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Innateness, Developmental Systems and Explanation Jason C. Jenson University of Sheffield 31 December 2002 Introduction The nature vs. nurture debate has been with us for decades now. The most controversial aspect of this debate is when various behaviors are claimed to be innate, hardwired, or inborn. In the 1970’s we had a short dalliance with what E. O. Wilson dubbed sociobiology. It seems reasonable to assume that if many aspects of our bodies can be explained in terms of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, then it may equally well apply to our minds. Wilson’s sociobiology met with stiff resistance from scientists and others. The worry was that if certain behaviors were innate, then people could be discriminated against based on innate traits they have. To some, a horrible return to eugenics appeared to be just around the corner. Even as recently as 1996 Herrnstein and Murray published the controversial book, “The Bell Curve.” It is posited in this book that there are innate differences in intelligence between the races. Regardless of whether any of this was true, it had the potential to effect government policy and funding. More sophisticated innateness claims have been developed in recent years under the...

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Posted by Norm at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When I wrote this Limerick about Steven Pinkers new book "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature" I wasn't saying that we are nothing but a blank slate but rather that Pinker for the sake of a commercially viable book had overstated the case for the biological component. The question never was if there was a biological basis for human nature,but how much it explains and what if fails to explain and why? Pinker slips from side to side as it suits his own prejudices. It seems I was not alone in that view. Louis Menand in a review of Pinker's book makes many of the the same points. WHAT COMES NATURALLY by LOUIS MENAND Does evolution explain who we are? "The new sciences of human nature." Well, why not? The old sciences of human nature didn't have such a fabulous track record. They gave us segregated drinking fountains, "invented spelling," and the glass ceiling all consequences of scientific theories about the way human beings really are. Possibly, there is a lesson there, which is that the sciences of human nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime happens to be sponsoring them. In totalitarian...

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Did you hear the one about the philosopher writing a book on humour? Simon Critchley, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex, investigates humour. And tells some pretty good jokes. Philosophy is a funny business and some philosophers are funny people. The philosopher asks you to look at the world awry, to place in question your usual habits, assumptions, prejudices and expectations. The philosopher asks you to be sceptical about all sorts of things you would ordinarily take for granted, like the reality of things in the world or whether the people around you are actually human or really robots. In this regard, the philosopher has, I think, a family resemblance with the comedian, who also asks us to look at the world askance, to imagine a topsy-turvy universe where horses and dogs talk and where lifeless objects become miraculously animated. Both the philosopher and the comedian ask you to view the world from a Martian perspective, to look at things as if you had just landed from another planet. With this rough resemblance in mind, I became interested in jokes, humour and the comic and I have just finished writing a short book on the topic.[1]...

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Joseph Campbell Saves The World In which the late, great master of myth reveals just how foolish all our religious impudence is, again By Mark Morford Essential items needed right now: internal fortitude, deep belly laughter that defies war, juicy blasphemy, thick socks, nuanced humanism in the face of raging and imminent oily conservatism. Red wine, gleaming personal vibration, hope for the decimated Democratic Party, sexy small cars, extra vibrator batteries, chocolate, bomb shelters for the soul and carefully wrought, nimble perspective. And Joseph Campbell. Lots and lots of Joseph Campbell. To fill that last category. This is mandatory....

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There once was a king of cogsci Who thought all others small fry He claimed there's no blank A view he could bank What he claimed however was all lies...

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The following paper is by Aaron Tabor, a student studying English at MSU in Wichita Falls, Texas. I met Aaron through my son Chris online at the Internet Chess Club. So what do Blake and Nietzsche have in common? Blake a Christian and Nietzsche an Atheist, you may be surprised by Aaron's conclusions. Blake and Nietzsche: Some Affiliations In this paper I would like to draw some affiliations between Blake and Nietzsche. As preposterous as it may sound to compare an avowed Christian with an avowed Atheist I ask the reader to bear with me. The parallels between these two great men are many, but I will restrict this paper to the similarities between “The Songs of Innocence and Experience” and “Of The Three Metamorphosis.” I will begin by examining the “contrary states of the human soul” in the “Songs” and then proceed into analogies implicit in Blake’s and Nietzsche’s conception of Innocence and Experience. This paper will attempt to show that Blake and Nietzsche are not as foreign to each other as many believe and that their poetic and philosophical vision carries with it some curious affiliations....

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Jason C. Jenson University of Sheffield 1. Introduction There has been much discussion of "folk psychology" in the philosophical literature in recent years. However, it has not been clear precisely what folk psychology is and what its commitments are. Many discussions of folk psychology begin by making an analogy to folk physics. Folk physics refers to the ordinary understanding of the lay people, who have no special training in physics, about the physical processes in their environment. Likewise, folk psychology should be taken to refer to the ordinary understanding of lay people, who have no special training in the cognitive sciences, about the behaviours of their fellow human beings....

