Finding a home: Developmental and neurobiological perspectives on cultural models

This article looks at cultural models in the light of human development, and neurobiological findings in motivation, learning, and cognition. It is argued that at the individual level, the acquisition of cultural models relies on several innate, neurobiologically based motivational, learning, and cognitive systems. These are: (a) a primary motivation to form social bonds which is driven by affect; (b) highly specialized social learning circuits, involving, but not limited to, mirror neuron systems, that facilitate the encoding of social information through implicit, embodied, imitational learning processes; and (c) the formation of culturally based templates for behavior and cognition centered around structures, collectively known as the “default mode network,” which is essential to self‐understanding, autobiographical memory, social cognition, prospection, and theory‐of‐mind. Cultural models, it is argued, are acquired through innate motivational processes that tie the individual emotionally to a secure base of familiar people and customs. This instinctual desire for proximity to others facilitates the efficient, largely implicit, patterning of knowledge and expectations. Shared knowledge and expectations, in turn, create a common, mostly implicit or unconscious, experience of subjectivity within groups. This allows each individual to automatically and effortlessly interact with similarly enculturated others.     

默认选项助推老年人意外伤害险在线购买

老年人意外伤害保险作为应对人口老龄化带来的意外风险的措施之一,能够有效缓解老年人意外伤害给其和家庭造成的经济负担。然而该险种购买不足的现状有可能影响其持续运营。本研究试图通过四个子研究探讨默认选项的助推方式是否能够促进老年人意外伤害险在线购买额。研究1通过实际销售数据分析,研究2~4通过实验发现:把默认选项设置在最高份数上能够有效地促进保险的购买份额。研究表明应用行为科学的发现可以有效促进公共政策的实施。     

Thinking about the Needy, Justice, and International Organizations

This article has three main parts, Section 2 considers the nature and extent to which individuals who are well-off have a moral obligation to aid the worlds needy. Drawing on a pluralistic approach to morality, which includes consequentialist, virtue-based, and deontological elements, it is contended that most who are well-off should do much more than they do to aid the needy, and that they are open to serious moral criticism if they simply ignore the needy. Part one also focuses on the United States, and illustrates both how incredibly wealthy the U.S. is and some of the spending habits of its citizens; however, its considerations apply to the well-off generally. Section 3 considers whether justice provides reasons for helping the needy. Noting that justice in an extremely complex notion, it discusses numerous considerations relevant to justices scope and implications, including an extended Rawlsian conception of justice, an absolute conception, a comparative conception, the distinction between natural and social justice, and various elements of common-sense morality. Section 2 also distinguishes between agent-relative justice-based reasons, which are relevant to whether we act justly, and agent-neutral justice-based reasons, which are relevant to whether we have reasons of justicefor acting. Correspondingly, it argues that even if one can ignore the needy without acting unjustly, as philosophers like Robert Nozick and Jan Narveson contend, there may be powerful reasons of justicefor addressing their plight. Section 4 briefly address the responsibilities of international organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO). Drawing on Section 2, it is suggested that in addition to standard reasons to act justlytowards needy members of the worlds community, there will be reasons of justicefor such organizations to aid the needy in both present, and future, generations. The article concludes by contending that the well-off in countries like the U.S. have reason to view international organizations like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO as their agents, and to seek to insure that they alleviate misfortunes amongst the worlds needy.     

Perceived Sources of Happiness: A Network Analysis

This study investigated the perceived sources of happiness among young men and women. Rank scores of the perceived reasons for happiness were compared between the two groups and seven significant differences were discerned. Men ranked “sexual activity”, “sports”, being “liked” and having a “good social life” significantly higher than women. Women ranked “helping others”, having a “close family” and being “loved by loved ones” significantly higher than men. A modified form of network analysis was also conducted. Both networks demonstrated similar core representations of happiness with a focus on self-confidence, being free of stress, occupational and social factors, family support and personal relationships. However, the networks show an association between sexual activity and male personal relationships, whereas emotional factors are associated with female personal relationships. The male network also demonstrates the importance of sports and physical activity in male happiness. Despite some gender differences, it is suggested that the similarities within the mean rank scores and networks form the core elements of a shared social representation of happiness.     

