Haggeo Cadenas

Haggeo Cadenas responds to one of two kinds of epistemic objection to psychedelic experience, namely, that which is inquiry related (the other kind of epistemic objection to psychedelic experience is that which is agency related). According to Cadenas, all inquiry-related epistemic objections to psychedelic experience should be rejected because they are based on insufficient data. Specifically, inquiry-related epistemic objections to psychedelic experience do not take into account either the mindset of the user of a psychedelic drug (the “set”) or the setting in which it is used (the “setting”), despite the fact that both set and setting influence the kinds of psychedelic experiences that user can have. He concludes with a discussion of the ways in which psychedelic experiences might have positive epistemic value.

Work on cultural evolution, especially that of Boyd, Richerson, and Henrich, has said little about the role of reinforcement in cultural learning. This is surprising, for reinforcement is an old system, it is found across a diverse array of organisms, and it is a successful concept in various scientific disciplines. The main claim of this paper is that social forms of reinforcement play a role in cultural evolution. More specifically, I argue that starting early in human history, social approval and disapproval of behavior function as reinforcers and punishers; approval and disapproval thereby start a process whereby norms are transmitted. After giving arguments for these claims, I discuss work on social learning strategies—cultural rules specifying who to learn from and how to learn from them (Heyes in Philos Trans R Soc 371(1693):1–8, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0369 ). I suggest that the account I develop here can help explain the connection between these learning rules and cultural evolution. I illustrate this point with recent work on divination practices (Hong and Henrich in Hum Nat 32:622–651, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09408-6 ). My account proposes that forms of social reinforcement can explain the spread and persistence of divination practices. Besides addressing the central question (a role for reinforcement in cultural evolution), my account indirectly touches on developing themes in cultural evolution, namely, normative psychology (Heyes in Perspect Psychol Sci, 2023; Birch Biol Philos 36:4, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-020-09777-9 ).