Crossing the buffer: ontological anxiety among US evangelicals and an anthropological theory of mind

Scholars describe the dominant model of mind in the United States as secular: bounded, private, supernaturally inert, and the locus for self and identity. I argue that US charismatic evangelicals live with the secular sense of a seemingly immutable boundary between the immaterial mind-self and the material world – what Charles Taylor might call ‘boundedness’ – but at the same time, their commitment to supernatural connection means they imagine the mind-world boundary as porous under certain circumstances: a brittle, fragile buffer between the natural and the supernatural. To allow this porosity, charismatics develop strategies for crossing the buffer, which include spoken prayer, powerful emotions, playful modes of pretend, and bodily rupture or ‘breaking in’. These strategies provide evidence that the supernatural is real. Yet practitioners remain anxious about the relationship between these supernatural experiences and the scepticism around them. This ‘ontological anxiety’ becomes visible in three ways. First, charismatics cultivate intense bodily sensations that demonstrate the reality of God. Second, they describe their experience with a ‘common-sense realism’. Finally, charismatics are disturbed by the incoherence between their evangelical and secular impulses around the possibility of mental action.     

Mind and Spirit: a comparative theory about representation of mind and the experience of spirit

This special issue reports the findings of the Mind and Spirit project. We ask whether different understandings of ‘mind’, broadly construed, might shape the ways that people attend to and interpret thoughts and other mental events – and whether their judgements affect their experience of (what they take to be) gods and spirits. We argue in this collection that there are indeed cultural differences in local theories of minds, in the way social worlds draws the line between interior and exterior, and that these differences do affect the way people sense invisible others. This introduction lays out the ideas that inspired the project and the methods that we used. This is the first report on our work.     

What anthropologists can learn from psychologists,and the other way around

The Mind and Spirit project uses methods from anthropology and psychology to explore the way understandings of what English-speakers call ‘the mind’ may shape the kinds of events people experience and deem ‘spiritual’. In this piece, we step back to reflect on this interdisciplinary approach. We observe that, in some ways, both fields are in parallel states of critical self-reflection around explanation and comparison: anthropology in the wake of the postmodern and postcolonial critique; and psychology in response to a pair of recent crises about the overreliance on Western samples and the reproducibility of psychological research. We suggest that combining our methods may go some way towards giving each field more confidence in its research. Joint fieldwork with specific point-by-point comparison is not common in either anthropology or psychology. We found it fruitful and commend it to others.     

Mental Misrepresentation in Non-human Psychopathology

In this paper, we defend a representational approach to at least some kinds of non-human psychopathology. Mentally-ill non-human minds, in particular in delusions, obsessive-compulsive disorders and similar cognitive states, are traditionally understood in purely behavioral terms. In contrast, we argue that non-human mental psychopathology should be at least sometimes not only ascribed contentful mental representation but also understood as really having these states. To defend this view, we appeal to the interactivist account of mental representation, which is a kind of a constructive approach to meaning. We follow Mark Bickhard in assuming that only an organism – either human or non-human – capable of detecting its own misrepresentations is representational. However, under his autonomy-based account of biological function these minds are incapable of misrepresentations because these minds are, ex hypothesi, unable to detect error in such representations. To solve this problem, we argue that adding a historical dimension – as in Millikan’s view on mental representations – to Bickhard’s account of function makes mental misrepresentation of mentally-ill minds possible. Using Bickhard’s dynamic account of function, it is possible to explain why delusions and other mental disorders can be seen as locally functional. However, an etiological dimension can further explain why misrepresentations seem to be globally dysfunctional. Even if representational or biosemiotic hypotheses about non-human psychopathology are difficult to confirm empirically, we defend the view that they can enrich our understanding of the causes and development of such pathologies, and may constitute a new progressive research programme.     

