Mentalizing Mistakes: Distinguishing Mentalizing Ability from Bias in God Beliefs

The claim that religions are by-products of evolutionary adaptations has been at the center of the cognitive science of religion since its inception nearly three decades ago. It has been argued that religious beliefs are manifestations of evolved hyperactive agent detection and other mentalizing biases, whose development required pan-human mentalizing abilities. Much of the current research on the cognitive underpinnings of religiosity seems to rest on the assumption that not only mentalizing biases but also mentalizing abilities give rise to god beliefs in the minds of contemporary individuals. However, this presupposes that the higher capacity an individual has for mentalizing the more likely he or she is to make mentalizing mistakes. We illustrate the conceptual confusion that results from this way of framing the discussion and point to empirical evidence that challenges this notion.

Social Reproduction at Work, Social Reproduction as Work: A Feminist Political Economy Perspective

Social reproduction has received considerable recent attention from academics and activists aiming to stimulate and advance transformative political change. Yet, an understanding of social reproduction as “work” has sometimes slipped away, leaving behind important anti-racist feminist insights. Engaging with recent contributions from scholars in the U.S., U.K., and Canada, we argue that social reproduction is most useful as a concept, not as a theory, and is best understood as “work”. We point out quandaries and ambiguities that have produced conceptual confusion in scholarship on social reproduction and argue for a conceptualization offered by feminist political economy. We conclude that social reproduction, when understood as work, can support efforts to build the mass movements and solidarity necessary for effective anti-capitalist politics if its relationship to, and contradictions with, the processes of dispossession and capital accumulation are taken into account.

Désignation et représentation des éléments topographiques dans les dialectes de France : synthèse générale (relief, cours d’eau, cavernes)

As the second part of a general study about semantic determinism, this article continues to analyze the topographic lexicon of Gallo-Romance dialects. The new concepts (‘river’, ‘brook’, ‘valley’, ‘cave’) that I examine in this paper complete my previous survey about the designations of hills and mountains. Most of all, the new set of data allows me to go beyond isolated concepts and to present for the first time the motivational synthesis of a whole theme. The result is that, whatever the concept, words referring to topography are generally created according to four matrices of designation: such words originally allude to (1) level; (2) concavity/convexity; (3) physical composition; or stem from a (4) conceptual confusion due to adjacency. The method that reduces hundreds of lexical forms to a handful of creative patterns leads to a direct perception of how the lexicon is structured and has a strong heuristic potential.

ПРОПОЗИЦИОНАЛЬНЫЕ УСТАНОВКИ В КОНТЕКСТЕ СИТУАЦИИ ЗНАКОМСТВА

The emergence and development of the semantic theory of aquaintaince is associated with the solution of conceptual confusion within the context of propositional attitudes. The author considers various contexts of propositional attitudes, such as desire, taste, belief, knowledge, resorting to the consideration of difficulties that arise in their environment. There is also attempting to explain problems and ambiguities using information theory and cognitive process analysis. С решением концептуального замешательства в рамках контекстов пропозициональных установок связано появление и развитие семантической теории знакомства. Автор работы рассматривает различные контексты пропозициональных установок, такие как желание, вкус, убеждение, прибегая к обзору формальных трудностей, возникающих в их среде. Также предпринимается попытка объяснения проблем и неоднозначностей с помощью теории информации и анализа когнитивных процессов.

Why Anti-Bias Interventions (Need Not) Fail

This manuscript was accepted for publication in Perspectives on Psychological Science on September 26, 2021. There is a critical disconnect between scientific knowledge about the nature of bias and how this knowledge gets translated into organizational de-biasing efforts. Conceptual confusion around what implicit bias is contributes to misunderstanding. Bridging these gaps is the key to understanding when and why anti-bias interventions will succeed or fail. Notably, there are multiple distinct pathways to biased behavior, each of which require different types of interventions. To bridge the gap between public understanding and psychological research, we introduce a visual typology of bias that summarizes the process by which group-relevant cognitions are expressed as biased behavior. Our typology spotlights cognitive, motivational, and situational variables impacting the expression and inhibition of biases while aiming to reduce the ambiguity of what constitutes implicit bias. We also address how norms modulate how biases unfold and are perceived by targets. Using this typology as a framework, we identify theoretically distinct entry points for anti-bias interventions. A key insight is that changing associations, increasing motivation, raising awareness, and changing norms are distinct goals, which require different types of interventions targeting individual, interpersonal, and institutional structures. We close with recommendations for anti-bias training grounded in the science of prejudice and stereotyping.

Kant’s Argument for Transcendental Idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic Revisited

This paper provides a novel reconstruction of Kant’s argument for transcendental idealism in the Transcendental Aesthetic. This reconstruction relies on two main contentions: first, that Kant accepts the then-ubiquitous view that all cognition is either from grounds or consequences, a view he props up by drawing a distinction between logical and real grounds; second, that Kant, like most of his contemporaries, holds that our representations are the most immediate grounds of our cognition. By stressing these elements, the most threatening objection to Kant’s argument can be avoided, namely, the claim that Kant ignores the possibility that our representations of space and time are subjective in origin, but objective as regards their applicability. My reconstruction shows that this so-called neglected alternative objection is based on a conceptual confusion about the nature of a priori cognition.

