Genes in the Postgenomic Era

We outline three very different concepts of the gene—instrumental, nominal, and postgenomic. The instrumental gene has a critical role in the construction and interpretation of experiments in which the relationship between genotype and phenotype is explored via hybridization between organisms or directly between nucleic acid molecules. It also plays an important theoretical role in the foundations of disciplines such as quantitative genetics and population genetics. The nominal gene is a critical practical tool, allowing stable communication between bioscientists in a wide range of fields grounded in well-defined sequences of nucleotides, but this concept does not embody major theoretical insights into genome structure or function. The post-genomic gene embodies the continuing project of understanding how genome structure supports genome function, but with a deflationary picture of the gene as a structural unit. This final concept of the gene poses a significant challenge to conventional assumptions about the relationship between genome structure and function, and between genotype and phenotype.     

Why do Mathematicians Need Different Ways of Presenting Mathematical Objects? The Case of Cayley Graphs

This paper investigates the role of pictures in mathematics in the particular case of Cayley graphs—the graphic representations of groups. I shall argue that their principal function in that theory—to provide insight into the abstract structure of groups—is performed employing their visual aspect. I suggest that the application of a visual graph theory in the purely non-visual theory of groups resulted in a new effective approach in which pictures have an essential role. Cayley graphs were initially developed as exact mathematical constructions. Therefore, they are legitimate components of the theory (combinatorial and geometric group theory) and the pictures of Cayley graphs are a part of practical mathematical procedures.     

Virtue and Disagreement

One of the most prominent strands in contemporary work on the virtues consists in the attempt to develop a distinctive—and compelling—account of practical reason on the basis of Aristotle’s ethics. In response to this project, several eminent critics have argued that the Aristotelian account encourages a dismissive attitude toward moral disagreement. Given the importance of developing a mature response to disagreement, the criticism is devastating if true. I examine this line of criticism closely, first elucidating the features of the Aristotelian account that motivate it, and then identifying two further features of the account that the criticism overlooks. These further features show the criticism to be entirely unwarranted. Once these features are acknowledged, a more promising line of criticism suggests itself—namely, that the Aristotelian account does too little to help us to resolve disputes—but that line of objection will have to be carried out on quite different grounds.     

Conjunctive representations,the hippocampus,and contextual fear conditioning

The context in which events occur can be represented as both (1) a set of independent features, the feature representation view, and (2) a set of features bound into a unitary representation, the conjunction representation view. It is assumed that extrahippocampal (e.g., neocortical) areas provide a basis for feature representations, but the hippocampal formation makes an essential contribution to the automatic storage of conjunctive representations. We develop this dual-representation view and explore its implications for hippocampal contributions to contextual fear conditioning processes. To this end, we discuss how our framework can resolve some of the conflicts in the recent literature relating the hippocampus to contextual fear conditioning. We also present new data supporting the role of a key mechanism afforded by conjunctive representations—pattern completion (the ability of a subset of a memory pattern to activate the complete memory)—in contextual fear conditioning. As is implied by this mechanism, we report that fear can be conditioned to the memory representation of a context that is not actually present at the time of shock. Moreover, this result is predicted by our computational model of cortical and hippocampal function. We suggest that pattern completion demonstrated in animals and by our model provides a mechanistic bridge to human declarative memory.     

Supervenience of Extrinsic Properties

The aim of this paper is to define a notion of supervenience which can adequately describe the systematic dependence of extrinsic as well as of intrinsic higher-level properties on base-level features. We argue that none of the standard notions of supervenience—the concepts of weak, strong and global supervenience—fulfil this function. The concept of regional supervenience, which is purported to improve on the standard conceptions, turns out to be problematic as well. As a new approach, we develop the notion of property-dependent supervenience. This notion is founded on a criterion of relevance adapting the supervenience base to the considered higher-level properties in a specific way, such that only features which are relevant to the instantiation of the higher-level properties under consideration are taken into account.     

Object-based attention occurs regardless of object awareness

In this study, we investigated whether awareness of objects is necessary for object-based guidance of attention. We used the two-rectangle method (Egly, Driver, & Rafal, 1994) to probe object-based attention and adopted the continuous flash suppression technique (Tsuchiya & Koch, 2005) to control for the visibility of the two rectangles. Our results show that object-based attention, as indexed by the same-object advantage—faster response to a target within a cued object than within a noncued object—was obtained regardless of participants’ awareness of the objects. This study provides the first evidence of object-based attention under unconscious conditions by showing that the selection unit of attention can be at an object level even when these objects are invisible—a level higher than the previous evidence for a subliminally cued location. We suggest that object-based attentional guidance plays a fundamental role of binding features in both the conscious and unconscious mind.     