On the lack of evidence that non-human animals possess anything remotely resembling a 'theory of mind'

After decades of effort by some of our brightest human and non-human minds, there is still little consensus on whether or not non-human animals understand anything about the unobservable mental states of other animals or even what it would mean for a non-verbal animal to understand the concept of a ‘mental state’. In the present paper, we confront four related and contentious questions head-on: (i) What exactly would it mean for a non-verbal organism to have an ‘understanding’ or a ‘representation’ of another animal''s mental state? (ii) What should (and should not) count as compelling empirical evidence that a non-verbal cognitive agent has a system for understanding or forming representations about mental states in a functionally adaptive manner? (iii) Why have the kind of experimental protocols that are currently in vogue failed to produce compelling evidence that non-human animals possess anything even remotely resembling a theory of mind? (iv) What kind of experiments could, at least in principle, provide compelling evidence for such a system in a non-verbal organism?     

The evolution of theory of mind on welfare tradeoff ratios

People seem to attribute beliefs and desires to another person when interacting with them. Such a “theory of mind” capacity is essential for complex and uniquely human behavior such as language, but its evolutionary origin remains elusive. Using the formal tools of evolutionary game theory, we asked what environmental properties are necessary to select for a basic form of theory of mind—the ability to infer the prosociality, quantified by the welfare tradeoff ratio, of another person toward oneself. We found that none of the environments studied in classical or evolutionary game theory give an advantage to this form of theory of mind capacities; theory of mind is advantageous only in a new class of environments with stable opponents and variable payoff structures. In two behavioral experiments (n = 91) we verified that people can, and do use theory of mind in such an environment. These results suggest that some features of early humans’ social environment that were previously neglected in evolutionary game theory may be responsible for the evolution of people’s complex social capacities.     

Spencerism and the Causal Theory of Reference

Spencer’s heritage, while almost a forgotten chapter in the history of biology, lives on in psychology and the philosophy of mind. I particularly discuss externalist views of meaning, on which meaning crucially depends on a notion of reference, and ask whether reference should be thought of as cause or effect. Is the meaning of a word explained by what it refers to, or should we say that what we use a word to refer to is explained by what concept it expresses? I argue for the latter view, which I call ‘Darwinian’, and against the former, ‘Spencerian’ one, assuming conceptual structures in humans to be an instance of adaptive structures, and adaptive relations to an environment to be the effect rather than the cause of evolutionary novelties. I conclude with the deficiency – both empirically and methodologically – of a functionalist study of human concepts and the languages they are embedded in, as it would be undertaken in a paradigm that identifies meaning with reference or that gives reference an explanatory role to play for what concepts we have.     

The evolution of an enigmatic human trait: false beliefs due to pseudo-solution traps

In this essay I ask why it is so common for people to hold strong beliefs despite insufficient evidence to justify them. I approach this question from an evolutionary perspective of ultimate causation rather than a neurophysiological perspective of proximate causation. Beginning with simple optical illusions, I use a progression of examples to argue that humans are programmed to form false beliefs due to (i) intrinsic errors of intuition and, more importantly, (ii) a propensity to accept intuitively compelling beliefs without sufficient evidence when they appear to provide solutions to problems that cannot be solved with available knowledge. The formation of these false beliefs and their persistence constitute a phenomenon I call a pseudo-solution trap. I show that these mental traps are especially prevalent in the area of medicine. I end by showing that pseudo-solution traps are expected to feasibly lead to a belief in the supernatural, including an afterlife and one or more deities.     

Bird naming systems by Akan people in Ghana follow scientific nomenclature with potentials for conservation monitoring

Background

Studies on indigenous knowledge of fauna particular birds and its potential use in biodiversity conservation and management are rare globally. Characteristics used in creating indigenous bird names in many Ghanaian languages are undocumented. The main aim of this study is to answer the question “whether indigenous bird naming systems by the Akan tribes in Ghana follow scientific nomenclature and whether indigenous Akan bird knowledge can potentially help improve bird conservation efforts in Ghana.

Methods

Purposive sampling technique was employed in selecting 10 respondents from 25 communities in the five administrative districts in the Central Region. The study was conducted between November 2014 and March 2015. A mixed method approach was adopted in the data collection including key person interviews, focus group discussion, and structured interview supported by a participatory field observation.

Results

Indigenous people in the study area have reported 143 species of birds belonging to 44 families representing 57 % of total number of species with known local names in Ghana. The study revealed that just as Latin and common English naming systems, indigenous Akan bird names originated from features of the bird, including plumage, vocalizations or behavioural characteristics and belief systems of the indigenous people. The study also discovered that indigenous people in the study area have distinct names for different species within a particular family for most of the birds they could identify. However, they occasionally assign a single general name for either the entire family or all species therein.

