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On the timeline of human history, we've been exploring outer space for just the short blip of a few decades. But long before we launched satellites out of our atmosphere, artists imagined escaping our humble planet to aspire toward the heavens. Military defence spending and science have driven our exploration, though artists have continued to be instrumental catalysts in our quest to conquer the unknown, because they imagine the future before it happens - as the saying goes, life imitates art. Today, artists are joining in the space race, imagining the mysterious vacuum beyond our atmosphere as the next museum or gallery space.

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The artist known as Nahum resists the idea that space is ours to conquer. He argues that artists must be included in the conversation about how we explore space or else humanity - namely rich countries with well-funded aerospace programs - risk making the same mistakes the colonising empires made in the past. Who owns the surface of the Moon or a comet and has the right to exploit minerals or precious metals there? Fundamental aspects of our culture such as land ownership and borders are called into question as soon as we leave Earth, says the artist. "If [artists] have different skills and ways of understanding the world, we can only enrich the conversation," he tells BBC Culture.

Artists are, for the first time since scientists overcame the incessant pull of gravity to break free from Earth's atmosphere, beginning to imagine outer space as a platform for art. What does art look like after Earth? On 29 June 2018, years in the making, Nahum's long-time dream came true when he launched a one-of-a-kind interactive sculpture into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). Back on Earth, the artist orchestrated performances that allowed the audience to interact with the sculpture on the ISS, bringing the audience here on Earth closer to space, says Nahum.
Is space a place for art?
Space should also be used as a cultural laboratory, says Nahum, which is why his new project is especially designed around interaction with space. By interacting with the sculpture on board the ISS, viewers on Earth will feel as if outer space is more accessible, he says. The work is about the interconnectedness of all things, on a cosmic scale but also here on Earth; the interpretation of the unknown as part of what we don't see but what is inevitably part of the totality of our existence. "Sometimes I think of space as a black canvas," he says.

Other artists like Trevor Paglen, Tavares Strachan and Makoto Azuma have also conceived projects created specifically for outer space. On 3 December 2018 Paglen's Orbital Reflector, made in collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art, and Strachan's Enoch, in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) were launched into space after multiple scrapped attempts. The two works hitched a ride aboard the same SpaceX rocket.

At first, Paglen's sculpture might look like a scientific satellite, but it is in fact purely aesthetic and aspirational. The project sparked protest among astronomers who claimed that the highly reflective object would obstruct scientific observation. Nahum refutes their claim, though the project is among the first that calls into question the issue of who has a legal right to space or who owns Earth's orbit. Why should scientists have unlimited reign? Why can't artists, or anyone else for that matter, have equal access to this new frontier?

Strachan's space sculpture looks more like what you might expect to see in a museum - a bust of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr, the first African American ever selected for the US space program. Lawrence died in a plane crash while still in training to become an astronaut and never realised his dream of going to space, until Strachan's sculpture put him there after the fact. The launch of Nahum, Paglen and Strachan's space sculptures marks a turning point for artworks in outer space, with three works by three separate artists orbiting around our planet at this very moment.

Paglen says that he designed the space sculpture to encourage those of us bound by gravity on Earth to look up with a renewed sense of wonder. "What I like about space exploration, is that most of the time it's about Earth," says Nahum. In other words, these projects, though they are extra-terrestrial in nature, are meant to bring us together. Nearly every satellite ever made points toward Earth. In fact, the first camera ever launched into space took a picture not of the stars, but of Earth. Migration and nationalism are broken down when we imagine a future where we will simply say, "I'm from Earth," says Nahum. Beyond science or even science fiction, art can provoke new ways of looking outward into the heavens and also inward to our collective consciousness.

Art in space: A 50-year history
Nahum, originally from Mexico City but now working in Berlin, has been exploring space as a subject matter and a destination in his art for nearly a decade. "As artists, we have the responsibility to engage in whatever our subject matter is," he says. For a 2015 exhibition in Mexico City, The Matters of Gravity, Nahum along with a small group of artists travelled to Russia to experience the closest thing to zero gravity that we have on Earth: parabolic flight. Conceived as part of astronaut training and for scientific research, parabolic flights allow for short 30-second near zero-gravity experiences, through a specific series of manoeuvres aboard a specially designed airplane. Nahum and the other artists were the first to undertake artistic experiments in a zero-gravity environment. The results were displayed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in the form of audio, video and sculpture.

