The Natural History of Desire

Sterelny (2003) develops an idealised natural history of folk-psychological kinds. He argues that belief-like states are natural elaborations of simpler control systems, called detection systems, which map directly from environmental cue to response. Belief-like states exhibit robust tracking (sensitivity to multiple environmental states), and response breadth (occasioning a wider range of behaviours). The development of robust tracking and response-breadth depend partly on properties of the informational environment. In a transparent environment the functional relevance of states of the world is directly detectable. Outside transparent environments, selection can favour decoupled representations.

Sterelny maintains that these arguments do not generalise to desire. Unlike the external environment, the internal processes of an organism, he argues, are selected for transparency. Parts of a single organism gain nothing from deceiving one another, but gain significantly from accurate signalling of their states and needs. Key conditions favouring the development of belief-like states are therefore absent in the case of desires. Here I argue that Sterelny's reasons for saying that his treatment of belief does not generalise to motivation (desires, or preferences) are insufficient. There are limits to the transparency that internal environments can achieve. Even if there were not, tracking the motivational salience of external states suggests possible gains for systematic tracking of outcome values in any system in which selection has driven the production of belief-like states.     

The Natural History of an Outcome Prediction

This study investigated the relationship between accuracy in figure drawing interpretation and interpersonal style. Subjects were 66 undergraduates who completed the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), the Interpersonal Check List (ICL), and a figure drawing interpretation task. The MMPI and ICL were scored and interpreted using Leary's Interpersonal System, which provides for a multilevel assessment of interpersonal functioning. Interpretive skill was found to be associated with "affiliative" interpersonal styles (p < .05), and lack of interpretive skill was associated with "disaffiliative" interpersonal styles (p < .05) at two of the three levels examined. The role of unconscious processes in figure drawing interpretation, the nature of the interpretive process, and implications for the selection of skilled interpreters are discussed with reference to the interpersonal characteristics of the interpreter.     

A Natural History of Belief

Contemporary philosophy of mind is dominated by a conception of our propositional attitude concepts as comprising a proto-scientific causal-explanatory theory of behavior. This conception has given rise to a spate of recent worries about the prospects for naturalizing the theory. In this paper I return to the roots of the theory-theory of the attitudes in Wilfrid Sellars's classic Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. I present an alternative to the theory-theory's account of belief in the form of a parody of Sellars's Myth of Jones, one that highlights the normative and pragmatic aspects of this concept and, hopefully, enables us to bypass questions about its physical realization.     

Simulating Natural History: Walking with Dinosaurs as Hyper-Real Edutainment

Abstract

Real-world experiments that test new technologies can affect policy and practice by introducing new objects of intervention through tinkering; the ad hoc work of realigning relations in the face of frictions, surprises, and disturbances that occur when introducing a technology. In a pilot study on aggression detection, tinkering moved aggression in and out of the human body. In the end, the pilot defined aggression as a set of acoustic-physical variables representing the aroused human body, alongside other signals of aggression. How aggression as an object intervention was shaped by tinkering is relevant because it involved inclusions and exclusions by the authorities who identified aggression, the methods they applied, and mandate for intervention. A focus on relations that are tinkered within a real-world experiment permits critical engagement with this format. Although the real-world experimental format is credited with producing knowledge about a technology's ‘actual’ performance, actors and events at the pilot study location were made only selectively relevant. Analyses of real-world experiments should therefore explain how experiments selectively make the world relevant, giving only particular objects of intervention a truth status.     

The Natural Shiftiness of Natural Kinds

Abstract

The Philosophical search for Natural Kinds is motivated by the hope of finding ontological categories that are independent of our interests. Other requirements, of varying importance, are commonly made of kinds that claim to be natural. But no such categories are to be found. Virtually any kind can be termed natural' relative to some set of interests and epistemic priorities. Science determines those priorities at any particular stage of its progress, and what kinds are most natural' in that sense is always a real and lively scientific question. The general philosophical problem of scientific realism is also real; but between the scientific and the metaphysical, the ‘Problem of Natural Kinds’ sits otiose.     

The Value and Vulnerability of Perceived Religious Involvement

Abstract

The relation between sequential request influence strategies and social power was examined, using a social impact theory model of perception. It was predicted that a door-in-the-face (DITF) scenario would suggest a greater difference in power between a giver and seeker than a foot-in-the-door (FITD) scenario would. Two judgment studies using American students at two different universities measured the perceived power of two individuals, the favor giver and the favor seeker, in either the DITF or the FITD. In both studies, the subjects perceived a significantly greater power difference between the giver and the seeker in the DITF strategy than they did in the FITD.     