Conclusions

The study found evidence to support the prediction that indigenous bird naming systems in the Akan language follow scientific nomenclature. Indigenous knowledge and understanding of birds in the study area can be tapped and used in conservation planning and monitoring of birds. This research thus provides sufficient evidence to prove that indigenous knowledge by the Akan tribes in the study area can be useful in bird conservation and monitoring programs in Ghana. Further research in other Ghanaian languages is recommended.

     

"Nature" and "environment" in German and Portuguese sustainable development strategies for Johannesburg 2002

The recent Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development was an important symbolic moment, in spite of the poor results some people claim to have emerged from it. The very fact that official written texts were produced for a wide discussion in many participating countries is a positive side-effect, as it enables the almost unique possibility of using parallel corpora for the analysis of the respective language and underlying assumptions. This could lead to the identification of some potential causes for conflicts and misunderstandings. Both texts were produced according to a (supposedly, at least) common intention, so they may be seen as functionally equivalent. In spite of that, there are obviously huge differences, not only in extension, but also in the type of lexical combinations and stylistic features used. Words like ambiente, in the Portuguese language, and Umwelt, in German, as well as natureza/Natur, appear in very different lexical environments, so that one can, by means of a distributive methodology, obtain a picture of what might be intended with their use in the two countries. Another issue brought about by this analysis was a reflection on the concept of "foreign" language. This raises the question not only of knowing whether, or to what extent, written texts like these are really intended to have an effect on (local) people's minds, but also about pragmatic/cultural constraints that have influenced their very shaping.     

Asymmetric mating in the brachypterous grasshopper Podisma sapporensis

Crossing of genetically differentiated populations often results in assortative mating within populations. However, asymmetric sexual isolation or negative assortative mating has occasionally been reported. Previous studies suggested that sexual selection or sexual conflicts would lead to asymmetric mating when local populations are crossed. In order to evaluate the extent of assortative or disassortative mating in population crosses, we conducted laboratory crosses using the flightless grasshopper Podisma sapporensis. Crossing was conducted for all pairwise combinations of three populations, 150–240 km from one another – Teine, Shimokawa, and Akan. We found evidence for asymmetric mating for all the pairs of the populations. In particular, when the Teine and Akan populations were crossed, mating in the Teine male–Akan female cross was significantly more frequent than mating in both within‐population crosses, whereas mating in the Teine female–Akan male cross was significantly less frequent than mating in both within‐population crosses. We examined whether these results can be explained by any of the three hypotheses: (1) Kaneshiro's hypothesis, (2) differentiation in attractiveness, or (3) coevolution between male vigor and female receptivity. All the results were consistent with male vigor differing between populations balanced by different female potential to reject males. The available evidence suggests that antagonistic coevolution between the sexes has led local populations to different equilibria and that crossing of populations at different equilibria has resulted in asymmetry in mating frequencies.     

The Environments of Our Hominin Ancestors, Tool-usage, and Scenario Visualization

In this paper, I give an account of how our hominin ancestors evolved a conscious ability I call scenario visualization that enabled them to manufacture novel tools so as to survive and flourish in the ever-changing and complex environments in which they lived. I first present the ideas and arguments put forward by evolutionary psychologists that the mind evolved certain mental capacities as adaptive responses to environmental pressures. Specifically, Steven Mithen thinks that the mind has evolved cognitive fluidity, viz., an ability to exchange information flexibly between and among mental modules. Showing the deficiency in Mithen’s view, I then argue that the flexible exchange of information between and among modules together with scenario visualization is what explains the ability to construct the novel tools needed to survive and flourish in the environments in which our hominin ancestors resided. Finally, I trace the development of the multi-purposed javelin, from its meager beginnings as a stick, in order to illustrate scenario visualization in novel tool manufacturing.     

