ISOLATING THE INDIVIDUAL: THEOLOGY,THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION,AND THE PROBLEM OF ABSTRACT INDIVIDUALISM

Debates about the theological implications of recent research in the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion have tended to focus on the question of theism. The question of whether there is any disagreement about the conceptualization of the individual human being has been largely overlooked. In this article, I argue that evolutionary and cognitive accounts of religion typically depend upon a view of cognition that conceptually isolates the mind from its particular social and physical environmental contexts. By embracing this view of the mind, these accounts also unwittingly embrace an abstract individualist view of individual personhood that Christian theologians have explicitly battled against. Taken as a whole, the field leaves sufficient room for supplementary theories that are compatible with theological accounts of the relational individual, but in practice, no effort has been made to engage, or even to accommodate, any other view of individual personhood.     

Spontaneous number discrimination of multi-format auditory stimuli in cotton-top tamarins (Saguinus oedipus)

Studies using operant training have demonstrated that laboratory animals can discriminate the number of objects or events based on either auditory or visual stimuli, as well as the integration of both auditory and visual modalities. To date, studies of spontaneous number discrimination in untrained animals have been restricted to the visual modality, leaving open the question of whether such capacities generalize to other modalities such as audition. To explore the capacity to spontaneously discriminate number based on auditory stimuli, and to assess the abstractness of the representation underlying this capacity, a habituation-discrimination procedure involving speech and pure tones was used with a colony of cotton-top tamarins. In the habituation phase, we presented subjects with either two- or three-speech syllable sequences that varied with respect to overall duration, inter-syllable duration, and pitch. In the test phase, we presented subjects with a counterbalanced order of either two- or three-tone sequences that also varied with respect to overall duration, inter-syllable duration, and pitch. The proportion of looking responses to test stimuli differing in number was significantly greater than to test stimuli consisting of the same number. Combined with earlier work, these results show that at least one non-human primate species can spontaneously discriminate number in both the visual and auditory domain, indicating that this capacity is not tied to a particular modality, and within a modality, can accommodate differences in format.     

Liberalism,Abstract Individualism,and the Problem of Particular Obligations

In the following I take issue with the allegation that liberalism must inevitably be guilty of ‘abstract individualism’. I treat Michael Sandel’s well-known claim that there are ‘loyalties and convictions whose moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are’ as representative of this widely held view. Specifically, I argue: (i) that Sandel’s account of the manner in which ‘constitutive’ loyalties function as reasons for action presupposes the possibility of there being (what I call) ‘underivable particular obligations’, but that such obligations are, in fact, a logical impossibility; and (ii) that Sandel’s account of the self as necessarily ‘encumbered’ presupposes an account of personal identity which confuses identification with definition, and which is, therefore, fundamentally flawed. For their constructive and insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, I owe a special debt of gratitude to the following: Clare Chambers, Roger Crisp, Cécile Fabre, Paul Kelly, David Lloyd-Thomas. Thanks also go to Res Publica’s two anonymous referees.     

The Situational Context <Emphasis Type="Italic">on the Nature of Political Philosophy</Emphasis>

Rationalism in political philosophy is the view that politics should be governed by moral principles and that those principles can and should be justified independently of the situations and circumstances that make up political reality. This traditional view of political philosophy implies that the meaning of right political action is determined by moral principles the rational authority of which derives from abstract philosophical reasoning, not from the situations and circumstances that are the substance of political reality. In this essay I argue that rationalist moralities must presuppose the understanding of particular situations and circumstances for their meaningful and correct interpretation. This means, I argue, that the rightness of political judgement and action is immanent in particular situations, not in abstract moralities. And this, I argue, suggests a shift from the traditional view of political society as the embodiment of abstract principles, towards a view of political society as the embodiment of the activity of situational judgement. A society worth hoping for, then, is one in which we can live in the light of our understanding of the situations and circumstances that are the substance of everyday life, rather than in the shadow of abstract moralities. Such a society would be sensitive to the particularities and complexities of political reality, but at the same time it does not succumb to moral relativism and skepticism.     

Language-relative construal of individuation constrained by universal ontology: revisiting language universals and linguistic relativity

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross‐linguistic developmental studies that follow Imai and Gentner (1997) , we examine the question of whether language influences our thought in different forms, like (1) whether the language‐specific construal of entities found in a word extension context ( Imai & Gentner, 1997 ) is also found in a nonlinguistic classification context; (2) whether the presence of labels per se, independent of the count‐mass syntax, fosters ontology‐based classification; (3) in what way, if at all, the count‐mass syntax that accompanies a label changes English speakers' default construal of a given entity? On the basis of the results, we argue that the ontological distinction concerning individuation is universally shared and functions as a constraint on early learning of words. At the same time, language influences one's construal of entities cross‐lingistically and developmentally, and causes a temporary change of construal within a single language. We provide a detailed discussion of how each of these three ways language may affect the construal of entities, and discuss how our universally possessed knowledge interacts with language both within a single language and in cross‐linguistic context.     

