious transmission: the complex of communicational and active conditions that affect (through perception, cognition, emotion, interaction and materiality) individuals engaged in religious action. From this perspective, religious transmission operates through both implicit and explicit regimes. It can take complex and defined forms in ritual contexts, but it can also impregnate various contexts of the quotidian through different dimensions and agencies: discipline, imagination or aesthetics. Taking these as fundamental dimensions of religious transmission, we invite participants to reflect on their articulation in concrete ethnographic cases."
Joint Action: What is Shared
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Monday, 05 July 2010 18:50
Special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology on "Joint Action: What is Shared?" Guest Editors: Natalie Sebanz & Stephen Butterfill. Call for papers. Deadline for submissions: 15 August 2010.
Researchers have appealed to many kinds of sharing in explaining or characterising joint action. Joint actions are variously said to involve shared intentions or goals, shared task representations, shared attention, shared common ground, and more. Each putative case of sharing raises numerous questions. Is talk of sharing in this context literal or metaphorical; and if metaphorical, how is the metaphor to be understood? Is such sharing constitutively necessary for joint action? What cognitive and conceptual demands does such sharing place on the agents? How does such sharing facilitate joint action? How does it develop? What is its role in development? What awareness of other agents of a joint action, if any, does such sharing require? In what ways is such sharing apparent to us when we perceive or recognise joint actions done by others? Further questions concern interactions and conceptual relations between the different kinds of sharing. Do shared intentions interact with shared task representations? How many kinds of sharing are involved in joint action—are intentions shared in the same sense that task representations are, for instance? This special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology aims to address questions such as these with contributions from social, cognitive and developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience and philosophy.
CFP : Conference on cognitive development, Central European University, Budapest
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Friday, 25 June 2010 20:37
Invited Speakers : Ellen Markman (Stanford University), Josep Call (MPI EVA, Leipzig), and the hosts: György Gergely & Gergely Csibra (CEU)
The conference will be held on January 14-15, 2011. Deadline for symposia: 10th September, 2010, Deadline for posters: 10th October, 2010. Call for symposium and poster submissions - Official website.
Read more: CFP : Conference on cognitive development, Central European University, Budapest
From cognitive science to an empirically-informed philosophy of logic
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Tuesday, 30 March 2010 09:48
A workshop in Amsterdam (December 7-8 2010) entitled "From cognitive science and psychology to an empirically-informed philosophy of logic" will bring together logicians, philosophers, psychologists and cognitive scientists to discuss the interface between cognitive science and psychology, on the one hand, and the philosophy of logic on the other hand. More specifically, we wish to investigate the extent to which (if at all), and in what ways, experimental results from these fields may contribute to the formulation of an empirically-informed philosophy of logic, taking into account how human agents, logicians and non-logicians alike, in fact reason.
Read more: From cognitive science to an empirically-informed philosophy of logic
Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics. Madrid 2010
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Friday, 29 January 2010 23:00
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.
Read more: Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics. Madrid 2010
Summer Institute in Cognitive Science: The origins of language
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Monday, 07 December 2009 23:22
Read more: Summer Institute in Cognitive Science: The origins of language
Grounding the Social Sciences in the Cognitive Sciences?
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Sunday, 15 November 2009 21:53
The workshop on "Cognitive Social Sciences-Grounding the Social Sciences in the Cognitive Sciences?" (here) is to be held at CogSci 2010 in Portland, Oregon, on August 11, 2010. This workshop is aimed at exploring the cognitive (psychological) basis of the social sciences and the possibilities of grounding the social sciences in cognition (psychology).
Read more: Grounding the Social Sciences in the Cognitive Sciences?
Encultured Brain conference 8 Oct. 2009 at the U. of Notre Dame
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Tuesday, 18 August 2009 21:43
The Encultured Brain conference will be held 8 October 2009 at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. This conference will promote neuroanthropology, which aims to integrate anthropology, social theory, and the brain sciences. As the first conference exclusively in this area, The Encultured Brain will provide a vision for the future of this line of integrative research, sparking conversations and establishing connections across disciplinary boundaries.
