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39Special human vulnerability to low-cost collective punishmentBehavioral and Brain Sciences 35 (1): 37-38. 2012.Guala notes that low-cost punishment is the main mechanism that deters free-riding in small human communities. This mechanism is complemented by unusual human vulnerability to gossip. Defenders of an evolutionary discontinuity supporting human sociality might seize on this as an alternative to enjoyment of moralistic aggression as a special adaptation. However, the more basic adaptation of language likely suffices.
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26Reply to Lagueux: on a Revolution in Methodology of EconomicsErasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 1 (1): 56-60. 2008.
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30Real Patterns and the Ontological Foundations of MicroeconomicsEconomics and Philosophy 10 (2): 113-136. 1994.Most philosophical accounts of the foundations of economics have assumed that economics is intended to be an empirical science concerned with human behaviour, though they have, of course, differed over the extent to which it has been or can be successful as such an enterprise. A prominent source of dissent against this consensus is Alexander Rosenberg. In his recent book, Rosenberg summarizes and completes his statement of a position that he has been developing for some time. He argues that alth…Read more
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120Quining qualia Quine's wayDialogue 32 (3): 439-59. 1993.Thanks largely to Daniel Dennett, I am a recent convert to what many will regard as the shocking hypothesis that qualia do not exist. This admission is not quite a confident sighting of that rarest of philosophical birds, an unequivocally sound and valid argument. For one thing, I have, like many, been frustrated by and suspicious of philosophers' use of qualia for some time, and have often wished them dead ; so I was an easy mark. More to the point, I was persuaded by Dennett without being pers…Read more
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42Qualia and Materialism: IntroductionDialogue 32 (3): 435. 1993.Though the days of consciousness-raising are mostly passed, the days of consciousness seem to be upon us, or, at least, to be upon philosophers. Dennett's recentConsciousness Explainedis the flagship for a flotilla of new major works on the subject, by Flanagan, Jackendoff, Searle, Seager and others. It seems to be something of a convention in such work that one begins by complaining that consciousness is a sorely neglected topic among philosophers; this cliché has created the faintly comical si…Read more
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41Psychological versus economic models of bounded rationalityJournal of Economic Methodology 21 (4): 411-427. 2014.That the rationality of individual people is ‘bounded’ – that is, finite in scope and representational reach, and constrained by the opportunity cost of time – cannot reasonably be controversial as an empirical matter. In this context, the paper addresses the question as to why, if economics is an empirical science, economists introduce bounds on the rationality of agents in their models only grudgingly and partially. The answer defended in the paper is that most economists are interested primar…Read more
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23Psychologists should learn structural specification and experimental econometricsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 45. 2022.The most plausible of Yarkoni's paths to recovery for psychology is the least radical one: psychologists need truly quantitative methods that exploit the informational power of variance and heterogeneity in multiple variables. If they drop ambitions to explain entire behaviors, they could find a box full of design and econometric tools in the parts of experimental economics that don't ape psychology.
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19PHILIP MIROWSKI The Effortless Economy of Science? (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 60 (3): 659-665. 2009.
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3Cooperation on Multiple Scales: Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation Peter Hammerstein, editor Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003 (485 + xiv pp; $47.00 hbk; ISBN 0-262-08326-4) (review)Biological Theory 1 (4): 428-430. 2006.
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161Ontic structural realism and economicsPhilosophy of Science 75 (5): 732-743. 2008.Ontic structural realism (OSR) is crucially motivated by empirical discoveries of fundamental physics. To this extent its potential to furnish a general metaphysics for science may appear limited. However, OSR also provides a good account of the progress that has been achieved over the decades in a formalized special science, economics. Furthermore, this has a basis in the ontology presupposed by economic theory, and is not just an artifact of formalization. †To contact the author, please write …Read more
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27Ostensive communication, market exchange, mindshaping, and elephantsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Heintz & Scott-Phillips's hypothesis that the topic range and type diversity of human expressive communication gains support from consilience with prior accounts of market exchange as fundamental to unique human niche construction, and of mindshaping as much more important than mindreading. The productivity of the idea is illustrated by the light it might shed on why elephants seem to engage in continuous social communication for little evident purpose.
