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The Open Society and Its Complexities
Preface -- Prolegomenon : Hayek's three unsettling theses -- Beyond human nature -- Beyond moral justification -- Beyond human governance -- Three enquiries on the open society -- The rise of a normative species -- A natural history of moral order -- The "starting point" -- The egalitarian revolution -- Self-interest, reciprocity and altruism -- Internalized, enforced, social rules -- The other side of morality -- Cultural evolution -- Part I : the rise and (partial) fall of inequality -- A complex moral species -- The diversity and self-organized complexity -- Liberalism and the open society -- Understanding diversity -- Autocatalytic diversity -- Diversity and complexity -- Too much comple...
A Talent for Friendship
Professor John Terrell argues that the ability to make friends is an evolved human trait not unlike our ability to walk upright on two legs or our capacity for speech and complex abstract reasoning. Terrell charts how this trait has evolved by investigating two unique functions of the human brain: the ability to remake the outside world to suit our collective needs, and our capacity to escape into our own inner thoughts and imagine how things might and ought to be.
The Emotional Mind
Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were hard at work. If we want to properly understand the evolution of the mind, we must explore this more primal capability that we share with other animals: the power to feel. Emotions saturate every thought and pe...
Political Philosophy
Political philosophy is not a well-defined field. It hovers between political theory and classical philosophy. Few early political thinkers could have anticipated the most pressing political issues of our time: the need to stop global warming; the reduction of nuclear armaments; the rise of inequality between individuals and nations; and the struggle against authoritarianism, particularly when it comes disguised as democracy or as socialism. Here, celebrated philosopher Mario Bunge masterfully integrates socio-political theory into a philosophical exploration of power and resource distribution in the world today. Bunge contends that even recent political thinkers have generally failed to add...
A Theory of Everyone
A blueprint for a better future that offers a unified theory of human behavior, culture, and society. Playing on the phrase “a theory of everything” from physics, Michael Muthukrishna’s ambitious, original, and deeply hopeful book A Theory of Everyone draws on the most recent research from across the sciences, humanities, and the emerging field of cultural evolution to paint a panoramic picture of who we are and what exactly makes human beings different from all other forms of life on the planet. Muthukrishna argues that it is our unique ability to create culture, a shared body of knowledge, skills, and experience passed on from generation to generation, that has enabled our current do...
Usage-Based Approaches to Language Acquisition and Language Teaching
Although usage-based approaches have been successfully applied to the study of both first and second language acquisition, to monolingual and bilingual development, and to naturalistic and instructed settings, it is not common to consider these different kinds of acquisition in tandem. The present volume takes an integrative approach and shows that usage-based theories provide a much needed unified framework for the study of first, second and foreign language acquisition, in monolingual and bilingual contexts. The contributions target the acquisition of a wide range of linguistic phenomena and critically assess the applicability and explanatory power of the usage-based paradigm. The book also systematically examines a range of cognitive and linguistic factors involved in the process of language development and relates relevant findings to language teaching. Finally, this volume contributes to the assessment and refinement of empirical methods currently employed in usage-based acquisition research. This book is of interest to scholars of language acquisition, language pedagogy, developmental psychology, as well as Cognitive Linguistics and Construction Grammar.
Natural causes of language
What causes a language to be the way it is? Some features are universal, some are inherited, others are borrowed, and yet others are internally innovated. But no matter where a bit of language is from, it will only exist if it has been diffused and kept in circulation through social interaction in the history of a community. This book makes the case that a proper understanding of the ontology of language systems has to be grounded in the causal mechanisms by which linguistic items are socially transmitted, in communicative contexts. A \textit{biased transmission} model provides a basis for understanding why certain things and not others are likely to develop, spread, and stick in languages. ...
Consequences of Language
What is it about humans that makes language possible, and what is it about language that makes us human? If you are reading this, you have done something that only our species has evolved to do. You have acquired a natural language. This book asks, How has this changed us? Where scholars have long wondered what it is about humans that makes language possible, N. J. Enfield and Jack Sidnell ask instead, What is it about humans that is made possible by language? In Consequences of Language their objective is to understand what modern language really is and to identify its logical and conceptual consequences for social life. Central to this undertaking is the concept of intersubjectivity, the o...
Intercultural Business Communication and Simulation and Gaming Methodology
This book received the Enrique Alcaraz research award in 2010. This volume derives from the COMINTER-SIMULNEG research project which aims at designing a pragmatic model for the analysis of intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons, as well as developing a teaching methodology for cultural awareness based on computer simulation of real business settings. Contributions to this volume focus on three main issues: (a) explaining intercultural communication; (b) research on intercultural business communication; (c) the use of simulation and gaming methodology for the acquisition of communicative and cross-cultural competence in business settings. This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the study and practice of intercultural business communication, borrowing concepts from social anthropology, social cognition, cognitive linguistics, and intercultural pragmatics.
"I Love Learning; I Hate School"
Frustrated by her students’ performance, her relationships with them, and her own daughter’s problems in school, Susan D. Blum, a professor of anthropology, set out to understand why her students found their educational experience at a top-tier institution so profoundly difficult and unsatisfying. Through her research and in conversations with her students, she discovered a troubling mismatch between the goals of the university and the needs of students. In "I Love Learning; I Hate School," Blum tells two intertwined but inseparable stories: the results of her research into how students learn contrasted with the way conventional education works, and the personal narrative of how she hers...
