Browse by:

Institutional Identity

The very excellent Joshua Rust has made this paper published in Journal of Social Ontology freely available. Derek Parfit famously sought to illuminate his account of personal identity by comparing a person to a club. If Parfit could use our intuitions about clubs to help motivate his neo-Lockean account of personal identity over time, which resists…

The Perverse Ontology of Intersectionalism

Nice analytical piece by Helen Pluckrose. Consider the incoherent fuckwittery of, for example, “queers for Palestine” and the recent unholy alliance of feminism with Sharia law (I refer of course to Linda Sarsour, co-organizer of the recent Women’s March blindly followed by white middle class pseudo-intellectuals giving new meaning to Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons). The permutations of idiocy…

Is Behavioral Economics Doomed?

Here is a skeptical take on the insights supposedly offered by the rise of behavioral economics as represented by Daniel Kahneman and others. Since I’m in the process of reviewing Kahneman it will be interesting to see if Levine’s take on behavioral economics jibes with my take on Kahneman in particular and behavioral economics in…

Hayek and Behavioral Economics: Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension

I see that the publisher now has a fully detailed page up for a volume that I’ve been privileged to be a part of. The Foreword is by a very nice chappie going by the name of V.Smith and includes luminaries such as McCloskey, Boettke, Gintis, Steel and others. My abstract: Mindscapes and Landscapes: Hayek and Simon on Cognitive Extension Hayek’s…

Agent-Based Computational Sociology

Check out this new book I’ve just come across – Wiley’s lists, across disciplines, is certainly looking very strong these days. Also check out two colleagues’ excellent Wiley offerings – Ted Lewis’ Network Science and of course Ken Aizawa’s and Fred Adams’ The Bounds of Cognition. Agent-based modelCognitionCognitive sciencecomplexityComputational SociologyExtended MindFred AdamsKen AizawaNetwork ScienceSimulationsocial epistemologySocial…

Rationalism in Politics

In anticipation of a talk I’m giving later on in the week on Oakeshott’s so-called “dispositional conservatism”, here is a nice little piece by my chum Gene Callahan serving as a good introduction to RIP. The British philosopher and historian Michael Oakeshott is a curious figure in twentieth-century intellectual history. He is known mostly as…

Collective Intelligence 2012

Just under a week until the CI2012 shindig – as it so happens I’m busy co-writing a paper and co-editing a themed issue of Cognitive Systems Research on a species of CI – surprise, surprise “stigmergy.” Artificial intelligenceAustrian SchoolCognitionCollective intelligencecomplexityExtended MindIntelligenceKnowledgeKnowledge ManagementPhilosophy of mindsocial epistemologySocial SciencesSpontaneous orderStigmergyWikipedia

The Emergence of the Mind: Hayek’s Account of Mental Phenomena as a Product of Spontaneous Physical and Social Orders

Gloria Zúñiga y Postigo’s intro from her excellent paper. Friedrich Hayek’s social theory is well known for his articulation of the paradigm of spontaneous orders that challenges the traditional distinction between what is natural and what is artificial. The problem that Hayek saw is that language and other social objects do not fall under either…