In 2017 Azuma made space feel closer by recreating the art history standard of the still life with a bouquet of flowers hovering in the outer edges of the atmosphere. His works were necessarily impermanent, as if to suggest the fragile and temporary nature of everything alive and organic in the great cosmos, even the planet that we call home. So again, the artist's exploration in space comes back to our life on Earth.

Azuma's approach to reaching space was decidedly more DIY. Rather than launch his bouquets into space aboard a rocket, the arrangements were secured to gigantic balloons, reaching heights 100,000 feet above the Nevada desert. At -60C, the flowers began to break apart in the outer atmosphere before falling to Earth like colourful confetti. The photographic documentation is the only evidence of the adventure, capturing the grey area where Earth ends and space begins. The project called EXOBIOTANICA offers a poetic exploration of space, as if to say, we must dive into the unknown only if we bring beauty with us.

The history of art in space stretches back further than the last few years however. Two of the most famous aerospace missions, Voyager 1 and 2, identical spacecraft designed to reach the outer edges of our galaxy, carry with them two golden records full of art. After their launch in 1977, they continue to careen ever further into the unknown. With every second they become the farthest human-made objects from Earth ever. In December 2018, Voyager 2 left our Solar System, nearly 18 billion km (11 billion miles) from Earth, following Voyager 1, which left our Solar System in 2012. Truly one-of-a-kind, the Voyager project epitomises the striving spirit of humanity reaching outward with a message of beauty and human creativity. Each golden disk contains a message to a potential extra-terrestrial civilisation that might discover the spacecraft: images, music, and greetings in many languages from around the world.

Carl Sagan, charged with the impossible task of curating the content of the golden record to represent all human civilisation, called the disk "Earth's greatest hits; a gift across the cosmic ocean from one island of civilisation to another". In the four decades following, there has been no greater undertaking of art in space. Our exploration of the cosmos, whether artistic or brutal, is ultimately an exploration of our soul and the interconnectedness of the universe.
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On the timeline of human history, we've been exploring outer space for just the short blip of a few decades. But long before we launched satellites out of our atmosphere, artists imagined escaping our humble planet to aspire toward the heavens.

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Canvassing opinion: what art critics make of the hit play Art 

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Canvassing opinion: what art critics make of the hit play Art 

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A small play about big issues is how the producers like to portray Art, a sensation when it opened in the West End 20 years ago and now packing 'em in again in a revival at the Old Vic in London. The play is a three-hander by French writer Yasmina Reza. It opened in Paris in 1994 and, in a translation by Christopher Hampton, swept the Anglo-Saxon world two years later, helped by starry casts - the first, unveiled in London in October 1996, was Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Ken Stott. That production won the Olivier award for best comedy in 1997. "But I thought I had written a tragedy," said Reza when she picked up the prize.
Art review - Rufus Sewell shines in finely shaded character study
The setup is simple. Serge, who fancies himself as an art collector, has bought a painting - "a white canvas with fine diagonal white streaks" - by a fashionable artist called Antrios for €100,000. His old friend Marc thinks it's "shit", and the ensuing argument about its merits threatens their relationship. Their mutual friend Yvan, a committed fence-sitter, is caught in the crossfire.

It is a clever, calculating piece of theatre, but does it really have anything to say about modern art? We set up our own three-hander to find out - Guardian art critics Adrian Searle and Skye Sherwin, and me in the middle, playing the part of the hapless Yvan, eager to get answers to big questions: what is art; how do you judge artistic value; should we venerate the artist; and what the hell is this play really about?

"I hadn't seen it before," says Searle. "I'd been very much put off by the rotating casts, and had sort of assumed it was about taking the piss out of art. The posters had put me off, too - pictures of sweaty men throwing buckets of coloured paint at each other, which doesn't happen in the play. So I went in feeling ill disposed towards it, and when Serge brings out his white canvas the waves of laughter from the audience immediately antagonised me, but I think it's much more complex than that, and not entirely in a bad way."

It is not just an idle assassination of modern art, whatever some members of the audience might think. But Searle doubts whether the play wants seriously to engage with the nature of art. "The artwork is a portmanteau, the McGuffin, and they could just as easily be talking about cars," he says. "It's really about male friendship."

Searle also argues that Tony Hancock made many of the same points about the art world - and more forcefully - in his 1961 satirical film The Rebel, in which Hancock chucks in his life as a clerk in London to become an existentially inclined artist in Paris (despite a singular lack of artistic talent). "It's a favourite film of artists," says Searle. "The art world is best debunked by artists. When you get literary types writing about art, they do it badly."

