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Anna Alexandrova
Philosophy Department 0119 UC – San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla CA 92093-0119 aaalexan@ucsd.edu
Can social phenomena be understood simply by analyzing their parts? Contemporary economic theory assumes that they can. Indeed the methodology of constructing models which trace the behavior of perfectly rational agents in idealized environments rests on the premise that such models, while restricted, help us isolate important portions of social reality. Providing understanding by isolating the essential elements of phenomena is, according to most economists and many philosophers (Maki 1992, Sugden 2000, Schultz 2001, Lucas 1981), the primary purpose of models. This view is often supplemented with John Stuart Mill's account of political economy as a science of tendencies, studying the behavior of economic agents in the absence of disturbing factors. In this paper, I question both the claim that models in economics generally supply claims about tendencies and also the view that economics, when successful, is done according to the method of isolation. To justify the first claim, I explain what the purported methodology is and then critically examine a prominent argument in its favor. To justify the second claim I discuss perhaps the most successful case of the application of game theory to date – the construction of the FCC spectrum auctions. Because of concern with interactions between different elements of the design and because theory was silent on many issues, economics in this case was done by studying the phenomenon under investigation as a whole, rather than by isolating individual causal effects.
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Christy Hoffman
Committee on Human Development University of Chicago hoffmanc@uchicago.edu
Attachment research that has been conducted since Bowlby's introduction of attachment theory has focused on how infants respond in the absence of their mothers. Consequently, many psychologists have measured attachment via separation studies, but few studies, at least in the nonhuman primate realm, have investigated the mother-infant dyad as it fits into a larger social context (Maestripieri, 2003). Thus, we lack information about how mother-infant attachment behaviors are shaped by social interactions that occur outside of the mother-infant dyad but within the dyad's social group. This knowledge would provide clues about the group's effects on the infant's social and cognitive development.
Since the infant's cognitive growth is influenced by his mother as well as by other group members, the social learning processes the infant participates in might be best described as co-constructed. According to Johnson (2001), co-construction means that social partners place mutual constraints on one another's, as well as their own, behaviors. When examining the co-constructed nature of relationships, cognitive growth is perceived through the visible interactions that occur within the group. In my study, I observed how a western lowland gorilla and her son moderated their interactions in response to each other's activities and to the activities of other group members. The focal subject was Kojo, a 9-month-old gorilla living at the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. Kojo resided with five other individuals: his 20-year-old mother (Mandara), a 2-year-old brother, a 5-year-old brother, a blackback male, and a silverback male. I collected data from videotaped interactions using focal animal and ad libitum sampling methods. Furthermore, I assessed the mother-infant attachment relationship using Ainsworth et al.'s (1978) descriptions of attachment styles, and I determined tension levels within the group by counting the number of displays the two oldest males performed. The mother-infant dyad exhibited a secure attachment. Mandara promptly responded to Kojo during distressing situations, and the mother-infant relationship was characterized by positive physical contact and an absence of tension. Kojo treated Mandara as a secure base and ventured short distances from her to explore objects and play with his brothers. Although Kojo and Mandara's attachment style remained secure throughout the study, changes in group dynamics affected Kojo and Mandara's relationship in the following ways: It influenced the amount of time Kojo spent in physical contact with Mandara, Mandara's protectiveness of Kojo, and Kojo's opportunities to interact with objects and other individuals. Based on behavioral counts and qualitative analyses of Mandara and Kojo's behaviors, I have drawn the following conclusions about the flexible nature of the mother-infant attachment relationship and the merits of studying this relationship within the larger social context:
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David M. Steffes
History of Science Department University of Oklahoma Physical Sciences, Room 628 Norman, OK 73019-0315 david.m.steffes-1@ou.edu
This paper reexamines the 1930s-40s integration of biology at Chicago described by Gregg Mitman in his book The State of Nature (1992). During these years, Warder Allee's young field of population ecology united with physiological fields including genetics, forming a new program which Gregg Mitman called “population physiology.” Mitman also recognized that the organism metaphor aided in this synthesis. I seek to explain how the organism metaphor actually changed after the addition of Sewall Wright and Alfred Emerson in the late 1920s, and how this new version of organicism at Chicago during the 1930s helped consolidate research in ecology, genetics, and evolutionary studies. The organism as a system of complexly interacting mechanisms was no longer credited as having the primary powers of change solely within itself; the organism was understood instead as an integrated system regulated by interplay between both internal and external environments through energy exchange. Organicism in this light required not only a meeting of minds from different fields of biological research focusing on different levels of biotic phenomena, but also required a synthesis of different methodologies in biology. In particular, Sewall Wright's skills in statistical analysis and modeling helped bridge the gap between experimental knowledge of individuals (from cellular, neural, and genetic research) and the experimental knowledge of aggregations (from Allee's ecology). The confluence of statistical and empirical methods was justified by organicism, according to which all biotic levels possess similarly integrated divisions of labor (processes of energy exchange).