Valéry et l’automatisme psychologique

While the name of Paul Valery is usually associated with that of Leonardo da Vinci or the character, Monsieur Teste, most people are unaware of Valery’s posthumous work, which he considered the most significant of his writings: Cahiers/Notebooks, a voluminous and dense work, in its dimensions (around 30,000 pages) as well as in what it discloses about the daily ponderings of a man who considered himself — in spite of himself — a philosopher. It is a multifaceted work, touching on all fields of thought: history, politics, and the sciences, in all their diversity, from mathematics to physics, and biology to the theory of evolution. Neither philosophy, nor theology, nor linguistics is left in the dark. But he clearly expressed a preference for psychology and, more specifically, the question of mental function: What is it to think? How does the mind link ideas? What is abstraction? What role do feelings play? What is the relationship between the mind and the machine? Must we concede the existence of the unconscious mind. These are some of the questions we address in elucidating the concept of automatism through what makes it work as well as its failings.     

Autistic autobiography

Autism narratives are not just stories or histories, describing a given reality. They are creating the language in which to describe the experience of autism, and hence helping to forge the concepts in which to think autism. This paper focuses on a series of autobiographies that began with Grandin''s Emergence. These are often said to show us autism from the ‘inside’. The paper proposes that instead they are developing ways to describe experience for which there is little pre-existing language. Wittgenstein has many well-known aphorisms about how we understand other people directly, without inference. They condense what he had found in Wolfgang Köhler''s Gestalt Psychology. These phenomena of direct understanding what other people are doing are, Köhler wrote, ‘the common property and practice of mankind''. They are not the common property and practice of people with autism. Ordinary language is rich in age-old ways to describe what others are thinking, feeling and so forth. Köhler''s phenomena are the bedrock on which such language rests. There is no such discourse for autism, because Köhler''s phenomena are absent. But a new discourse is being made up right now, i.e. ways of talking for which the autobiographies serve as working prototypes.     

Seeing Minds in Others – Can Agents with Robotic Appearance Have Human-Like Preferences?

Ascribing mental states to non-human agents has been shown to increase their likeability and lead to better joint-task performance in human-robot interaction (HRI). However, it is currently unclear what physical features non-human agents need to possess in order to trigger mind attribution and whether different aspects of having a mind (e.g., feeling pain, being able to move) need different levels of human-likeness before they are readily ascribed to non-human agents. The current study addresses this issue by modeling how increasing the degree of human-like appearance (on a spectrum from mechanistic to humanoid to human) changes the likelihood by which mind is attributed towards non-human agents. We also test whether different internal states (e.g., being hungry, being alive) need different degrees of humanness before they are ascribed to non-human agents. The results suggest that the relationship between physical appearance and the degree to which mind is attributed to non-human agents is best described as a two-linear model with no change in mind attribution on the spectrum from mechanistic to humanoid robot, but a significant increase in mind attribution as soon as human features are included in the image. There seems to be a qualitative difference in the perception of mindful versus mindless agents given that increasing human-like appearance alone does not increase mind attribution until a certain threshold is reached, that is: agents need to be classified as having a mind first before the addition of more human-like features significantly increases the degree to which mind is attributed to that agent.     

Language and learning: the cognitive revolution at 60-odd

Around the middle of the last century, the prevailing psychological paradigm of behaviourism was challenged by what is now known as the cognitive revolution. Behaviourists viewed learning as changes in patterns of behaviour through reinforcement. By contrast, advocates of the cognitive approach argued that such behavioural changes were outward manifestations of computational operations on mental representations. Here we consider the current state of the cognitive revolution, focusing on the two most contentious issues in the debate: language and learning. The cognitive approach has proved to be extremely fruitful in both fields. Although contemporary learning theory has almost completely embraced the cognitive approach, the study of language has witnessed a clear empiricist trend to revert back to a kind of neo-behaviourism. Many contemporary authors contend that language is a means of communication that is learned solely through the observation of external events, and culturally transmitted to successive generations. Here, we argue that learning and language can only be properly understood from a cognitive perspective, where the mind is conceived of as a biologically underpinned computational system. As is the case in learning theory, there is abundant evidence showing that language is subserved by an autonomous cognitive system in the mind. We conclude that the cognitive revolution has fundamentally changed our understanding of the mind.     