If Searle takes the part of the Marc character - there is less to this than meets the eye - Sherwin tends towards the role of Serge, who feels he has found truth through his expensive purchase. "I enjoyed it immensely," she says. "One of the things I liked was the way Marc deflates the rhetoric used in the art world, as when he turns round to Serge and says, 'Why are you saying the Artist?'. She [Reza] uses the idea of the 'system' around art really cleverly."

It is Yvan, trying to defend Serge's purchase to Marc, who first uses this key word: "It's a work of art, there's a system behind it ... It's the completion of a journey ... It wasn't painted by accident, it's a work of art which stakes its claim as part of a trajectory." Marc mocks Ivan for "parroting Serge's nonsense".

When do we take an artist seriously and why? Is it because they have a "system"? Is that what makes them an "artist"? "If we're living in a world where anything can be an artwork," says Sherwin, "it's not necessarily to do with the materiality or the craft. It can be an idea. So the figure of the artist becomes much more important in terms of bestowing value. The artist has to have some unique vision for the whatever-it-is to be special."

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Jeff Koons's sculpture Balloon Flower attracts attention in St James's Park, London, 2008. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

"I agree with Duchamp that the artist's greatest invention is the artist," adds Searle. "A kind of critical mass builds up behind a successful artist. They get written about by critics and academics; people start writing theses about them; the view becomes fixed. But that can start to break down after a bit. Often when artists die, there is a dip for a while - or that can be permanent. There are figures who are very fashionable in their lifetime who then fall out of favour."

Some artists are also lucky, or adept at catching a wave. "They are remembered not because the work was great, but because of its sociological context," says Searle. "The diamond skull of Damien Hirst is precisely that, and I think Jeff Koons is a lot of that. What has he [Koons] added to Andy Warhol? Not very much."

How, then, does one judge the value of art? I like the question Marc puts to Yvan about the Antrios: "You're getting married tomorrow, and you get this painting as a wedding present. Does it make you happy?" Yvan admits it would not make him happy. But Searle rejects happiness as a criterion for judging art. "I hate it when people say 'What art do you love most?' I don't love art."

He tells me not to worry so much, and dismisses any simple terminology I try to apply to art. "'Importance' is a posteriori; 'beauty' is not a word I use very often; I can only say the word 'masterpiece' in a Darth Vader-type voice; and I'm not looking for 'happiness'." So what are you looking for? "I don't know," he says. "I don't know what I'm looking for, but I find things."

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For the Love of God, Damien Hirst's 2007 life-size cast of a human skull in platinum and diamonds. Photograph: Reuters/HO

"Going to an exhibition with a set of criteria to tick off a list would be a huge mistake," says Sherwin. "The point of art is freedom, and if you're a critic going in with a preconceived list you're doing a huge disservice to your subject." The market is always seeking to put a value on art; critics couldn't give a damn. "I try to avoid even reading about the market," says Searle.

Can you ever, like Marc, say that something is "shit", or is such language hopelessly subjective? "There is shit," says Searle, "but questions of whether this is good or bad are the least interesting part of what we do." "'Is it good, is it bad?' shuts down conversations," adds Sherwin. "As a critic you want to open up conversations by thinking through the work. There are no essential questions, just as there are no essential forms."

Sherwin reckons writers are too keen to look for meaning in art. She cites Margaret Atwood's and Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved as novels in which the art is intensely literary - all about narrative, symbols, content. "The idea that it could be just process, material or about the circulation of images, the massive completely open box that art actually is, doesn't come in to it," she says. "Writers always think of art in literary terms, as something that can be unpacked."

If writers want art to mean something, collectors want art to celebrate their own success, good taste, modernity. Serge is seeking to validate himself through art. "It's all to do with consumerism," says Searle, "not just judging art but judging each other through the decisions they make. The play was written in a period of boom for the French bourgeoisie. It is art as luxury commodity."

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All white ... A 2015 Robert Ryman exhibition. Photograph: Bill Jacobson. Courtesy of the Greenwich Collection, Ltd/Dia Art Foundation, New York

He is dismissive of the painting at the centre of the play. "It is exactly the kind of painting that would be used as a prop in a furniture catalogue and made by the yard. And there's nothing very outre about a white painting. Robert Ryman has made his entire career out of making white paintings." Indeed, there is an honourable tradition of all-white paintings: Kazimir Malevich unveiled his painting White on White as long ago as 1918. Far from being a modernist statement, the Antrios is old hat.