Neurophysiological evidence for transfer appropriate processing of memory: Processing versus feature similarity

Transfer appropriate processing (TAP) accounts propose that memory is a function of the degree to which the same neural processes transfer appropriately from the study experience to the memory test. However, in prior research, study and test stimuli were often similar physically. In two experiments, event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded to fragmented objects during an indirect memory test to isolate transfer of a specific perceptual process from overlap of physical features between experiences. An occipitotemporoparietal P2(00) at 200 msec showed implicit memory effects only when similar perceptual grouping processes of good continuation were repeatedly engaged—despite physical feature differences—as TAP accounts hypothesize. This result provides direct neurophysiological evidence for the critical role of process transfer across experiences for memory.     

Feature integration that routinely occurs without focal attention

To analyze visual scenes, the visual system decomposes the visual scene into features that are processed in parallel by separate subsystems. Certain theories (Treisman, Wolfe) propose that these subsystems function independently before focal attention integrates their output. We describe a new paradigm—the gestalt detection task—that directly assesses the degree of preattentive dependence between any two subsystems. We present five experiments that test whether the subsystems that process form and color function independently in processing brief (and, therefore, preattentively processed) stimuli. Our data show that these two subsystems interact during the preattentive processing of featuredependent information. They are synergistic when the information they receive is consistent; they are antagonistic when the information they receive is inconsistent.     

Contingency is used to prepare for outcomes: Implications for a functional analysis of learning

It is generally assumed that the function of contingency learning is to predict the occurrence of important events in order to prepare for them. This assumption, however, has scarcely been tested. Moreover, the little evidence that is available suggests just the opposite result. People do not use contingency to prepare for outcomes, nor to predict their occurrence, although they do use it to infer the causal and predictive value of cues. By using both judgmental and behavioral data, we designed the present experiments as a further test for this assumption. The results show that—at least under certain conditions—people do use contingency to prepare for outcomes, even though they would still not use it to predict their occurrence. The functional and adaptive aspects of these results are discussed in the present article.     

Towards a Religiously Adequate Alternative to OmniGod Theism

Theistic religious believers should be concerned that the God they worship is not an idol. Conceptions of God thus need to be judged according to criteria of religious adequacy that are implicit in the ‘God-role’—that is, the way the concept of God properly functions in the conceptual economy and form of life of theistic believers. I argue that the conception of God as ‘omniGod’—an immaterial personal creator with the omni-properties—may reasonably be judged inadequate, at any rate from the perspective of a relationship ethics based on the Christian revelation that God is Love. I go on to suggest that a conception of God as the power of love within the natural universe might prove more adequate, with God’s role as creator understood in terms of final rather than efficient causation.     

Conceptual representations in goal-directed decision making

Emerging evidence suggests that the long-established distinction between habit-based and goal-directed decision-making mechanisms can also be sustained in humans. Although the habit-based system has been extensively studied in humans, the goal-directed system is less well characterized. This review brings to that task the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual representational mechanisms. Conceptual representations are structured out of semantic constituents (concepts)—the use of which requires an ability to perform some language-like syntactic processing. Decision making—as investigated by neuroscience and psychology—is normally studied in isolation from questions about concepts as studied in philosophy and cognitive psychology. We ask what role concepts play in the “goal-directed” decision-making system. We argue that one fruitful way of studying this system in humans is to investigate the extent to which it deploys conceptual representations.     

The epistemological challenge to metanormative realism: how best to understand it,and how to cope with it

Metaethical—or, more generally, metanormative—realism faces a serious epistemological challenge. Realists owe us—very roughly speaking—an account of how it is that we can have epistemic access to the normative truths about which they are realists. This much is, it seems, uncontroversial among metaethicists, myself included. But this is as far as the agreement goes, for it is not clear—nor uncontroversial—how best to understand the challenge, what the best realist way of coping with it is, and how successful this attempt is. In this paper I try, first, to present the challenge in its strongest version, and second, to show how realists—indeed, robust realists—can cope with it. The strongest version of the challenge is, I argue, that of explaining the correlation between our normative beliefs and the independent normative truths. And I suggest an evolutionary explanation (of a pre-established harmony kind) as a way of solving it.     