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Georg Theiner
Department of Philosophy & Cognitive Science Program Indiana University, Bloomington gtheiner@indiana.edu
In The Common Mind (Pettit 93), Pettit examines a thesis of collectivist outflanking stating that while our individual-psychological regularities are in principle compatible with intentional systems that do not exhibit our social-structural regularities, there is a filter ensuring that people have individual-psychological dispositions that do enforce our social-structural regularities. Pettit argues that such a filter could only be implemented via (i) gene-based, (ii) group-level natural selection, concluding that there isn't much evidence that anything like it has occurred in the evolutionary history of our species. Against Pettit, and contrary to the widespread over-emphasis on I-language over E-language in much of mainstream linguistics (Chomsky 86, Pinker 94), I advance the view that significant E-linguistic universals have outflanked our I-linguistic constitution. First, I will provisionally grant Pettit's constraints on filter mechanisms, and show how recent computational models of Baldwinian language evolution afford us with a process that passes Pettit's requirements (Kirby and Hurford 97, Turkel 2002, Christiansen forthcoming). In a second step, I will show how linguistic universals can emerge from the iterated dynamics of cultural evolution alone, without any genetically induced structural changes to the speakers' learning mechanisms (Kirby and Hurford 2001, Kirby 2001, 2002, Smith, Brighton, and Kirby 2003; Batali 2002, Niyogi 2002; Cangelosi 99, Steels and Kaplan 2002). As a result, I will argue that Pettit's constraints on mechanisms required for collectivist outflanking are too restrictive.
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Holly Andersen
University of Pittsburgh History and Philosophy of Science 1017 Cathedral of Learning Pittsburgh, PA 15260 412-559-8927 Hka1@pitt.edu
In this somewhat schematic presentation, I offer a negative and positive thesis regarding the current construal of bipolar disorder (DSM-IV). Negatively, I undermine the accuracy of labeling bipolar a disorder, insofar as disorder implies a distinct threshold between normal and abnormal. Positively, I offer an alternative construal of bipolar as the tail end of a Gaussian curve for a hypothesized trait distributed throughout the population. This explanation fits available evidence as well as the current characterization, I argue, and offers patients and society a subtler, less binary way to approach the problems associated with bipolar.
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James Tabery
Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh jgt1@pitt.edu www.pitt.edu/~jgt1
Genotype-environment interaction (G×E) refers to the nonadditive responses of different genotypes to an array of environments; such interactions have significant implications for the partitioning of sources of phenotypic variance in a population and for the evaluation of group differences. This essay examines the origin(s) of G×E. “Origin(s)” and not “the origin” will be examined because, it will be argued, British biologists R. A. Fisher and Lancelot Hogben actually came to consider G×E by two distinct routes. These routes, in turn, generated for Fisher and Hogben two distinct interpretations of G×E: Fisher introduced the biometric interpretation of G×E, or G×EB, while Hogben introduced the developmental interpretation of G×E, or G×ED. The distinction between G×EB and G×ED will be used to evaluate the debate that emerged between Fisher and Hogben over the significance of G×E. It will also be suggested, although only in passing, that the distinction between G×EB and G×ED can be used to evaluate more recent debates surrounding G×E such as in the 1970s IQ controversy.