Near the end of the play the painting is defaced by Marc, with Serge's complicity. Sherwin says she sensed from the start this would be the inevitable denouement. "It's a blank canvas with three men arguing over it," she says. "What other possible way could it go?" "Somebody's got to get their cock out and piss on it," adds Searle. Now that would be artistically innovative.

How did Searle feel when the painting was defaced? "I thought, 'Oh, this reminds me of a Michael Krebber painting'," he says. Krebber is a German conceptualist whose paintings tend to be characterised by enigmatic splodges on white backgrounds. It emerges that Searle once, urged on by the artists, defaced an artwork by Jake and Dinos Chapman on a TV programme. Acts of destruction, it seems, can be acts of creation. It may be that Marc's desecration of Serge's beloved Antrios - carried out in the name of classicism, essentialism and representative art - is a more modern gesture than the painting itself.

is at the Old Vic, London SE1, until 18 February. oldvictheatre.com.
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Canvassing opinion: what art critics make of the hit play Art

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A small play about big issues is how the producers like to portray Art, a sensation when it opened in the West End 20 years ago and now packing 'em in again in a revival at the Old Vic in London. The play is a three-hander by French writer Yasmina Reza.

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How do you stage an international art show with work from 100 different artists? If you're Shea Hembrey, you invent all of the artists and artwork yourself -- from large-scale outdoor installations to tiny paintings drawn with a single-haired brush. Watch this funny, mind-bending talk to see the explosion of creativity and diversity of skills a single artist is capable of.

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How do you stage an international art show with work from 100 different artists? If you're Shea Hembrey, you invent all of the artists and artwork yourself -- from large-scale outdoor installations to tiny paintings drawn with a single-haired brush.

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If machines want to make art, will humans understand it? 

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If machines want to make art, will humans understand it? 

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Assuming that the emergence of consciousness in artificial minds is possible, those minds will feel the urge to create art.

But will we be able to understand it? To answer this question, we need to consider two subquestions: when does the machine become an author of an artwork? And how can we form an understanding of the art that it makes?

Empathy, we argue, is the force behind our capacity to understand works of art. Think of what happens when you are confronted with an artwork. We maintain that, to understand the piece, you use your own conscious experience to ask what could possibly motivate you to make such an artwork yourself - and then you use that first-person perspective to try to come to a plausible explanation that allows you to relate to the artwork. Your interpretation of the work will be personal and could differ significantly from the artist's own reasons, but if we share sufficient experiences and cultural references, it might be a plausible one, even for the artist. This is why we can relate so differently to a work of art after learning that it is a forgery or imitation: the artist's intent to deceive or imitate is very different from the attempt to express something original. Gathering contextual information before jumping to conclusions about other people's actions - in art, as in life - can enable us to relate better to their intentions.

But the artist and you share something far more important than cultural references: you share a similar kind of body and, with it, a similar kind of embodied perspective. Our subjective human experience stems, among many other things, from being born and slowly educated within a society of fellow humans, from fighting the inevitability of our own death, from cherishing memories, from the lonely curiosity of our own mind, from the omnipresence of the needs and quirks of our biological body, and from the way it dictates the space- and time-scales we can grasp. All conscious machines will have embodied experiences of their own, but in bodies that will be entirely alien to us.

We are able to empathise with nonhuman characters or intelligent machines in human-made fiction because they have been conceived by other human beings from the only subjective perspective accessible to us: 'What would it be like for a human to behave as x?' In order to understand machinic art as such - and assuming that we stand a chance of even recognising it in the first place - we would need a way to conceive a first-person experience of what it is like to be that machine. That is something we cannot do even for beings that are much closer to us. It might very well happen that we understand some actions or artifacts created by machines of their own volition as art, but in doing so we will inevitably anthropomorphise the machine's intentions. Art made by a machine can be meaningfully interpreted in a way that is plausible only from the perspective of that machine, and any coherent anthropomorphised interpretation will be implausibly alien from the machine perspective. As such, it will be a misinterpretation of the artwork.

But what if we grant the machine privileged access to our ways of reasoning, to the peculiarities of our perception apparatus, to endless examples of human culture? Wouldn't that enable the machine to make art that a human could understand? Our answer is yes, but this would also make the artworks human - not authentically machinic. All examples so far of 'art made by machines' are actually just straightforward examples of human art made with computers, with the artists being the computer programmers. It might seem like a strange claim: how can the programmers be the authors of the artwork if, most of the time, they can't control - or even anticipate - the actual materialisations of the artwork? It turns out that this is a long-standing artistic practice.