(Russian) Deterrence, we hardly know ye…

This paper provides the epistemic equivalent of an 'MRI' scan of the English and Russian literature on deterrence in an international security context. Using a variety of different recent datasets and -tools, the paper exposes a surprisingly high number of glaring weaknesses and holes. The paper’s first, more ‘technical’, section presents compelling evidence that the volume, velocity, collegiality and uptake of publicly available scientific insights into ‘security deterrence’ remain decidedly suboptimal – also compared to the other scientific disciplines that have examined human deterrence. The data on the scientific thoroughness of this field also paint a discomfortingly bleak picture, albeit less conclusively so. The paper’s second, more substantive section equally painfully highlights what it calls the field’s unbearable empirical lightness; conceptual confusion and cacophony (even within language domains); as well as multiple major (highly relevant) epistemic holes and other weaknesses. The paper concludes with some recommendations on how the epistemic community working on these issues as well as the academic and policy communities that fund much of this research can build on uniquely promising new developments in the access to (especially also textual) data to build and validate more granular and trustworthy datasets; in humans’ newfound ability to interact with machine algorithms to semantically parse texts to discover and validate ‘knowledge’ in unprecedented ways; but also – in a more mundane mode – to start incentivizing more organically collaborative ways of knowledge building.

TERMINOLOGY OF THE OF TRADITIONAL MOROCCAN AMAZIGH POETRY : LEXICAL RICHNESS OR TERMINOLOGICAL DISORDER ?

The Amazigh poetic achievement represents an open horizon on the fabric of history and the collective life of Moroccans, and through its various manifestations it is a celebration of nature and the organic connection with its major norms and rituals. The multiplicity that characterizes its terminology embodies the mosaic of the Berber environment with its fertility and sweetness ... Therefore, it delves into the pleasure of expression, glorifies the causes of life and embraces its objects and symbols. However, the most important thing that attracts the attention of the linguistic researcher, which intends to carry out scientific research in the terminology of Amazigh poetry, is the scarcity of studies and research that have dealt with this level. Most of them stopped studying this aspect, and did not address it extensively or adequately, explaining its paradoxes, and defining its major articulations, despite the great importance and the fundamental place it occupies in modern Amazigh linguistic and literary studies ... Many linguistic and geographic reasons were not examined. One of the terms that may appear, at first glance, be indicative of the same meaning. The fact is that there are wide dialectal, semantic and technical differences between them. The matter here relates to concepts such as : “Tamdyazt”, “Izli”, “Tayffart” and “Tamawayt” ... as the search is often limited to the first concept without specifying the adjacent terms, nor highlighting the differences and combining them. The researcher in the Amazigh tongue in general, and in the poetic term in particular, faces a terminological chaos and a great conceptual confusion. This increases the difficulty of researching the topic and limits the scientific results reached. Then this paper comes to shed light on some of the components of its terminological structure, and to address some semantic and pragmatic issues related to it dialectally, geographically, and ethnologically.

Shaping a Concept of Terrorist Acts

Chapter 1 is concerned with bringing some clarity to the widespread conceptual confusion around what terms like “terrorist,” “terrorist act,” and “terrorism” mean. Without being too rigid about definition, it is important to operate with some agreed definitional clarity in the area. The chapter defends the value of such a definitional enterprise and then provides what it calls a tactical definition of a terrorist act that aims to capture a central core involved in talk about terrorism, and opens discussion of terrorist acts to cogent moral assessment. The author’s definition of a terrorist act is: “A political act, ordinarily committed or inspired by an organized group, in which violence is intentionally directed at non-combatants (or ‘innocents’ in a suitable sense) or their significant property, in order to cause them serious harm.” The rest of the chapter discusses advantages of the definition and criticizes a number of objections to it.

Sustainability as a “magic concept”

Sustainability studies have not been able to come up with a consensus conceptualization of “sustainability,” despite many attempts. This article asks what this conceptual confusion means. I do this through a (conceptual history) vertical analysis, and horizontal (discourse) analysis of the current use of the term. It finds that sustainability is a perfect fit for what Hupe and Pollit have called a “magic concept,” in that it is; broad, has a positive normative charge, imply consensus or at least the possibility of overcoming current conflicts, and has global marketability (2011: 643). This has both positive and negative effects: On the one hand, the popularity of the concept of sustainability has enabled an overarching discourse on the responsible use of natural resources. On the other hand, the concept is vulnerable to various strategic misuses, ranging from corporate greenwashing to Luddite passions. Based on a vertical analysis of the history of sustainability, this vagueness is not a coincidence: It was part of a political bargain at its birth, where environmental concerns were grafted onto an older discourse on “development” during the writing of the 1987 Brundtland report. Based on a horizontal analysis, this vagueness is now inherent to the concept and cannot be abandoned without losing the very magic qualities that make sustainability such a rallying point. This finding points to the conclusion that we should be cautious about how sustainability is wielded. Received: 03 February 2021Accepted: 01 March 2021