Intelligence and cognitive flexibility: Fluid intelligence correlates with feature “unbinding” across perception and action

People integrate the features of perceived events and of action plans, as well as of episodic stimulus—response relations, intoevent files. We investigated whether the management of event files, and particularly the speed of updating the binding between the task-relevant stimulus feature and the response, correlates with fluid intelligence. Indeed, the performance of participants scoring high on Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices test was less impaired by a mismatch between the stimulus—response relation in the current and the previous trial. This result suggests that high intelligence is accompanied by a higher degree of flexibility in handling event files—that is, by higher efficiency in updating episodic representations.     

Coherent choice functions under uncertainty

We discuss several features of coherent choice functions—where the admissible options in a decision problem are exactly those that maximize expected utility for some probability/utility pair in fixed set S of probability/utility pairs. In this paper we consider, primarily, normal form decision problems under uncertainty—where only the probability component of S is indeterminate and utility for two privileged outcomes is determinate. Coherent choice distinguishes between each pair of sets of probabilities regardless the “shape” or “connectedness” of the sets of probabilities. We axiomatize the theory of choice functions and show these axioms are necessary for coherence. The axioms are sufficient for coherence using a set of probability/almost-state-independent utility pairs. We give sufficient conditions when a choice function satisfying our axioms is represented by a set of probability/state-independent utility pairs with a common utility.     

Individual differences on speeded cognitive tasks: Comment on Chen,Hale, and Myerson (2007)

Chen, Hale, and Myerson (2007) recently reported a test of the difference engine model (Myerson, Hale, Zheng, Jenkins, & Widaman, 2003). This test evaluated whether the standard deviation (SD) is proportional to the amount of processing—that is, mean reaction time (RT)—in a speeded cognitive task. We show that this evaluation is not a test of the model because its finding is a consequence of relationships in the data. We argue any model structure that produces increasing values of RT as a function of difficulty, with different slopes for different individuals, necessarily produces a correlation between SD and mean RT. We illustrate this with a different model structure—that is, the diffusion model proposed by Ratcliff (1978)—showing that it produces a fan out between fast- and slow-group means and produces the correlation between SD and mean RT that matches the empirical result.     

Physico-mathematics and the search for causes in Descartes’ optics—1619–1637

One of the chief concerns of the young Descartes was with what he, and others, termed “physico-mathematics”. This signalled a questioning of the Scholastic Aristotelian view of the mixed mathematical sciences as subordinate to natural philosophy, non explanatory, and merely instrumental. Somehow, the mixed mathematical disciplines were now to become intimately related to natural philosophical issues of matter and cause. That is, they were to become more ’physicalised’, more closely intertwined with natural philosophising, regardless of which species of natural philosophy one advocated. A curious, short-lived yet portentous epistemological conceit lay at the core of Descartes’ physico-mathematics—the belief that solid geometrical results in the mixed mathematical sciences literally offered windows into the realm of natural philosophical causation—that in such cases one could literally “see the causes”. Optics took pride of place within Descartes’ physico-mathematics project, because he believed it offered unique possibilities for the successful vision of causes. This paper traces Descartes’ early physico-mathematical program in optics, its origins, pitfalls and its successes, which were crucial in providing Descartes resources for his later work in systematic natural philosophy. It explores how Descartes exploited his discovery of the law of refraction of light—an achievement well within the bounds of traditional mixed mathematical optics—in order to derive—in the manner of physico-mathematics—causal knowledge about light, and indeed insight about the principles of a “dynamics” that would provide the laws of corpuscular motion and tendency to motion in his natural philosophical system.     

Justification and awareness

In Justification Without Awareness, Michael Bergmann attacks Internalism and Mentalism. His attack on Internalism refutes some versions of an awareness requirement for justification but leaves another standing and well-motivated. His attack on Mentalism, while successful, leaves us with a difficult question—what non-mental features play a role in determining justification?—that his own externalist theory fails to answer correctly.     

Considering self‐interests and symbolism together: How instrumental and value‐expressive motives interact to influence supervisors’ justice behavior

Drawing upon functional theories of attitudes and the organizational justice literature, the current research suggests that people's attitudes toward justice likely serve an instrumental function (grounded in self‐interest, rewards maximization, and punishment minimization) as well as a value‐expressive function (grounded in the expression of self‐concept and values). Importantly, these two functions co‐exist and interact to influence supervisors’ justice behavior and the consistency of such behavior via supervisors’ justification for unjust behavior. Findings from a set of experimental and correlational studies confirmed these predictions. The positive effects of supervisors’ value‐expressive function on justice behavior and its consistency were stronger when their instrumental function was lower (vs. higher), and justification for unjust behavior mediated these effects. Also, supplementary analyses showed that the consistency of supervisors’ justice behavior positively predicted subordinates’ overall justice perceptions beyond the effects of the overall level of justice behavior. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.