Abstracts must be submitted by September 4th, 2009.
Read more: Encultured Brain conference 8 Oct. 2009 at the U. of Notre Dame
Conference on comparative social cognition
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Monday, 16 March 2009 15:15
The ESF Research Networking Programme "The Evolution of Social Cognition" (CompCog) (www.compcog.org) is proud to announce its opening meeting in Budapest, 13-16 May 2009.
Thanks to the support of leading scientists from around the world we have managed to put together an exciting program that covers many interesting areas of comparative social cognition with emphasis on
SOCIAL GENES, SOCIAL BRAINS AND SOCIAL MINDS
This is a call for scientists interested in the field to come to this meeting. There will be no registration fees, but participants have to cover their costs. We are happy to help in organising the travel as well as the accommodation through our partner company, Chemoltravel.
To celebrate this event and to support the best young and enthusiastic researchers in their early career our budget allows for providing financial support for 35 participants (Note that the support for travel costs is 250 Euros). Twenty applicants will also get the possibility to present their research in a short oral paper, others will have the opportunity to bring a poster.
In order to apply, we need applications by the 5th April 2009. Applicants are asked to fill in a form, with a brief CV, their research interest, and proposed abstract. All applications will be considered but there will be a preference for those that are judged to relate closer to the main topics of the meeting. Please consult the preliminary program.
Applications and any other correspondence should be sent to:
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
There is a limit for the total number of participants to 120 people. Apart from the supported applications other participants will be accepted on a "first come first served" basis. Therefore participation is bound to prior registration by sending in the following form. Participants will be informed whether their registration is accepted.
We are looking forward seeing you in Budapest.
Elena Jazin, Department of Development and Genetics, Uppsala University
Ádám Miklosi, Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University
PS: You will find shortly a bit more information also at www.compcog.org
Changing Minds: Cultures and Cognition in Evolution
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Tuesday, 03 March 2009 08:56
EXTENDED DEADLINE - DATE DE SOUMISSION REPOUSSEE
Cognitio 2009 - Changing Minds: Cultures and Cognition in Evolution
Montreal, Canada
June 4th, 5th & 6th 2006.
http://cognitio.uqam.ca/2009
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Cognitio 2009 invites graduate students and young researchers in cognitive science, anthropology, biology, psychology, computer science, philosophy, or any discipline concerned with cognition, evolution, and culture to present their work at the conference.
Suggested topics include:
- comparative psychology and animal cultures;
- culture and cognition in cross-cultural perspective;
- evolutionary psychology and the adapted mind;
- cognitive neurosciences and cultural learning;
- the modelisation of cultural evolution;
- the evolution and origins of language;
- the evolution of culture and cognition in the human lineage;
- epistemological issues related to the study of cognition, evolution, and culture.
Submission of proposals for the conference is done through the EasyChair system (see http://cognitio.uqam.ca/2009). We are only asking for 600 words abstracts. EasyChair will allow you to upload a PDF paper if you want to, but only your abstract will be evaluated.
Deadline for submission IS NOW MARCH 13th
Keynote speakers:
* Joseph Henrich
Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
University of British Columbia
* Frédéric Bouchard
Philosophy Department
University of Montreal
Theme:
Cognitive Science, which now includes disciplines such as cognitive genetics, evolutionary developmental neuroscience and cognitive anthropology, is unfolding a fresh view of the mind and its relation to culture, fresh yet strangely reminiscent of pre-20th century conceptions of the mind, from Plato to Freud. According to this view, much of cognition is done by unconscious automatic processes, evolved by natural selection to solve specific adaptive problems faced by hominids and early humans. To ensure the replication of their genetic builders, some of these automatic processes may even produce aspects of culture as extended human phenotype. Many cognitive scientists add an adapting mind to this adapted mind, a conscious analytical rule-following processor that can, on occasion, override actions planned by the automated processes. The conscious processor's main task is to adapt the general goals of genes (replicate) to the local environment in which the individual bearing those genes finds herself. To do so, the conscious processor possesses a general learning mechanism that allows it to reproduce any identifiable cultural item(from local norms to local prosody and local food preferences), a learning mechanism that also opens it to rogue cultural items: mind viruses. The nature of the cultural items being copied and of the conscious processor's copying mechanism may even be such that a whole new type of evolutionary process is going on over our minds: the evolution of cultural variants, or memes. If this is so, we, that is our conscious self, are but a battleground in which genes and memes fight for the right to activate our muscles.
