EVOLUTION
2007-12-28 Paley Redivivus. Fodor 2007 once more presents us with a persuasive, entertaining – and profoundly wrong – view of a great man. Not B. F. Skinner this time, but a much grander figure, none other than Charles Darwin. Fodor’s often misdirected attacks on an extinct behaviorism... Staddon 2007: [ PDF ]
2008-02-12 Response: A dialogue between Fodor and Staddon. Jerry Fodor responded to John Staddon’s comment, and a dialogue ensued. The focal point seems to be whether natural selection should (Fodor), or potentially does (Staddon) provide a causal account of evolutionary adaptation. Fodor & Staddon 2008: [ PDF ]
VOLUNTARINESS
2007-10-11 Is it human? Judgments of choice responding. Neuringer et al. believe their experiments can tell us something about what 'voluntary behavior' is. Davison disagrees... Davison 2007: [ PDF ] Jensen and Neuringer reply: [ PDF ]
RATIONALITY
2007-05-25 Rationality and Process. There is a philosophical (or perhaps definitional) problem with the analysis so engagingly presented by Basu 2007. Definition: The rational choice is the one that (for defensible reasons) gains the most payoff. Thus, buying a lottery ticket on a hunch is not rational even if you win... Staddon/Basu: [ PDF ]
PARAPSYCHOLOGY
2007-01-03 Guess for Success. Parapsychology is a term coined by J. B. Rhine that covers phenomena such as telepathy the direct transmission of information from mind to mind. The landmark work is Rhine, J. B. (1964) Extra-sensory perception. (Boston: Bruce Humphries), and a flow of other publications by Rhine’s associates and others. In this extended article, Lockhead shows how very small deviations from randomness in the to-be-guessed sequence can give rise to better- or worse-than-chance guessing performance. Lockhead/Rhine: [ PDF ]
SOCIAL SCIENCE
2006-10-27 Ill-defined. What is happening to political science when leading thinkers can pretend to advance knowledge by little more than re-defining words? In their article Anti-Americanisms, an abstract of a forthcoming book, Katzenstein and Keohane begin thus... Bertrand/Keohane: [ PDF | HTML ]
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EMOTION
2006-09-23 Emotion is Natural but Categories are Not. Barrett 2006 argues against the construct of emotion by conflating the basic-emotions perspective in neural physiology with a type of category discussed in reference philosophy... Alvarado 2006: [ PDF ]
BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
2006-07-16 Behavior-centric versus reinforcer-centric descriptions of behavior. The paper is a brilliant tour-de-force, but a subtext to the paper is what I will call the behavior-centric view. In this view, stimuli are remembered until a response is emitted, and reinforcers reach back in time to effect this response in the presence of the remembered stimulus... Davison 2006: [ PDF | HTML ]
METACOGNITION
2007-03-15 Metacognition: A problem not a process. "Metacognition" in animals can be explained by familiar learning principles... Staddon et al. 2007: [ PDF ]
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
2007-03-15 Minority Report. It is perhaps unfair to critique in a scientific journal an interview in a popular magazine… The idea is this: perhaps we should forcibly treat and restrain "abnormal" individuals before they can do harm if the propensity can be detected in some way... Churchland 2006: [ PDF ]
LANGUAGE PROCESSING
2006-09-07 Report: Visual Language Processing and Additive Effects of Multiple Factors on Timed Performance: A Challenge for the Interactive Activation Framework? Two factors often have additive effects on timed performance in language tasks. Despite 25 years of work, fans of the dominant theoretical framework for language processing have yet to publicly address even a single instance of such additivity... Besner: [ PDF ]
NEUROECONOMICS
2006-07-16 Will you take ‘neuro’ with that? Neuroeconomics is an interesting idea that has an epistemological worm at its core... but there is no guarantee at all that the optimizing process corresponds to “explicit optimization” in which courses of action are well-defined... Staddon/Bernheim: [ PDF | HTML ]
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