Moral Testimony and its Authority

A person sometimes forms moral beliefs by relying on another person's moral testimony. In this paper I advance a cognitivist normative account of this phenomenon. I argue that for a person's actions to be morally good, they must be based on a recognition of the moral reasons bearing on action. Morality requires people to act from an understanding of moral claims, and consequently to have an understanding of moral claims relevant to action. A person sometimes fails to meet this requirement when she relies on another person's moral testimony, and so there are moral limits on such reliance.     

一种应用于中医阴阳五行诊断学说的次协调逻辑(英文)

中医阴阳五行学说博大情深,是中医辨证论治的理论基础,也是指导中医临床诊断与治疗的基本原理,因此对于中医的理论与实践都有着十分重要的价值。但长期以来,一直缺乏对该学说进行严格的形式化研究,使之难以与不断发展中的中医现代化进程相适应。本文就是在这一学说核心内容的基础上,介绍引入次协调逻辑、缺省推理逻辑等先进逻辑来与中医诊断学结合的思想和方法,这样的目的是为今后构造一种符合中医诊断原则的中医阴阳五行推演逻辑系统作准备,该逻辑系统将用来描述基本的中医辨证推演过程。     

The Importance of the Default Mode Network in Creativity—A Structural MRI Study

Anecdotal reports as well as behavioral studies have suggested that creative performance benefits from unconscious processes. So far, however, little is known about how creative ideas arise from the brain. In the current study, we aimed to investigate the neural correlates of creativity by means of structural MRI research. Given that unconscious and less controlled processes are important in creative thinking, structural brain research may find a positive correlation between well‐established creativity measures and cortical thickness in brain structures of the default mode network (i.e., the counterpart of the cognitive control network). Individuals performed the Alternative Uses task by which an individual's cognitive flexibility and the average uniqueness and average creativity of a participant's ideas were assessed. We computed optimized voxel‐based‐morphometry (VBM) to explore the correlation between inter‐individual differences in creativity and inter‐individual differences in gray matter volume. For all creativity measures, a positive correlation was found between creative performance and gray matter volume of the default mode network. These findings support the idea that the default mode network is important in creativity, and provide neurostructural support for the idea that unconscious forms of information processing are important in creativity. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Finite Reasons Without Foundations

This article develops a theory of reasons that has strong similarities to Peter Klein's infinitism. The view it develops, Framework Reasons, upholds Klein's principles of avoiding arbitrariness (PAA) and avoiding circularity (PAC) without requiring an infinite regress of reasons. A view of reasons that holds that the “reason for” relation is constrained by PAA and that PAC can avoid an infinite regress if the “reason for” relation is contextual. Moreover, such a view of reasons can maintain that skepticism is false by the maintaining that there is more to epistemic justification than can be expressed in any reasoning session. One crucial argument for Framework Reasons is that justification depends on a background of plausibility considerations. The final section of the article applies this view of reasons to Michael Bergmann's argument that any nonskeptical epistemology must embrace epistemic circularity.     

The You Turn

This introductory paper sets out a framework for approaching some of the claims about the second person made by the papers collected in the special edition of Philosophical Explorations on The Second Person (2014, 17:3). It does so by putting centre stage the notion of a ‘bipolar second person relation’, and examining ways of giving it substance suggested by the authors of these papers. In particular, it focuses on claims made (and denied) in these papers (a) about the existence and/or nature of second person thought, second person reasons for action and second person reasons for belief and (b) about possible connections among thought-theoretical, ethical and epistemological issues and debates in this area.     

A Logical Transmission Principle for Conclusive Reasons

Dretske's conclusive reasons account of knowledge is designed to explain how epistemic closure can fail when the evidence for a belief does not transmit to some of that belief's logical consequences. Critics of Dretske dispute the argument against closure while joining Dretske in writing off transmission. This paper shows that, in the most widely accepted system for counterfactual logic (David Lewis's system VC), conclusive reasons are governed by an informative, non-trivial, logical transmission principle. If r is a conclusive reason for believing p in Dretske's sense, and if p logically implies q, and if p and q satisfy one additional condition, it follows that r is a conclusive reason for believing q. After introducing this additional condition, I explain its intuitive import and use the condition to shed new light on Dretske's response to scepticism, as well as on his distinction between the so-called ‘lightweight’ and ‘heavyweight’ implications of a piece of perceptual knowledge.