Much has been made about Anthony Flew’s “conversion” from atheism to deism. An article in The Atlantic suggests that all might not be quite as it seems. I’m not in a position to adjudicate, but something is a bit off. (On a personal note, Flew has been a responsive and charming correspondent and an early supporter (a charter member) of the…
Blaise Cronin’s comments that the term social epistemology has provenance going back to the 1950s library science is absolutely correct. The point that needs to be made, however, is that this “in vogue” term does not denote a unified tradition. Given the rather amorphous and diffuse nature of social epistemology its domain, approach, structure and value are highly…
A copy of my review of Andy Clark’s Natural-Born Cyborgs is now available through MindPapers.
My recent co-authored paper now available to download through MindPapers. The abstract: To know is to cognize, to cognize is to be a culturally bounded, rationality-bounded and environmentally located agent. Knowledge and cognition are thus dual aspects of human sociality. If social epistemology has the formation, acquisition, mediation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge in complex…
A journalistic take on what is essentially active externalism or the thesis of the extended mind. David Brooks (yes, THAT David Brooks) implicitly refers to notions of collaborative filtering, swarming, stigmergy, and even memetics. Of course, one suspects that Brooks has only the slighest conceptual inkling of what’s going on. Notions of the extended mind enjoy currency both in academic and popular literature: the ‘‘global…
Atheism is big publishing business these days. The rash of recent bestsellers has been dubbed the “New” Atheism – and the loose coalition of those who subsribe to the naturalism promoted across these books – as Brights. I want to make four points: 1. I resent the haughtiness of the term “bright”. The term fails to capture many…
Cognitive Science and FactCheck.org, or Why We (Still) Do What We Do The following article is culled from Annenberg Fact Check (if this is the sort of discussion you find interesting, why not check out the journal EPISTEME. Articles such as Alvin Goldman on the epistemic failure of the FBI regarding 9/11 and Roger Koppl on why…
The new issue of EPISTEME is now available. For a list of contents and abstracts please click here.
The September 7th issue of Science is a special issue devoted to social cognition: the table of contents found here. I reproduce the introduction “Living in Societies” by Caroline Ash, Gilbert Chin, Elizabeth Pennisi and Andrew Sugden. The appearance of this issue has prompted me to post the introduction to the special issue of social cognition…
Some years ago I commissioned Noël O’Sullivan to contribute to the program for inaugural conference of Michael Oakeshott Association in 2001 which was held at the LSE. This is his beautifully crafted essay and is a companion piece to Ken Minogue’s portrait. ================================= When Leslie Marsh asked me to talk about the apparently simple subject, ‘Why…
manwithoutqualities 