Luc Faucher

Reason and rationality

Over the past few decades, reasoning and rationality have been the focus of enormous interdisciplinary attention, attracting interest from philosophers, psychologists, economists, statisticians and anthropologists, among others. The widespread interest in the topic reflects the central status of reasoning in human affairs. But it also suggests that there are many different though related projects and tasks which need to be addressed if we are to attain a comprehensive understanding of reasoning.

Social Construction and the Concept of Race

There has been little serious work to integrate the constructionist approach and the cognitive/evolutionary approach in the domain of race, although many researchers have paid lip service to this project. We believe that any satisfactory account of human beings’ racialist cognition has to integrate both approaches. In this paper, we propose to move toward this integration. We present an evolutionary hypothesis that rests on a distinction between three kinds of groups—kin‐based groups, small scale coalitions, and ethnies. Following Gil‐White (1999, 2001a, 2001b), we propose that ethnies have raised specific evolutionary challenges that were solved by an evolved cognitive system. We suggest that the concept of race is a byproduct of this mechanism. We argue that recent theories of cultural transmission are our best hope for integrating social constructionists’ and cognitive/evolutionary theorists’ insights.

Evaluating Recommender Systems

Recommender systems are considered as an answer to the information overload in a Web environment. Such systems recommend items (movies, music, books, news, web pages, etc.) that the user should be interested in. Collaborative filtering recommender systems have a huge success in commercial applications. The sales in these applications follow a power law distribution. However, with the increase of the number of recommendation techniques and algorithms in the literature, there is no indication that the datasets used for the evaluation follow a real world distribution. This paper introduces the long tail theory and its impact on recommender systems. It also provides a comprehensive review of the different datasets used to evaluate collaborative filtering recommender systems techniques and algorithms (EachMovie, MovieLens, Jester, BookCrossing, and Netflix). Finally, it investigates which of these datasets present a distribution that follows this power law distribution and which distribution would be the most relevant.

Racism Against Jorge Garcia's Moral and Psychological Monism

In this article, we argue that it can be fruitful for philosophers interested in the nature and moral significance of racism to pay more attention to psychology. We do this by showing that psychology provides new arguments against Garcias views about the nature and moral significance of racism. We contend that some scientific studies of racial cognition undermine Garcias moral and psychological monism about racism: Garcia disregards (1) the rich affective texture of racism and (2) the diversity of what makes racial ills morally wrong.In this article, we argue that it can be fruitful for philosophers interested in the nature and moral significance of racism to pay more attention to psychology. We do this by showing that psychology provides new arguments against Garcias views about the nature and moral significance of racism. We contend that some scientific studies of racial cognition undermine Garcias moral and psychological monism about racism: Garcia disregards (1) the rich affective texture of racism and (2) the diversity of what makes racial ills morally wrong.

WHY DO WE THINK RACIALLY

Contemporary research on racial categorization is mostly encompassed by two research traditions-the social constructionist approach and the cognitive-cum-evolutionary approach. The way people conceptualize race membership is strongly influenced by their cultural niche. However, it is underscored that the similarities between culture-specific concepts of race remain unexplained by this approach. These similarities suggest that racialism results from a universal cognitive system. Three cognitive-cum-evolutionary theories are reviewed in this chapter: all see racialism as a by-product of an evolved cognitive system. Although the literature from both approaches has some plausible empirical evidence and some theoretical insights to contribute to a full understanding of racial categorization, there has been little contact between their proponents. In order to foster such contacts, the chapter critically reviews both traditions, focusing particularly on the recent evolutionary/cognitive explanations of racial categorization. Despite some decisive progress, one is still far from having a complete theory of why humans classify people on the basis of their skin color, body appearance, or hairstyle.

Unity of Science and Pluralism: Cognitive Neurosciences of Racial Prejudice as a Case Study

A consideration of the recent history of philosophy reveals that when thinking about unity of science, philosophers have mainly been thinking of unity through reduction of higher level theories to lower level theories. In other words, if unity was to be achieved it was through intertheoretic reduction. Lately, though, some philosophers (Darden and Maull, Philos Sci 44:43–64, 1977; McCauley and Bechtel, Theory Psychol 11:736–760, 2001; Mitchell and Dietrich, Am Nat 168:S73–S79, 2006) have started to question this exclusive focus on intertheoretic reduction in the discussions concerning the unity of science. These philosophers have also come to reject the global project of unification for more modest and local forms of unification: This is the area of pluralism. Pluralism complicates tremendously our understanding of the relations between theories. In fact, pluralism suggests that we are facing two distinct tasks: (1) Developing a typology of the intertheoretic relations; (2) Understanding on a case-by-case basis the relation between specific theories or specific frameworks. I believe that progress has been made with respect to (1), but I want to improve on the current understanding of the typology of intertheoretic relations. I take (2) to be essential: Many scientists have failed to understand what pluralism entails. They view their theories to be simply inconsistent with each other (when sometimes, they are not). It is important to understand the relations between actual sciences and between actual theories in order to avoid futile arguments and to develop better theories. In this paper, I will present Sandra Mitchell’s typology of inter-theoretic relations. I will then focus on a case study—the relations between the neurosciences and social cognitive psychology of racial prejudice. What will emerge is that the pluralism proposed by Mitchell should be enriched further to understand the real nature of the unity proposed in certain fields of science.