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Lucia Gutierrez
Agronomy 1203 Agronomy Hall Iowa State University Ames, IA 50011 Phone: 515-294-6795 luciag@iastate.edu
Historically there has been a debate on whether molecular markers or phenotypic traits are the best indicators of genetic diversity. Addressing this dichotomy involves a holistic approach to the understanding of the relationship between both. This paper explores a history of the study of genetic diversity, the present dichotomy, and new approaches to move forward.
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Margeret Heath
Social Cognition Laboratory Department of Psychology 3C217 Vrije Universiteit Brussel Pleinlaan 2, B1050, Brussels, Belgium Margeret_heath@vub.ac.be +32 (0)2 629 12 72 (office) +32 (0)2 629 24 89 (fax) +32 494 83 96 83 (mobile) www.vub.ac.be/PESP/Heath.html
There exists still a dichotomy between poetics and cognition despite ongoing theoretical and empirical work to 'unify the unruly system' in the disciplines of neuro- dynamics, distributed cognition, cognitive philosophy and epochal evolutionary theory. Cognition concerns itself with perception, action, emotion and other disassembled aspects of aggregated human adaptive intelligence forgetting therein the irreducibility of culturally imaginative mind, of variation and novelty, and of imagining as relationship integral to the biological nature of variable humanity. As living systems humans are a particularly imaginatively possible species able to enact a “poetics of the possible” within the general materiality of quotidian existence. Hermeneutically, Being, in co-ordination with the World emerges a mode of dynamical relating with-the-world and in so doing shapes through co-regulative means the forms of emerging surplus Being. This dichotomous notion of poetic surplus 'self' coupled with contingent possible Other, in Kearney's terms, is an idea which I explore through the stance proffered by Clark's analytically informed Extended Mind Hypothesis which sees Being as in-accommodation-with Other, by means of an embodied Gibsonian affordance and a Vygotskyan learning theory that embraces extensive cognition as a scaffolded (en)active externalism.
In making the above move I embark briefly on three concurrent conceptual strategies. In the first I create a tool of three distinctions which are probabilistically coupled but not the dichotomies I suspect we suspect them to be: body-brain, mind-world, species-environment. In the second I find it only possible to scientifically explain the potency of poetic possibility of being by considering yet two more apparently dichotomous ideas: (i) Mind as an encultured phenotypic expression of a species, and not of an individual - a form of Clark's type II emergence; and, epochal cognitive 'niche-construction' the evolutionary theoretic tool by means of which I might examine and explain the non-linear dynamics of Poiesis in Mind-World interplays a process whereby psychological 'selves' are the 'mechanisms of novelty' in co-constructing social relationship. The third strategy is an approach to an intrigue reminiscent of Gregory Bateson's ecological and systemic imperative - tools which might adequately express yet another inherited dichotomy - of universal notions of the loving (im)possibility of emergent being as a locally expressed aesthetic and artistically lived sensuality, within or inclusive of, the formal scientific and analytical tools for understanding structurally-complex, natural evolving systems. In crafting these strategies I hope I am some way in setting up a linguistic studio-space for methodological construction of a Being (im)Possible interdisciplinary project. *This work was made possible by Grant # G.0336.04 of the Flemish Foundation for Scientific Research Back to top* * *
Melinda Fagan
Department of History and Philosophy of Science Indiana University Goodbody Hall 130 1011 East Third St. Bloomington, IN 47405 (812) 323-2103 mefagan@indiana.edu
Social epistemology is the study of the relevance of social relations, roles, interests, and institutions to knowledge. The field is divided into two branches or camps: one broadly interdisciplinary, the other affiliated with anglophone analytic philosophy. The former is heterogeneous, drawing on various methods and approaches, many of which emphasize scientific knowledge. Research of this sort involves interdisciplinary interactions between various natural, social and historical sciences, and traditions such as continental philosophy, feminism, critical theory, and American pragmatism. 'Analytic' social epistemology is, however, largely isolated from this vibrant area of research.
