The Smurf Studies: Do 7-month-olds have a
In a recent paper published in Science (24 December 2010) and entitled "The Social Sense: Susceptibility to Others' Beliefs in Human Infants and Adults", Agnes Kovacs, Ernő Téglás and Ansgar Denis Endress describe a striking set of experiments that may be of interest to ICCI readers, and suggest ...
Denis Dutton (1944-2010)
In twelve years of existence, Arts and Letters daily (aldaily.com) hardly ever let a day pass without publishing its three witty three-liners. On the 28th of December, the feed was unusually late. It quickly resumed to announce the death of its founder, Denis Dutton.
In this Aug. 3, 2002 photo, Dr. ...
The evolutionary and cognitive basis of the cultural success of garbage trucks among western toddler
The other day, I was browsing Youtube, looking for toddler's cartoons to entertain my 18 months old boy. I was not very optimistic though: Like many toddlers, my son's attention span rarely exceeds a couple of minutes... My best bet was that he would be interested in cartoons involving trucks and ...
“Neurobabble” vs Real Science
The New York Times is hosting a piece by Tyler Burge, philosopher of mind, that may be of interest to ICCI readers.
Popular science writing on psychology, Burge argues, is often just "neurobabble" which does three things he strongly dislikes: (1) it provides no additional insight into essentially ...
The dawn of “culturomics”
A team lead by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden (Harvard University) just published in Science a paper "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books" that promises to open a new era in the study of cultural evolution.
We constructed a corpus of digitized texts ...
Folk epistemology
Of clear cognition-and-culture interest, a special issue of the Review of Philosophy and Psychology (Volume 1, Number 4 / December 2010) on "Folk Epistemology". For the table of content,
1) Editorial: Folk Epistemology. The Cognitive Bases of Epistemic Evaluation
Christophe Heintz and Dario ...
In EHB : Sixteen misconceptions about the evolution of human cooperation, by West et al.
Now officially published online in Evolution and Human Behavior is a paper by West, El Mouden and Gardner (all from Oxford University) that has been circulating, as a manuscript, in the academic community for almost two years.
The paper (of which a copy can be found here) has several goals and ...
Bourgeois Dignity: what doesn’t explain the industrial revolution
Deirdre McCloskey is a very unorthodox economist. Even though she did a lot of classical work on the history of the industrial revolution in England, she is best known for her critical examination of the 'rhetoric' of economics. A good example of her attacks can be found in her latest book on that ...