Cognitio 2009 invite les étudiants des cycles supérieurs et les jeunes
chercheurs en sciences cognitives, anthropologie, biologie,
psychologie, informatique, philosophie ou tout autre discipline
abordant la cognition, l'évolution et la culture à présenter leurs
travaux lors du colloque. Les sujets proposés sont:
- la psychologie comparative et les cultures animales;
- la culture et la cognition dans une perspective transculturelle;
- la psychologie évolutionniste et l'esprit adapté;
- la modélisation de l'évolution culturelle;
- l'évolution et les origines du langage;
- l'évolution de la culture et de la cognition dans la lignée humaine;
- les questions épistémologiques liées à l'étude de la cognition, de l'évolution et de la culture.
La soumission de propositions de communication se fait à l'aide du
système EasyChair (voir http://cognitio.uqam.ca/2009). Un résumé de 600 mots doit être joint à la demande. EasyChair vous permet de joindre aussi un article en PDF si vous le désirez, mais seul votre résumé sera évalué.
La date limite pour l'envoi de résumés EST MAINTENANT LE 13 MARS.
Conférenciers invités :
Joseph Henrich
Chaire de recherche du Canada sur la culture, la cognition et l'évolution
Université de la Colombie-Britannique
Frédéric Bouchard
Département de philosophie
Université de Montréal
Thématique :
Les sciences cognitives, qui incluent maintenant des disciplines telles que la génétique cognitive, les neurosciences évolutionnistes du développement et l'anthropologie cognitive, mettent présentement de l'avant une nouvelle façon d'aborder la relation entre l'esprit et la culture. Cette nouvelle façon de voir n'est toutefois pas sans rappeler certaines conceptions de l'esprit qui prévalaient avant le 20e siècle, de Platon à Freud. Selon cette conception, une partie importante de la cognition est prise en charge par des processus inconscients qui ont évolué par sélection naturelle pour résoudre les problèmes auxquels étaient confrontés les hominidés et les premiers humains. Pour assurer la réplication de leurs véhicules génétiques, certains de ces processus pourraient même produire certains aspects de la culture, dès lors comprise comme un phénotype étendu. De nombreux chercheurs en sciences cognitives ajoutent à cet esprit adapté un esprit en adaptation : un processeur analytique conscient, capable de suivre des règles et, à l'occasion, de prendre le pas sur les actions planifiées par les processus automatiques. La principale tâche de ce processeur conscient est d'adapter l'objectif global des gènes (se reproduire) à l'environnement local dans lequel se trouve l'individu porteur de ces gènes. Pour ce faire, le processeur conscient possède un mécanisme d'apprentissage général qui lui permet de reproduire tout item culturel identifiable (qu'il s'agisse de normes, de prosodies ou de préférences alimentaires locales). Ce mécanisme d'apprentissage est toutefois vulnérable à des items culturels rebelles : les virus de l'esprit. La nature des items culturels copiés et du mécanisme de copie mise en oeuvre par le processeur conscient pourrait même mener à l'apparition dans nos esprits d'un tout nouveau type de processus évolutionniste: l'évolution de variantes culturelles, ou de mèmes. Si c'était le cas, nous (c'est-à-dire notre moi conscient) ne serions qu'un champ de bataille où gènes et mèmes s'affrontent pour déterminer qui a le droit d'activer nos muscles.
--
http://cognitio.uqam.ca/2009
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Workshop on Pragmatic Development
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- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Friday, 09 January 2009 11:33
Workshop on Pragmatic Development, 22, April 2009, Lyon, France.