Suppose that your local orchestra is playing Beethoven's Symphony No 7 (1812). Even though Beethoven will not be directly responsible for any of the sounds produced there, you would still say that you are listening to Beethoven. Your experience might depend considerably on the interpretation of the performers, the acoustics of the room, the behaviour of fellow audience members or your state of mind. Those and other aspects are the result of choices made by specific individuals or of accidents happening to them. But the author of the music? Ludwig van Beethoven. Let's say that, as a somewhat odd choice for the programme, John Cage's Imaginary Landscape No 4 (March No 2) (1951) is also played, with 24 performers controlling 12 radios according to a musical score. In this case, the responsibility for the sounds being heard should be attributed to unsuspecting radio hosts, or even to electromagnetic fields. Yet, the shaping of sounds over time - the composition - should be credited to Cage. Each performance of this piece will vary immensely in its sonic materialisation, but it will always be a performance of Imaginary Landscape No 4.

Why should we change these principles when artists use computers if, in these respects at least, computer art does not bring anything new to the table? The (human) artists might not be in direct control of the final materialisations, or even be able to predict them but, despite that, they are the authors of the work. Various materialisations of the same idea - in this case formalised as an algorithm - are instantiations of the same work manifesting different contextual conditions. In fact, a common use of computation in the arts is the production of variations of a process, and artists make extensive use of systems that are sensitive to initial conditions, external inputs or pseudo-randomness to deliberately avoid repetition of outputs. Having a computer executing a procedure to build an artwork, even if using pseudo-random processes or machine-learning algorithms, is no different than throwing dice to arrange a piece of music, or to pursuing innumerable variations of the same formula. After all, the idea of machines that make art has an artistic tradition that long predates the current trend of artworks made by artificial intelligence.

Machinic art is a term that we believe should be reserved for art made by an artificial mind's own volition, not for that based on (or directed towards) an anthropocentric view of art. From a human point of view, machinic artworks will still be procedural, algorithmic and computational. They will be generative, because they will be autonomous from a human artist. And they might be interactive, with humans or other systems. But they will not be the result of a human deferring decisions to a machine, because the first of those - the decision to make art - needs to be the result of a machine's volition, intentions and decisions. Only then will we no longer have human art made with computers, but proper machinic art.

The problem is not whether machines will or will not develop a sense of self that leads to an eagerness to create art. The problem is that if - or when - they do, they will have such a different Umwelt that we will be completely unable to relate to it from our own subjective, embodied perspective. Machinic art will always lie beyond our ability to understand it because the boundaries of our comprehension - in art, as in life - are those of the human experience.

Rui Penha & Miguel Carvalhais

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

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If you're active on social media, you're probably doing it from time to time. The temptation to raise one's social status via public display of moral conscience is almost irresistible, and online platforms make it so easy. But moral grandstanding is not a harmless pastime. It's insidious and corrosive, eating away at the foundations of public discourse and deepening the divisions between us. But how to stop it?

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Moral grandstanding is not a harmless pastime. It's insidious and corrosive, eating away at the foundations of public discourse and deepening the divisions between us. But how to stop it?

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This podcast is about the many ideas in the world of philosophy, psychology, and spirituality that are popularized by our society and culture through books, movies, TV shows, and the public figures all around us. Insightful ideas are everywhere and I'll be taking a deeper dive into those ideas presented to us in cultural and society.

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The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.

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Peter Adamson, Professor of Philosophy at the LMU in Munich and at King\'s College London, takes listeners through the history of philosophy, \"without any gaps.\" The series looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition.

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History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

Peter Adamson, Professor of Philosophy at the LMU in Munich and at King's College London, takes listeners through the history of philosophy, "without any gaps." The series looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition. www.historyofphilosophy.net. NOTE: iTunes shows only the most recent 300 episodes; subscribe on iTunes or go to a different platform for the whole series.

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Peter Adamson, Professor of Philosophy at the LMU in Munich and at King's College London, takes listeners through the history of philosophy, "without any gaps." The series looks at the ideas, lives and historical context of the major philosophers as well as the lesser-known figures of the tradition. www.historyofphilosophy.net.

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Philosophy for our timesThe world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas

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Philosophy for our timesThe world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas

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Is it possible for certain experiences to reveal specific truths to the experiencer? On this week’s episode we’re discussing ephipanies, experience and ethics.

