This must surely be the most anticipated event in modern non-fiction publishing history. Here is a taster.
EPISTEME 9:2
Now available.
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 and Simon’s social externalism runs on a shared presupposition: mind is constrained in its computational capacity to detect, harvest, and assimilate “data” generated by the infinitely fine-grained and perpetually dynamic characteristic of experience in complex social environments. For Hayek, mind and sociality are co-evolved spontaneous orders, allowing little or no prospect of comprehensive explanation, trapped in a hermeneutically sealed, i.e. inescapably context bound, eco-system. For Simon, it is the simplicity of mind that is the bottleneck, overwhelmed by the ambient complexity of the environmental. Since on Simon’s account complexity is unidirectional, Simon is far more ebullient about the prospects of explanation. Hayek’s social externalism functions as a kind of distributed “extra-neural” memory store manifest as dynamic spontaneous orders. Simon’s organizational rule-governed externalism negotiates the “inner” world (the mind) with the “outer” world through a homeostatic interface that offloads the cognitive burden into the environment. Their respective externalisms may differ in detail but not in spirit in that it ameliorates their shared presupposition of cognitive constraint. Even though any “optimization talk” for Hayek and Simon is objectionable, knowledge acquisition can be represented by a contextualized stigmergic swarm optimization algorithm that gives due emphasis to both the individual and the environment. The key insight is that “perfect” knowledge is unnecessary, impracticable and indeed irrelevant if one understands the mechanism at work in complex sociality, a stigmergic sociality that in effect augments or scaffolds cognition.
Dawkins & Dennett
A recent discussion held at Oxford. (The picture above is Darwin, not Dennett :~) )
Can dogs really show empathy towards humans?
This from The Economist.
The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War
Look out for my chum David Livingstone Smith’s entry “War, Evolution, and the Nature of Human Nature“
Stigmergic Dimensions of Online Creative Interaction
Uncorrected proof of final contribution to Stigmergy 3.0 line-up.
Oakeshott Zygon Symposium
Check out this symposium from a few years back.
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Leslie Marsh
Keywords: category error; creationist science; Stephen Jay Gould; ignoratio elenchi; modality; non-overlapping magisteria; Michael Oakeshott; politics; religion; science
Abstract. This paper introduces a symposium discussing Michael Oakeshott’s understanding of the relationship of religion, science and politics.
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Elizabeth Corey
Keywords: British Idealism; modality; Michael Oakeshott; practical mode; practice; religion; George Santayana; Georg Simmel; Eric Voegelin
Abstract. Michael Oakeshott’s religious view of the world stands behind much of his political and philosophical writing. In this essay I first discuss Oakeshott’s view of religion and the mode of practice in his own terms. I attempt next to illuminate his idea of religion by describing it in less technical language, drawing upon other thinkers such as Georg Simmel and George Santayana, who share similar views. I then evaluate Oakeshott’s view as a whole, considering whether his ideas about religion can stand up to careful scrutiny and whether they have value for present-day reflection on religion.
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Timothy Fuller
Keywords: Christianity; experience unmodified; historical experience; modes of experience; practical experience; religious life; scientific experience; worldliness
Abstract. Michael Oakeshott reflected on the character of religious experience in various writings throughout his life. In Experience and Its Modes (1933) he analyzed science as a distinctive “mode,” or account of experience as a whole, identifying those assumptions necessary for science to achieve its coherent account of experience in contrast to other modes of experience whose quests for coherence depend on different assumptions. Religious experience, he thought, was integral to the practical mode. The latter experiences the world as interminable tension between what is and what ought to be. The question, Is there a conflict between science and religion? is, in Oakeshott’s approach, the question, Is there a conflict between the scientific mode of experience and the practical mode? Insofar as we tend to treat every question as a practical one, these questions seem to make sense. But Oakeshott’s analysis leads to the view that scientific experience and religious experience are categorically different accounts of experience abstracted from the whole of experience. They are voices of experience that may speak to each other, but they are not ordered hierarchically. Nor can either absorb the other without insoluble contradictions.
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Byron Kaldis
Keywords: definition; designation; ethics; holism; mode of experience; naturalism; naturalized epistemology; Michael Oakeshott; philosophy of science; religion; science
Abstract. I offer a critical exposition and reconstruction of Michael Oakeshott’s views on natural science. The principal aim is to enrich Oakeshott’s modal schema by throwing light on it in terms of its internal consistency and by bringing to bear on it recent developments in philosophy in general and the philosophy of science in particular. The discussion brings out the special place reserved for philosophy, the crucial tenet of the separateness of these modes seen as Leibnizian monads as well as the special status allowed to science. It considers the possibility of combining one moment of philosophical thinking, namely ethics, with science in the midst of such modal separateness. I first offer a general introduction of how to approach Oakeshott’s views on science. The next section stresses philosophy and its relation to science. This is followed by an elaboration of what the modes of experience are meant to be and how science is placed among them. An examination of Oakeshott’s more particular views on science concludes the essay.
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Corey Abel
Keywords: apology; Augustine; authority; Christianity; civil association; Francis Collins; conversation; Richard Dawkins; evolution; Stephen Jay Gould; history; mode; nonoverlapping magisteria; Michael Oakeshott; practical experience; religion; science; theism
Abstract. I examine Michael Oakeshott’s theory of modes of experience in light of today’s evolution debates and argue that in much of our current debate science and religion irrelevantly attack each other or, less commonly but still irrelevantly, seek out support from the other. An analysis of Oakeshott’s idea of religion finds links between his early holistic theory of the state, his individualistic account of religious sensibility, and his theory of political, moral, and religious authority. Such analysis shows that a modern individualistic theory of the state need not be barrenly secular and suggests that a religious sensibility need not be translated into an overmastering desire to use state power to pursue moral or spiritual ends in politics. Finally, Oakeshott’s vision of a civil conversation, as both a metaphor for Western civilization and as a quasi-ethical ideal, shows us how we might balance the recognition of diverse modal truths, the pursuit of singular religious or philosophic truth, and a free political order.
Franz Kafka
Commemorating Kafka’s birthday.
If ever there was a mind that captured the modern condition (our current condition) it is Franz Kafka. Not only that, he must rate as the preeminent novelist of ideas without them being the ideas of the learned man trotted out self-consciously by most (academics and literati) who would be flattered by that appellation. First published in October 1919 here is Kafka’s In the Penal Colony. Since this was the only Kafka piece that I felt could be translated to the screen, years back I wrote a screenplay that faithfully followed this text. Though it never made it to the screen I can see it in my mind eye unmodulated by others’ vision.
A Performative-Extended Mind and a Law of Optimal Emergence
Yet another improbable invocation of EM.
manwithoutqualities 