-
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
-
27Internal 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
-
26Special, radical, failure of reduction in psychiatryBehavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.Use of network models to identify causal structure typically blocks reduction across the sciences. Entanglement of mental processes with environmental and intentional relationships, as Borsboom et al. argue, makes reduction of psychology to neuroscience particularly implausible. However, in psychiatry, a mental disorder can involve no brain disorder at all, even when the former crucially depends on aspects of brain structure. Gambling addiction constitutes an example.
-
26Reply to Lagueux: on a Revolution in Methodology of EconomicsErasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 1 (1): 56-60. 2008.
-
25The evolution of individualistic normsIn Kim Sterelny, Richard Joyce, Brett Calcott & Ben Fraser (eds.), Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication, Mit Press. pp. 17. 2012.It is generally recognized that descriptive and normative individualism are logically independent theses. This paper defends the stronger view that recognition of the falsehood of descriptive individualism is crucial to understanding the evolutionary and developmental basis of normative individualism. The argument given for this is not analytic; rather, it is based on empirical generalizations about the evolution of markets with specialized labor, about the nature of information processing in la…Read more
-
24Action-oriented predictive processing and the neuroeconomics of sub-cognitive rewardBehavioral and Brain Sciences 36 (3): 225-226. 2013.Clark expresses reservations about Friston's reductive interpretation of action-oriented predictive processing (AOPP) models of cognition, but he doesn't link these reservations to specific alternatives. Neuroeconomic models of sub-cognitive reward valuation, which, like AOPP, integrate attention with action based on prediction error, are such an alternative. They interpret reward valuation as an input to neocortical processing instead of reducing it
-
24Game Theory in Studies of Evolution and Development: Prospects for Deeper UseBiological Theory 1 (1): 31-32. 2006.
-
23Ostensive 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.
-
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?
-
22Carsten Herrmann-Pillath's Foundations of economic evolution: a treatise on the natural philosophy of economics. Edward Elgar, 2013, 704 pp (review)Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 7 (1): 109. 2014.
-
22Economic models of pathological gamblingIn D. Ross, D. Kincaid, D. Spurrett & P. Collins (eds.), What is Addiction?, Mit Press. pp. 131--158. 2010.Pathological gambling (PG) is a kind of ‘ideal puzzle’ for the economic model of the consumer. The pathological gambler takes pains to engage in activity that transparently has negative expected returns if utility varies positively with money. She also, typically, spends further resources on commitment devices designed to interfere with her gambling. These properties together describe an agent that is a kind of perfect foil for the rationally maximizing consumer. Recently, aspects of the neuropa…Read more
-
22Scientific metaphysics and social scienceSynthese 202 (5): 1-34. 2023.Recently, philosophers have developed an extensive literature on social ontology that applies methods and concepts from analytic metaphysics. Much of this is entirely abstracted from, and unconcerned with, social science. However, Epstein (2015) argues explicitly that analytic social metaphysics, provided its account of ontological ‘grounding’ is repaired in specific ways, can rescue social science from explanatory impasses into which he thinks it has fallen. This version of analytic social onto…Read more
-
22Empiricism, sciences, and engineering: cognitive science as a zone of integrationCognitive Processing 20 (2): 261-267. 2019.An article by Alexandra Kirsch accepted for publication in Cognitive Processing occasioned debate among reviewers about broad methodological issues in cognitive science. One of these issues is the proper place of Popperian falsificationism in the interdisciplinary cluster. Another is the tension between abstract models and theories that apply to wide classes of cognitive systems, and models of more restricted scope intended to predict specifically human patterns of thought and behavior. The lead…Read more
-
22Psychologists 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.
-
20The Alleged Coupling/Constitution Fallacy and Mature SciencesIn Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind, Bradford Book. 2010.
-
19Timing models of reward learning and core addictive processes in the brainBehavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (4): 457-458. 2008.People become addicted in different ways, and they respond differently to different interventions. There may nevertheless be a core neural pathology responsible for all distinctively addictive suboptimal behavioral habits. In particular, timing models of reward learning suggest a hypothesis according to which all addiction involves neuroadaptation that attenuates serotonergic inhibition of a mesolimbic dopamine system that has learned that cues for consumption of the addictive target are signals…Read more
-
19‘Naturalism’ about the ontology of society can most blandly be characterized as the belief that social phenomena are among the class of natural phenomena. Contemporary scholars are apt to regard this thesis as bland because its denial seems quaint at best, if not outright unhinged, after a century and a half of development in the social sciences. There has, however, been a powerful tradition in (at least) Western culture that has understood the ‘artificial’ as a primary contrast class with the ‘…Read more
-
1910 The Economic and Evolutionary Basis of SelvesIn Don Ross, David Spurrett, Harold Kincaid & G. Lynn Stephens (eds.), Distributed Cognition and the Will: Individual Volition and Social Context, Mit Press. pp. 197. 2007.
-
18I discuss the role of economics in the study of social cognition. A currently popular view is that microeconomics should collapse into psychology partly because cognitive science has shown that valuation is constitutively social, whereas non-psychological economics insists that it is not. In the paper I resist this view, partly by reference to the relevant history of economic theory, and partly by reference to an alternative model of the way in which that theory complements, without reducing to,…Read more
-
18Some mental disorders are based on networks, others on latent variablesBehavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3): 166-167. 2010.Cramer et al. persuasively conceptualize major depressive disorder (MDD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) as network disorders, rejecting latent variable accounts. But how does their radical picture generalize across the suite of mental and personality disorders? Addictions are Axis I disorders that may be better characterized by latent variables. Their comorbidity relationships could be captured by inserting them as nodes in a super-network of Axis I conditions
-
17The Alleged Coupling/Constitution Fallacy and Mature SciencesIn Richard Menary (ed.), The Extended Mind, Mit Press. 2010.
-
16Introduction to discussion forum on Glenn W. Harrison’s ‘field experiments and methodological intolerance’Journal of Economic Methodology 23 (2): 127-129. 2016.
-
16Critics of mainstream economics typically rest important weight on the differences between people and the 'agents' that populate economic theory and economic models. Hollis and Nell (1975) is both representative of and ancestral to many more recent variations on the theme. Lately, the upgraded status of behavioral economics (BE) within the discipline's mainstream has encouraged a number of writers to use revolutionary rhetoric in promotion of a 'paradigm shift' that includes the rejection of 'ra…Read more
-
15Folk-economics: Inherited biases or misapplication of everyday experience?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 41. 2018.
-
15Carsten Herrmann-Pillath and Ivan Boldyrev's Hegel, institutions and economics: performing the social. London: Routledge, 2014, 264 pp (review)Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics 8 (1): 98. 2015.