For an anthropology of the demoralized: state pay,mock‐labour,and unfreedom in a Serbian firm

Recently, the leitmotif of much anthropological writing became that of the virtue of precarity: the belief that people continue to exercise their ethical imagination in the most trying circumstances. While refreshingly non‐deterministic, the Foucauldian approach to freedom that guides this vision neglects those situations in which people see their ability to be moral as irreparable, and structurally compromised. Such is the case of a Serbian firm selling spare car parts, where policies of financing unprofitable employment gradually involved workers in everyday, ritualized performances of productivity for the state – what I call mock‐labour. Unable either to meaningfully fulfil or to renounce the ethos of work, workers remain in an affective blend of nonchalance and failure, experiencing mock‐labour as both a source of material security and an abandonment of their creative capacities – a mocking of moral self. I call for a reconciliation of the anthropologies of ethics and precarity through the notion of demoralization, as a state in which the deficits of structural agency and the limits of reflective freedom overlap.     

The green beards of language

Language transfers information on at least three levels; (1) what is said, (2) how it is said (what language is used), and, (3) that it is said (that speaker and listener both possess the ability to use language). The use of language is a form of honest cooperation on two of these levels; not necessarily on what is said, which can be deceitful, but always on how it is said and that it is said. This means that the language encoding and decoding systems had to evolve simultaneously, through mutual fitness benefits. Theoretical problems surrounding the evolution of cooperation disappear if a recognition system is present enabling cooperating individuals to identify each other – if they are equipped with “green beards”. Here, I outline how both the biological and cultural aspects of language are bestowed with such recognition systems. The biological capacities required for language signal their presence through speech and understanding. This signaling cannot be invaded by “false green beards” because the traits and the signal of their presence are one and the same. However, the real usefulness of language comes from its potential to convey an infinite number of meanings through the dynamic handling of symbols – through language itself. But any specific language also signals its presence to others through usage and understanding. Thus, languages themselves cannot be invaded by “false green beards” because, again, the trait and the signal of its presence are one and the same. These twin green beards, in both the biological and cultural realms, are unique to language.     

Timescale Halo: Average-Speed Targets Elicit More Positive and Less Negative Attributions than Slow or Fast Targets

Research on the timescale bias has found that observers perceive more capacity for mind in targets moving at an average speed, relative to slow or fast moving targets. The present research revisited the timescale bias as a type of halo effect, where normal-speed people elicit positive evaluations and abnormal-speed (slow and fast) people elicit negative evaluations. In two studies, participants viewed videos of people walking at a slow, average, or fast speed. We find evidence for a timescale halo effect: people walking at an average-speed were attributed more positive mental traits, but fewer negative mental traits, relative to slow or fast moving people. These effects held across both cognitive and emotional dimensions of mind and were mediated by overall positive/negative ratings of the person. These results suggest that, rather than eliciting greater perceptions of general mind, the timescale bias may reflect a generalized positivity toward average speed people relative to slow or fast moving people.     

Belief in Animal Mind among Spanish Primary School Children

Beliefs concerning the mental experiences of nonhuman animals have been related to how people treat, see, and take care of nonhuman animals. Whereas this issue has been the subject of several studies on adults, few have been conducted with children. Taking advantage of a recently published scale, the Child-BAM questionnaire, we aimed to explore the beliefs in animal minds of Spanish primary school children. The study also considered the effects of a child's age, school year group, gender, and pet ownership on their beliefs in animal mind. The Child-BAM questionnaire, concerning the mental capabilities of eight different species (human, chimpanzee, dog, cow, otter, sparrow, frog, and fish), was distributed at a primary school sited in Cordoba, Spain. A total of 416 participants were included aged between 6 and 13 years. Each child provided scores for animals’ ability to have intelligence, experience pain, fear, happiness, and sadness, and total scores for the eight species were calculated. The results showed that children's beliefs about animal minds differed depending on the type of animal, and that children were more likely to believe in the emotional capacities of animals rather than their cognitive capabilities. Dogs achieved similar scores to humans regarding all capabilities, and higher than any other species, while the cow, fish, and frog generally scored the lowest. Age, school year group, and having a companion animal at home affected beliefs in animal minds, whereas gender had no effect. This study highlights cultural similarities in children's beliefs about animal minds and the potential importance of this variable for future research in child–animal interactions.