The Vulnerability of Young Japanese Women and Suicide

ABSTRACT: Young Japanese females had the highest suicide rate in the world until the end of the 1960s, and it is still extremely high. This paper attempts to explain this phenomenon primarily in terms of vulnerability—in their personalities, social conditions, and role conflicts. Concomitant psychological traits and social conditions are discussed. The cultural conflict of young Japanese women is explicated in terms of psychological and historical information. In addition, the reasons for the differences between the suicide rates among females in the Tokyo area and the Kyoto-Osaka area are explored largely in terms of concepts relating to authoritarianism and its correlates.     

Consumer Vulnerability

Consumer vulnerability affects billions of consumers worldwide, yet there is no consensus about what constitutes this state or about its consequences for consumers. Indeed, while consumer vulnerability is often invoked in consumer research, it is usually discussed informally, with little conceptual anchoring. The goal of the current work was to advance the field's understanding of consumer vulnerability by (a) reviewing and integrating existing research, (b) extracting common features to develop a comprehensive framework for the concept of consumer vulnerability, and (c) charting paths forward for future research. We begin by defining consumer vulnerability as a state in which consumers are subject to harm because their access to and control over resources are restricted in ways that significantly inhibit their ability to function in the marketplace. We then introduce two lenses through which to identify this state: experience and observation. Next, we delineate the antecedents and consequences of consumer vulnerability and discuss the merits of adopting a view of this state as more global and dynamic. Finally, we use our framework to offer future research considerations.     

《剑桥医学史》序言

在西方 ,人们从来没有像今天这样健康、长寿 ,医学的成就也从来没有像今天这样巨大。然而 ,具有讽刺意味的是 ,人们也从来没有像今天这样强烈地对医学产生疑惑和提出批评。毋庸置疑 ,在过去5 0年里医学突破性的进展 ,已挽救了比以往任何时代都要多得多的生命。我们已开始厌倦医学的进步 ,以至于应当对今天认为是当然 ,而一二百年前是不可能的巨大变革进行观察。以下章节将要讨论这些进步。作为导言 ,在这里简要地概括一下在 2 0世纪下半叶发生的重大变化。二战爆发时 ,青霉素仍在实验室研究阶段 ,尚未投入临床应用。在这种抗生素“魔弹”发…     

The Mental Vulnerability Questionnaire: A psychometric evaluation

Eplov, L.F., Petersen, J., Jørgensen, T., Johansen, C., Birket‐Smith, M., Lyngberg, A. C. & Mortensen, E. L. (2010). The Mental Vulnerability Questionnaire: A psychometric evaluation. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 51, 548–554. The Mental Vulnerability Questionnaire was originally a 22 item scale, later reduced to a 12 item scale. In population studies the 12 item scale has been a significant predictor of health and illness. The scale has not been psychometrically evaluated for more than 30 years, and the aim of the present study was both to evaluate the psychometric properties of the 22 and 12 item scales and of three new scales. The main study sample was a community sample comprising more than 6,000 men and women. In this sample the coefficients of homogeneity were all over 0.30 for the three new scales, but below 0.30 for the 12 and the 22 item scales. All five Mental Vulnerability scales had positively skewed score distributions which were associated significantly with both SCL‐90‐R symptom scores and NEO‐PI‐R personality scales (primarily Neuroticism and Extraversion). Coefficient alpha was highest for the 22 and 12 item scales, and the two scales also showed the highest long‐term stability. The three new scales reflect relatively independent dimensions of Psychosomatic Symptoms, Mental Symptoms, and Interpersonal Problems, but because of reliability problems it remains an open question whether they will prove useful as predictors of health and morbidity.     

The History Of Applied Mathematics And The History Of Society

Choosing the history of statistics and operations research as a casestudy, several ways of setting the development of 20th century appliedmathematics into a social context are discussed. It is shown that there isample common ground between these contextualizations and several recent research programs in general contemporary history. It is argued that a closer cooperation between general historians and historians ofmathematics might further the integration of the internalist andexternalist approaches within the historiography of mathematics.     

The History of Vision

One of the most influential ideas of twentieth‐century art history and aesthetics is that vision has a history and it is the task of art history to trace how vision has changed. This claim has recently been attacked for both empirical and conceptual reasons. My aim is to argue for a new version of the history of vision claim: if visual attention has a history, then vision also has a history. And we have some reason to think that at least in certain contexts (namely, in the context of looking at pictures), visual attention does have a history.