Here is a lovely practical (and little known) illustration of the power and nimbleness distributed knowledge and cognition. Here’s Steve Horwitz telling the story.
Please, would those harboring a fashionable indignation about Walmart desist from writing to me. The point is not about the substance of their business, but the logistics of their business and management culture.
Larry Sanger’s EPISTEME article is cited in Chronicle of Higher Education.
The Oakeshott symposium on science, religion, and politics in the journal Zygon is now online.
In this issue there is also a symposium on Owen Flanagan’s latest book The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World. I was scheduled to participate in this symposium, a symposium that I’d originally suggested, but my computer went though its 19th and final “nervous breakdown.”
I want to bring your attention to the work of philosopher David Livingstone Smith. David is one of the foremost theorists in:
1. Biologically informed philosophical naturalism
2. Evolution and human nature
3. Deception and self-deception
4. The evolutionary psychology of war and peace
5. Dehumanization
His recent books include Less Than Human (forthcoming); The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War; and Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind. David was also guest editor of the most recent double issue of the Journal of Mind and Behavior. Here is a recent interview with David: he is a terrific expositor and, as he says, unlike many philosophers he is not ploughing a narrow field of interest only to philosophers. I see from David’s blog that he is featured in a CBC documentary as well – see here.
Now it is becoming clear that group decisions are also extremely valuable for the success of social animals, such as ants, bees, birds and dolphins. And those animals may have a thing or two to teach people about collective decision-making.
There’s an article in the Economist entitled “Decisions, decisions: What people can learn from how social animals make collective decisions.” The article highlights work done by the very talented Christian List (an EPISTEME Associate Editor) and colleagues on collective intentionality and decision theory. It’s nice to see the rich possibilities of computational intelligence, a growth area in A.I, finally be taken seriously by the social theorist. Social theory in its attempt to make sense of the individual-group equation has often taken inspiration from natural history. Though biological inspired political theory has long since been discredited, evolutionary biology and entomology has inspired a lively multidisciplinary field of research termed biomimetics (Grosan & Abraham, Stigmergic optimization: technologies and perspectives. In A. Abraham, C. Grosan, & V. Ramos Eds., Stigmergic optimization. Berlin: Springer.2006, p. 16). Biomimetic inspired computational modeling has epistemology and adaptive intelligence as a central interest.
My inclination is to approach these issues through the lens of stigmergy, something I began to sketch out in a co-authored paper entitled “Stigmergic epistemology, stigmergic cognition” downloadable here, here, here or here.
Much of this is of course not new – hence the title of this post – which refers to Bernard de Mandeville’s metaphorical The Fable of The Bees – refracted though Adam Smith and Hayek.
Larry Sanger, founder of Wikipedia, is contributor to the latest issue of EPISTEME.
The new issue of EPISTEME is now available.
Special Offer
ALL issues free until Feb 28 – hurry now while stocks last :)
I want to give an early plug for Rob Rupert’s forthcoming book Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind. Though I haven’t read the book, I have read pretty much everything else Rob has written. Rob is one of the most serious-minded and one of the most talented philosophers around. Rob doesn’t merely crank out “clever” stuff – when Rob writes, it’s very thoughtful. Philosophy at its best.
Rob, along with Adams and Aizawa, is one of the small band of EM critics. Rob’s book is eagerly anticipated: it finally allows him set out in fine-grained detail his critique taking cognisance of Andy Clark’s recent Supersizing the Mind and Adams and Aizawa’s Bounds of Cognition. With these three books one might say that the EM literature has come of age some ten years after Clark and Chalmers’ landmark paper.
Michael Oakeshott Association Conference
November 12-14, 2009
Baylor University
Waco, Texas
2009 marks the fifth meeting of the Michael Oakeshott Association, a group founded in 2001 to encourage the study of one of the 20th century’s most important political philosophers. Previous conferences have taken place at the London School of Economics, Colorado College, and the University of Jena in Germany.
This year, Baylor University will host the conference, broadening its scope to include the thought of Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin. Because Oakeshott, Strauss and Voegelin overlapped so extensively in their interests and yet differed sharply on certain points of method and teaching, comparisons among them often prove fruitful and enlightening. This is why readers of one thinker often become serious readers of the others. And yet we rarely if ever have an occasion to come together as a group and to benefit directly from each other’s insights.
We thus especially invite papers on topics that all three thinkers address, such as the function and place of liberal education, the fruitful tensions between reason and revelation, the relationship of religion and politics, the meaning of political philosophy, the crisis of modernity, and the role that studying the ancients may play in better understanding our modern situation. This list is not exhaustive, but we strongly encourage potential presenters to engage such comparative topics.
Abstracts, no more than 500 words, should be sent by April 30, 2009 to Elizabeth_Corey@baylor.edu. Abstracts should also include: title of paper, full name(s), affiliation, current position, and an email address.
The conference will take place at the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