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1026Notions of Cause: Russell’s Thesis RevisitedBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 58 (1): 45-76. 2007.We discuss Russell's 1913 essay arguing for the irrelevance of the idea of causation to science and its elimination from metaphysics as a precursor to contemporary philosophical naturalism. We show how Russell's application raises issues now receiving much attention in debates about the adequacy of such naturalism, in particular, problems related to the relationship between folk and scientific conceptual influences on metaphysics, and to the unification of a scientifically inspired worldview. In…Read more
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6Notes on coordination, game theory and the evolutionary basis of languageInteraction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies / Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies 13 (1): 50-65. 2012.It is widely appreciated that establishment and maintenance of coordination are among the key evolutionary promoters and stabilizers of human language. In consequence, it is also generally recognized that game theory is an important tool for studying these phenomena. However, the best known game theoretic applications to date tend to assimilate linguistic communication with signaling. The individualistic philosophical bias in Western social ontology makes signaling seem more challenging than it …Read more
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53Notes on coordination, game theory and the evolutionary basis of languageInteraction Studies 13 (1): 50-65. 2012.It is widely appreciated that establishment and maintenance of coordination are among the key evolutionary promoters and stabilizers of human language. In consequence, it is also generally recognized that game theory is an important tool for studying these phenomena. However, the best known game theoretic applications to date tend to assimilate linguistic communication with signaling. The individualistic philosophical bias in Western social ontology makes signaling seem more challenging than it …Read more
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67Neural networks, real patterns, and the mathematics of constrained optimization: an interview with Don RossErasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 9 (1): 142. 2016.
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60Minimal strong functionalismJournal of Philosophical Research 20 237-268. 1995.This paper is motivated by the concern that increasingly fewer philosophers of mind seem prepared to call themselves ‘functionalists’ these days. I suggest that this has less to do with explicit arguments presented against functionalism than with a gradual decay in the clarity of the term’s reference. This decay has two sources: functionalism has involved several different, logically independent research commitments, and it has become tightly associated, to an unnecessary degree, with classical …Read more
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23Moralization of preferences and conventions and the dynamics of tribal formationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.Stanford casts original light on the question of why humans moralize some preferences. However, his account leaves some ambiguity around the relationship between the evolutionary function of moralization and the dynamics of tribal formation. Does the model govern these dynamics, or only explain why there are moralizing dispositions that more conventional modeling of the dynamics can exploit?
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28Learning, cognition and ideologySouth African Journal of Philosophy 22 (2): 139-156. 2003.Invited to give the 2000 Rick Turner Memorial Lecture, I pondered the following question: What explains the fact that the sincere thought of a brilliant and heroic person such as Turner can appear preposterous to me, if bad faith or scholarly ignorance on one side or the other are ruled out, as they should be in this case? I address this question by considering what ‘ideologies' are from the perspective of cognitive learning theory. I describe the dynamics by which pressures for social coordinat…Read more
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16Introduction to discussion forum on Glenn W. Harrison’s ‘field experiments and methodological intolerance’Journal of Economic Methodology 23 (2): 127-129. 2016.
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11Is resolve mainly about resisting hyperbolic discounting?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 44. 2021.Ainslie insightfully refines the concept of willpower by emphasizing low-effort applications of resolve. However, he gives undue weight to intertemporal discounting as the problem that willpower is needed to overcome. Nonhumans typically don't encounter choices that differ only in the time of consumption. Humans learn to transform uncertainty into problems they can solve using culturally evolved mechanisms for quantifying risk.
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28Internal recurrenceDialogue 37 (1): 155-161. 1998.It is crucial, first of all, to stress the importance Churchland attaches to the idea that the neural networks whose assemblages he holds to be “engines of reason” must be recurrent. Non-recurrent networks, of the sort best known among philosophers, simply discover patterns in input data presented to them as sets of features. The learning capacities of such networks, extensively discussed since the publication of Rumelhart and McClelland et al., are indeed impressive; and Churchland describes th…Read more