Introduction: Modularity and the Nature of Emotions

Are our experiences of fear, disgust, anger, joy, pride or compassion, for instance, more akin to states such as feelings or sensations, which are often thought to lack cognitive content, or are they more like perceptions or else like judgements? If emotions are informational or cognitive states, should we take emotions to be perceptions of a certain kind or else propositional states with a fully conceptual content? Are emotions passive states or are they at least to a certain extent subject to the will? Are some or all emotions basic, in the sense of being universally shared and innate or are they cultural constructions? Do some, or all, emotions threaten theoretical or practical rationality or are they, to the contrary, essential preconditions of rational thought and action? These are some of the many questions which emotion theorists have tried to answer. Since the publication of Jerry Fodor’s The Modularity of Mind (1983), a new set of questions, answers to which provide at least partial replies to the questions just mentioned, has emerged in the philosophy of emotions. Are emotions, or at least some of them, modular? This would mean, minimally, that emotions are cognitive capacities that can be explained in terms of mental components that are at functionally dissociable from other parts of the mind. This is what is suggested by the often noticed conflicts between emotions and thought. For instance, Hume asks us to consider “the case of a man, who being hung out from a high tower in a cage of iron cannot forbear trembling, when he surveys the precipice below him, tho’ he knows himself to be perfectly secure from falling, by his experience of the solidity of the iron, which supports him [...]”. The emotion of fear this man experiences is characterised by recalcitrance with respect to thought. Since this is taken to be one of the hallmarks of modularity, one might be tempted to conclude that emotions, or at least some types of emotions, are modular

Cultural evolution, the Baldwin effect, and social norms

The goal of this paper is to analyze the role of the Baldwin effect in cultural evolution and to propose that it played a fundamental role in the evolution of social norms. Drawing on a recent interpretation of the Baldwin effect proposed by Godfrey-Smith (2003), it is argued that the Baldwin effect should be construed in terms of niche construction. The paper appeals to the works of Deacon (1997, 2003) to illustrate the process of niche construction, and then concludes by applying a Baldwinian process of niche construction to the case of social norms.

Psychologie évolutionniste et théories interdomaines

Evolutionary psychology presupposes relations between theories of different domains that the two traditional models, reduction and autonomy, cannot properly account for. We aim to construct a model of relations between theories that succeeds where traditional models fail. We show that the multiple realizability argument, on which the autonomist model is thought to rest, is compatible with reductionism and, following Kim, that an autonomist reading of the argument deprives psychology of its scientific status. We therefore opt for a reductionist model compatible with functionalism and multiple realizability, but show that, within evolutionary psychology at least, the very application of the conditions of reduction requires strong interactions between psychology and various other adjacent disciplines. We also show that reduction must be preceded in evolutionary psychology by an augmentation of the reduction base, which brings still other disciplines into play. Finally, we present a model of the interaction between disciplines we believe accounts best for these relations and discuss the problems facing this kind of enterprise.

RDoC: Thinking Outside the DSM Box Without Falling into a Reductionist Trap

Just as the DSM-5 was about to be finalized, the National Institute for Mental Health (NIMH) launched its “Research Domain Criteria” (RDoC) initiative, a project that has been seen by many as a disavowal of the type of nosological enterprise incarnated by the DSM itself, from DSM-III to DSM-5. In our paper, we first want to describe the context in which RDoC appeared and demonstrate that, if it is not a disavowal of the DSM-5’s work, it certainly signals the abandonment of a method of trying to establish a valid nosology; a paradigm shift in nosology so to speak. We will then question if RDoC is a reductionist enterprise. We will explain why RDoC is not reductionist in a strong and naive sense, but why it could be understood as reductionist in a weaker sense. If this weaker form of reductionism does not possess the problems the stronger forms of reductionism do, it might nonetheless generate problems of its own that researchers should be aware of. We will try to delineate some of these problems.