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Jason C. Jenson University of Sheffield 1 Introduction Jerry Fodor has been known to support some rather strange theses. One is that all of our concepts are innate. (Fodor, 1987) In a recent article, “Language, Thought and Compositionality” (Fodor 2001) he addresses the issue of which between language and thought bears content in the first instance. This paper is a response to this new work. He combines his love of compositionality arguments with this penchant for radical conclusions in this article....

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Getting Clear on Innateness J. Christopher Jenson Sheffield 1. Introduction You might think the world is at stake. At least that is the impression given by cognitive scientists engaged in the innateness versus acquired debate. Is this all sound and fury signifying nothing or is there a substantive debate? Is there any sense we can give to the concept ‘innate’ that makes a useful explanatory distinction? For example, there was a concept “superlunary space” that was used by early astronomers. Although this term picks out a real place in the universe, it does not make a particularly useful distinction for modern astronomers. It should not be assumed from the beginning that innateness is a natural kind. The problem for cognitive scientists is that it is not clear what account of innateness various people have in mind when they make innateness claims. There have been many. Noam Chomsky has famously claimed that we have innate knowledge of the universal grammar....

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Posted by Norm at 8:12 PM | Permalink

The point of Rodney Brooks new book Flesh and Machines - How Robots Will Change Us is that we are machines. That our bodies are a mass of biomolecules that act according to a set of specifiable rules. He believes that his spouse, his children are mere machines, but that is not how we treat them. The crux of the book is why that is so and what that means to a future world that will include more robots. He tells the history of robotics, from Shaky to Kismet with dozens of other interesting characters in between, and what is on the horizon. What is already here ranging from artificial hearing to the prospects for artificial vision, to robots that can make our lives easier and free our time for more rewarding pursuits. He discusses the what and how of artificial intelligence. There are currently two main approaches to artificial intelligence one is a top down representational view, the other is a bottom up more evolutionary view. One way to look at it would be to compare the spectrum of views with a robot, a distributed network, and a desktop pc. The robot would be no representations, the distributed network...

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Posted by Norm at 7:46 PM | Permalink

As in life the level of discourse on the internet ranges from excellent to really quite terrible. We are emotional animals and have to be careful not to let those emotions get in the way of clear thinking. Supporting our views with sound arguments, verifying information to the best of our ability and being willing to admit when we have erred. I have recently discovered two sites that are helpful in that regard. The first is Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies The other site I like is here and is part of the Nizkor Project. This site lists forty-two common fallacies including Ad Hominem, Straw Man, Begging the Question to mention a few. Stephen's site is slightly different he lists categories of similar fallacies, covering basically the same ground as the Nizkor site. For instance he has a category called Fallacies of Distraction which includes the following: 1. False Dilemma:two choices are given when in fact there are three options 2. From Ignorance: because something is not known to be true, it is assumed to be false 3. Slippery Slope: a series of increasingly unacceptable consequences is drawn 4.Complex Question: two unrelated points are conjoined as a single proposition...

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Posted by Norm at 11:58 PM | Permalink

An interesting paper on why a contrastive explanation works well for those pesky "Why X?" questions. Motivations for Contrastive Explanation...

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I want to speak to the despisers of the body. I would not have them learn and teach differently, but merely say farewell to their own bodies___and thus become silent. "Body am I, and soul"__thus speaks the child. And why should one not speak like children? But the awakened and knowing say: body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.__ Friedrich Nietzsche...

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Posted by Norm at 9:52 PM | Permalink

"Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism... it forms with it a system." - Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; passage translated by David Hilditch in his Ph.D. thesis, At the Hear of the World (Washington University, 1995) from Andy Clark's Being There A nice way of looking at the role of brain, body, and enviornment, the mental realm being so much more that just the brain....

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Posted by Norm at 10:08 PM | Permalink

"Will cognitive Sciences change the way we think as much as other sciences" a fascinating question here is a link I think you'll find interesting Click here...

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Posted by Norm at 12:10 PM | Permalink

What an enjoyable afternoon and evening hanging out on ICC, The Internet Chess Club watching the US Championship. Igor Ivanov (a friend) was playing Yuri Lapshun. Quite a battle, and during the game I was chatting with my son Chris. "Wanna hear a great quotation" he says. "Sure" I reply. We start lots of conversations this way. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." Kant "Cinn and I have been annoyed because philosophy of mind seems really still to be stuck on the same old problems of the empiricists vs the rationalists" he continues. (Cinn his partner also studying philosphy/cognitive science at Sheffield.) "Remind me in a nutshell the difference between the rationalists and empericists" I say. Empiricists think we get all our knowledge from experience, rationalists think we get it all from reason. This distinction between empiricist and rationalist is really crude of course. They each think we get some knowledge from both. Kant really did make some philosophical progress, if only to give the standard dualisms there dying breath, unfortunately people don't seem to realize that. In modern philosophy there is still talk of "representations" and there "contents" but this distinction is illusory, "thoughts without...

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