Epistemic trust in scientific practice: The case of primates studies
A few days ago, I received a favorable review of a paper of mine. The reviewer suggested some minor improvements, one of which led me to reflect on epistemic trust in scientific practice. In the paper, I cited a recent study of which Marc Hauser was the lead author. The reviewer suggested that I ...
Is philosophy universal?
Justin Erik Halldor Smith has won this year's 3 Quarks Daily 2010 top philosophy prize with a post on his blog [jehsmith.com] entitled "More on Non-Western Philosophy (the Very Idea)". This provocative essay is of clear cognition-and-culture relevance. It begins:
Roughly speaking, we might ...
Creative pairs
Hugo Mercier and I have of late been developing the idea that reasoning, typically seen as an activity of the individual thinker, is in fact a social activity aimed at exercising some control on the flow of communicated information by arguing in order to convince others and by examining others' ...
Can Antropologists and other Cognitive Scientist live together?
How can we go beyond the rhetorical dichotomy between nature and culture and avoid misunderstandings that repeatedly occur when social/cultural anthropologists and natural scientists try to co-operate? It shouldn’t be all that difficult if we think, as I believe we should, of human cognition not ...
Nick Enfield reviews Searle and Runciman
In the Times Literary Suppement, September 3, 2010, 3-4, an interesting review (available here) by Nick Enfield of Making the social world by John Searle and The theory of social and cultural selection by W.G. Runciman.
The review begins:
"In a characteristically riotous scene from The Idiot, ...
Why pink? Color matters
Just ask yourself : Which colour do you prefer ? Have you always preferred it, or did your preference change ? Can you tell why you prefer pink to, let's say, yellow ? If you have no answer to these questions, you may wonder what's so interesting about colour preferences. And if you have no answer, ...