I characterize this rift within social epistemology in terms of the individual-social dichotomy. Individualistic assumptions inherited from traditional epistemology prevent the analytic camp from engaging with more interdisciplinary approaches. These assumptions effectively focus philosophical attention on individuals, with respect to three different aspects of knowledge: epistemic subjects, knowledge-producing processes, and knowledge as such. Similarly, substituting individualistic assumptions for their social counterparts often prevents engagement from the more 'social' direction. Rejecting the individual-social dichotomy for all three aspects of knowledge permits more integrative social epistemology. In this effort, I follow Helen Longino and Miriam Solomon, whose recent accounts have influenced my own. Longino's critical constructive empiricism (2002) and Solomon's social empiricism (2001) both make progress in bridging the gap within social epistemology. However, both accounts have difficulties: Longino's requires further specification of group boundaries and between-group relations before it can be applied to actual cases, while the normative aspect of Solomon's is problematic. My own proposal, drawing on the work of C.S. Peirce, is to conceive of science as human action. Human actions have goals; science, so conceived, has the overall goal of an account of the world independent of idiosyncratic assumptions of particular persons or groups of persons. In other words, science aims at the account of the world on which everyone who investigates would agree, given enough time to investigate. Since rational action, whatever else it may be, is not self-defeating, we can extract epistemic norms for science by examining conditions for the possibility of such an ideal consensus. One condition is the inclusion of inquirers with different backgrounds. Another is that inquirers be clustered into groups based on shared proximate goals and standards for their achievement, such that diversity of background assumptions is maximized in the context of key shared assumptions. A third is that the composition and relations of these groups to one another changes over time. So shared goals of groups, synchronic diversity within and among groups, and diachronic patterns of variation within and among groups, are all epistemically relevant. To apply this account to actual cases, we need empirical data to determine group boundaries, within-group diversity, and interactions between groups. Conceptual analysis thus leads to sociological categories and concepts, and toward input from history and sociology of science. This social account thus connects traditional epistemology and empirical studies of science, preparing the way for productive future discussion between presently-estranged areas of social epistemology. Back to top* * *
Rhiannon Luyster
Department of Psychology University of Michigan 1012 East Hall 530 Church Street Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043 rluyster@umich.edu
The interface between typical development and psychopathology has been a common theme in the recent writings of researchers in developmental psychology (Masten & Curtis, 2000; Rutter & Sroufe, 2000; Sroufe, 1990). These authors propose that our understanding of development can be bolstered by endeavors in the study of the normal as well as the abnormal, and that research in one area should inform investigations in the other. In considering developmental mechanisms and change, Sroufe (1990) has noted that it is often useful to identify related developmental pathways within normal and abnormal development. One instance of this is a cluster of developmental disorders grouped under the heading “Autism Spectrum Disorders” or ASD. ASD is an umbrella term for developmental disorders that are qualitatively similar; it includes autism, Pervasive Developmental Disorder – Not Otherwise Specified (PDD-NOS) and Asperger syndrome.
First, an introduction to the defining characteristics of ASD will be provided. Using this portrayal as a springboard, a reflection will then be made on how our understanding of normal development has informed our understanding of development in ASD. This will be followed by an effort to identify areas in which investigations of typical development have failed to provide us with advancements in our understanding of ASD. Finally, the essay will address areas appropriate for future research in ASD and how these potential investigations might, in turn, foster a deeper understanding of typical development. Back to top* * *
Jason Leddington
Northwestern University Department of Philosophy j-leddington@northwestern.edu
The topic of sense perception seems to be an ideal candidate for intersection of philosophical and scientific study. The prospects for scientific and philosophical interaction are encouraged by the fact that traditional philosophical approaches to sense perception appear to share a basic presupposition with traditional scientific approaches-namely, the presupposition that sense perception is properly understood as a kind of “communication” between two discrete, theoretically isolable, and independently studiable entities: mind (or rather, brain) and world.
This paper begins with an elucidation of the explanatory ambition associated with the communication model of sense perception and connects it to a traditional and widely-shared conception of knowledge-an "externalist" or "hybrid" conception, according to which the state of knowing decomposes into a "subjective" condition and an "objective" condition. I then introduce a non-traditional approach on which knowledge is not a hybrid state and give some reasons for preferring this approach. It becomes clear that the non-hybrid conception of knowledge corresponds to a conception of sense perception that is incompatible with the communication model. On this alternative view, perceiving, like knowing, is a unitary state. I call this competing model of sense perception a model of sense perception as harmonization. If the harmonization model is correct, then, contrary to the explanatory ambition of the communication model, neither philosophy nor empirical science can tell us "what it is" to perceive; rather, the "nature of sense perception" neither admits of, nor needs, clarification. That does not mean that the results of relevant empirical study are uninteresting, or have nothing to do with perception. Rather, the point is just that, if those results are "explanatory," they are so in a much weaker sense than the communication model suggests.