Conceptual Hierarchies in a Flat Attractor Network: Dynamics of Learning and Computations

The structure of people's conceptual knowledge of concrete nouns has traditionally been viewed as hierarchical ( Collins & Quillian, 1969 ). For example, superordinate concepts ( vegetable ) are assumed to reside at a higher level than basic-level concepts ( carrot ). A feature-based attractor network with a single layer of semantic features developed representations of both basic-level and superordinate concepts. No hierarchical structure was built into the network. In Experiment and Simulation 1, the graded structure of categories (typicality ratings) is accounted for by the flat attractor network. Experiment and Simulation 2 show that, as with basic-level concepts, such a network predicts feature verification latencies for superordinate concepts ( vegetable ). In Experiment and Simulation 3, counterintuitive results regarding the temporal dynamics of similarity in semantic priming are explained by the model. By treating both types of concepts the same in terms of representation, learning, and computations, the model provides new insights into semantic memory.     

Processes of religious individualisation: stocktaking and issues for the future

Abstract

The paper spells out implications of a perspective on religious individualisation that is both comparative and analytical and discusses the various issues that this line of research has to confront. Arguing against notions of modern Western exceptionalism, it points to the selectivity of Western forms of (religious) individualisation and makes a case for the inclusion of additional forms of articulating individual agency and ‘selfhood'. The paper takes individualisation as an inter-subjective, social phenomenon and connects it to the concept of social imaginaries. Opposing standard concepts of modernisation the paper nevertheless brings processuality centre stage, emphasising contingency. The paper discusses the possibility of the convergence of contextual developmental trends and the question of transculturality of notions of self and agency. With reference to the dimension of critique included in visions of religious individualisation, the paper finally points to the effects processes of religious individualisation can have on human actors within, and beyond, the realm of spirituality, including the recognition of subjectivities and the strengthening of actors’ resilience.     

Patterns of Response Times and Response Choices to Science Questions: The Influence of Relative Processing Time

We report on five experiments investigating response choices and response times to simple science questions that evoke student “misconceptions,” and we construct a simple model to explain the patterns of response choices. Physics students were asked to compare a physical quantity represented by the slope, such as speed, on simple physics graphs. We found that response times of incorrect answers, resulting from comparing heights, were faster than response times of correct answers comparing slopes. This result alone might be explained by the fact that height was typically processed faster than slope for this kind of task, which we confirmed in a separate experiment. However, we hypothesize that the difference in response time is an indicator of the cause (rather than the result) of the response choice. To support this, we found that imposing a 3‐s delay in responding increased the number of students comparing slopes (answering correctly) on the task. Additionally a significant proportion of students recognized the correct written rule (compare slope), but on the graph task they incorrectly compared heights. Finally, training either with repetitive examples or providing a general rule both improved scores, but only repetitive examples had a large effect on response times, thus providing evidence of dual paths or processes to a solution. Considering models of heuristics, information accumulation models, and models relevant to the Stroop effect, we construct a simple relative processing time model that could be viewed as a kind of fluency heuristic. The results suggest that misconception‐like patterns of answers to some science questions commonly found on tests may be explained in part by automatic processes that involve the relative processing time of considered dimensions and a priority to answer quickly.     

The mathematics of sharing / Las matemáticas que realizan los niños al compartir

Abstract

The purpose of sharing is to construct equivalent sets, making it an ideal context for analysing important quantitative concepts such as counting, equivalence and cardinality. Two studies analysed how four- and five-year-olds shared blocks in equal sharing and reciprocity conditions and their number inferences about one set after counting the other. The researcher asked children to share double and single blocks between two characters. They succeeded more in building equivalent shares in an equal sharing than reciprocity condition. Most children who shared correctly also made appropriate number inferences. To examine whether perceptual cues helped children share the blocks, a second study used Canadian $1 and $2 coins. A double block is twice the size of a single, whereas there is no visual cue about the value relation between coins because they are the same size. Unexpectedly, children shared equally well with blocks and coins, and most children made number inferences.     

GLOCALIZATION: RELIGION AND SCIENCE AROUND THE WORLD

This essay explains the rationale behind a series of reviews on interactions between knowledge and values, science and religion, in different countries or regions around the world. The series will run in Zygon for the whole of 2015 and beyond. In the literature, it may seem that discussions in the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom are typical of the issues, but they need not be. David Livingstone showed that the reception of evolution differed, even among Calvinists in different countries. Thus, rather than an export model, we should take time to learn from scholars rooted in different contexts how in their situation issues on knowledge and values arise and are dealt with. In this interplay of global processes and local contexts, indicated with the term glocalization, we should be alert to the migration of concepts and the transformations that ideas undergo.