Call for Posters. Deadline: 13, February
How children come to understand and produce gestures and speech in context-specific ways is an issue addressed from different perspectives in a number of fields. The aim of the workshop is to bridge disciplinary and cultural boundaries in order to explore the developmental processes enabling humans to achieve complex communicative goals. We want to bring together researchers who specialise in relevant subfields of pragmatic development, others with expertise in relevant cognitive prerequisites, as well as linguists and philosophers who may analyse the importance of the data for existing pragmatics theories. Among others, we want to address the following issues: (1) Are there common principles and processes at play in the use of context in communication at all stages of early development? And, if so, which ones? (2) How could we better take into account cultural differences concerning pragmatic development? (3) Which are the theoretical frameworks that best allow us to explain the latest empirical findings? How do they compare to each other? Can they be teased apart empirically?
Invited speakers: Richard Breheny, György Gergely, Bart Geurts, Erika Nurmsoo, Napoleon Katsos, Aylin Küntay, Ulf Liszkowski, Ira Noveck, Dan Sperber
Organizers: Gerlind Große, Danielle Matthews, Nausicaa Pouscoulous, and Michael Tomasello
Cultures and Cognition in Evolution. Young researchers conference in cognitive science, Montréal, June 4-6, 2009
- Details
- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Tuesday, 06 January 2009 16:31
Changing Minds: Cultures and Cognition in Evolution - Cognitio 2009
Young researchers conference in cognitive science
Montréal, June 4th, 5th & 6th 2009
The goal of this conference is to show current (theoretical and empirical) trends in cognitive science, and to allow academic exchanges between young researchers of various disciplines interested by the same topics. Graduate students in cognitive science, psychology, linguistics, robotics, biology, philosophy, neuroscience and experimental economics will be presenting.
The theme for this year is the evolution of culture and cognition.
Submission of proposals for the conference is done through the EasyChair system. We are only asking for 600 words abstracts. EasyChair will allow you to upload a PDF paper if you want to, but only your abstract will be evaluated.
The deadline for submissions is February 20th, 2009.
Keynote speakers: Joseph Henrich and Frédéric Bouchard
World Social Science Forum, Bergen, May 2009
- Details
- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Tuesday, 02 December 2008 15:47
The first "World Social Science Forum" organised by the International Social Science Council will take place in Bergen on May 10-12, 2009. It has the following goals:
- Topics shall be interdisciplinary and give proof of how different fields can provide complementary insights
- Some sessions will show how the social sciences are engaging with both the humanities and the natural sciences
- The empirical orientation will be broadly comparative, aimed at using cross-national data, historical diversity and the impacts of institutional variation to gain insight
- The Forum will demonstrate the relevance of social research for public policies and social interventions
- The issues addressed will have a broad public interest across countries and cultures and will encompass major current issues such as development or climate change
- The questions raised, approaches used and research presented should be scholarly, innovative and original, designed to re-examine established views by means of critical study and to contribute to generalisable knowledge
There is a Call for papers for a Poster Sessions
Visual Cognition in the History of Science - Call for Papers
- Details
- Category: Call for Papers
- Published on Monday, 17 November 2008 21:00
For the 'Visual Cognition in the History of Science' Symposium
To be held at the XXIII. International Congress of History of Science and Technology
Budapest, Hungary, 28th of July - 2nd of August, 2009
The scientific studies of science have, in the last decades, emphasized the diversity, richness and complexity of scientific practices. In this context, where people are departing from the initial restrictive focus on language, the role of visualization in science appears to be pervasive. Scientists look at the result of their experiments, they produce images and graphs for thinking about the phenomena they investigate and they communicate to their peers with visual artifacts. Tools for the generation of images, ranging from multiple types of microscopes and telescopes to computer generating graphs and 3D pictures, are constantly being developed and are often fully incorporated in scientific practices. Scientists and mathematicians often generate, interpret and manipulate them as part of their scientific work.
Read more: Visual Cognition in the History of Science - Call for Papers
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.
"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."
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...
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.