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Susan Hawthorne
University of Minnesota Dept. of Philosophy 831 Heller Hall 271 19th Ave. S. Minneapolis, MN 55455-0310 hawt0019@umn.edu
The term “disorder” and its contrasting notion “normality” are ubiquitous in psychiatry and psychology, but they are neither clearly defined nor clearly useful. The etymology and connotations of the term “disorder” point toward the concept's strong association with social disruption and badness in a moral sense. Medicalization of psychiatric disorders, as by the DSM-IV and current dominant practice, isolates disorders within individuals. Connotation and medicalization then work together to reinforce judgments of disordered individuals as socially deviant in a powerfully normative sense, despite awareness by many professionals that this problem persists. The disorder attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is used here to illustrate the diagnostic, treatment, and research practices that are held in place by the normal:disordered dichotomization despite ways in which categorical diagnoses such as ADHD are scientifically unsupportable and ethically problematic. Alternatives, such as increased emphasis on individual-environment complexes, are considered.
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Xaq Pitkow
16 Divinity Avenue Room 4033, Biological Laboratories Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 pitkow@fas.harvard.edu
Influential theories assert that retinal center-surround receptive fields remove spatial correlations present in the visual world. It is theorized that this decorrelation serves to maximize information transmission to the brain by avoiding transfer of redundant information through optic nerve fibers of limited capacity. While this theory successfully predicts human psychophysical sensitivities under a wide variety of conditions, it has never been directly tested at the putative bottleneck, the optic nerve. We presented visual stimuli with naturalistic correlations to salamander retinas while extracellularly recording outputs of many retinal ganglion cells using a microelectrode array. Comparison of the cross-correlations between neuronal responses to the correlations between their inputs showed that neurons do indeed decorrelate; however, the receptive fields are only partly responsible. Much of the decorrelation is due to the high threshold of neurons rather than the center-surround receptive fields.
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Katie Plaisance
Ph.D. Candidate University of Minnesota Department of Philosophy 831 Heller Hall 271 19th Ave. S. Minneapolis, MN 55455 plai0009@umn.edu
The nature-nurture debate, even by its own name, employs well-known and contentious dichotomies. Academic discussions of this debate generally focus on the nature-nurture and gene-environment dichotomies, which admittedly are problematic in their own right. However, there is another dichotomy at work, one which has not received much attention, but which plays a crucial role in the debate. This distinction results from subdividing the environmental source of influence into two parts: 'shared' environment and 'nonshared' environment.
I suggest that there is actually more than one distinction being drawn under the names of 'shared' and 'nonshared' environment. Following Turkheimer's descriptions, one is the objective distinction, which conceives of shared environments as those that an observer would consider to be shared by all members of a family (e.g., socioeconomic status). I believe that the objective distinction is the one preferred by developmental psychologists, and I also believe that it is the more intuitive way of understanding the shared-nonshared dichotomy. The other distinction is the effective one, which takes shared environments to be those that make family members more alike (e.g., socioeconomic status would only be considered a shared environmental factor if it resulted in siblings resembling one another). It is the effective distinction that behavioral geneticists make use of in twin and adoption studies. Although there are several valid criticisms of the shared-nonshared environment distinction, there are two in particular that I will focus on here. First, this distinction can be confusing, and explanations of it often muddled, partly, though not entirely, because there is actually more than one distinction being drawn. This confusion can lead to misunderstandings of research results, especially by the general public and policymakers. The second problem is that the effective distinction can miss out on important environmental influences, such as parents' influence on their children's behavioral traits, or at the very least downplay these possible influences by mislabeling them. I suggest that getting clear on this distinction and the various ways in which it is conceived of and employed by behavioral researchers is important in its own right, particularly as a means for grappling with the problems mentioned above. Furthermore, I believe that interdisciplinary work, especially collaboration between behavioral geneticists and developmental psychologists, could generate new insights for addressing these issues. Back to top* * * |