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Philosophy for our times | IAI Podcast " IAI TV

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Reaching for Truth | David Aaronovitch, Asa Wikforss, Santiago Zabala

Is it possible to tell the truth? Or is it time to accept that lying has a central role in all social discourse?

On today's episode The Times journalist David Aaronovitch, author of Freedom In the Age of Alternative Facts Santiago Zabala, and philosophy of the mind specialist Åsa Wikforss lock horns over whether telling the truth still matters at all.

David Aaronovitch, Åsa Wikforss, Santiago Zabala

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Philosophy for our Times is a weekly podcast bringing you the world's leading philosophers on today's biggest ideas, produced by the Institute of Art and Ideas.

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TEDxUIUC - Daniel Simons - Counter-Intuition

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TEDxUIUC - Daniel Simons - Counter-Intuition

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Daniel Simons is the head of Visual Cognition Lab at the University of Illinois. His recent research explores the cognitive underpinnings of our experience of a stable and continuous visual world. For example, his studies reveal the surprising extent of inattentional blindness — the failure to notice unusual and salient events when attention is otherwise engaged and when the events are unexpected.

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TEDxUIUC - Daniel Simons - Counter-Intuition

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We have over 100 free tutorials on different aspects of thinking skills. They are organized into modules listed below. Our tutorials are used by schools and universities around the world

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We have over 100 free tutorials on different aspects of thinking skills. They are organized into modules listed below. Our tutorials are used by schools and universities around the world. More info

Maintained by Joe Lau, Philosophy Department, University of Hong Kong.

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We have over 100 free tutorials on different aspects of thinking skills. They are organized into modules listed below. Our tutorials are used by schools and universities around the world. More info Maintained by Joe Lau, Philosophy Department, University of Hong Kong.

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What Is Intuition, And How Do We Use It?

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What Is Intuition, And How Do We Use It?

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We don't have to reject scientific logic in order to benefit from instinct.

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Key points

Intuition is a process that gives us the ability to know something directly without analytic reasoning.

Many people are uncomfortable with the idea of using our instincts as a guidance tool.

We don't have to reject scientific logic in order to benefit from instinct.

Have you ever had a moment where you felt as though something wasn't right? Perhaps stepping into a parking lot late at night, or feeling negative around someone without knowing why? And if you've experienced this before, have you shrugged it off, dismissing it as illogical nonsense?

As a culture, we have learned to believe that rationality is what should prevail when making decisions about anything from crucial business mergers to what to eat for lunch. But what of that "inner voice," that gut feeling, that little something instinctual from within that tells us how we feel beneath those layers of logic?

This is how I define instinct and intuition:

* Instinct is our innate inclination toward a particular behavior (as opposed to a learned response).
* A gut feeling-or a hunch-is a sensation that appears quickly in consciousness (noticeable enough to be acted on if one chooses to) without us being fully aware of the underlying reasons for its occurrence.
* Intuition is a process that gives us the ability to know something directly without analytic reasoning, bridging the gap between the conscious and nonconscious parts of our mind, and also between instinct and reason.

In essence, we need both instinct and reason to make the best possible decisions for ourselves, our businesses, and our families. Unfortunately, many of us-even when we experience success using this lesser-acknowledged part of us-are uncomfortable with the idea of using our instincts as a guidance tool. We are embarrassed to say that we follow hunches, we mistrust the sometimes-cryptic messages that our instincts send to us, and consequently we diminish our capacity to leverage the power of our own instincts when we need them most. Our discomfort with the idea of relying on our instincts is based on millennia of cultural prejudice.

Think of the common phrase, ''We are not like animals.'' It tells us that the assumed difference between humans and animals is humans' ability to reason with our instinctual impulses, and the unspoken message is that reason is a higher and better quality to possess. The thing is, not only are we like animals, we are animals. However, we are animals with the distinct advantage of having both instinct and reason at our disposal. So we don't actually have to reject either morality or instinct; rather, we have the capacity to honor and call upon both.

We don't have to reject scientific logic in order to benefit from instinct. We can honor and call upon all of these tools, and we can seek balance.

How do we include intuition into our everyday life? Since we've spent so long ignoring or dismissing this aspect of the self, how do we now successfully re-integrate it into our practical decisions? The answer is simple: dialogue it.

The conscious is an expert at logic and will use it relentlessly. Conversely, the unconscious mind searches through the past, present, and future and connects with hunches and feelings in a nonlinear way. Its process is cryptic to the logical mind, as it defies the conventional laws of time and space. For example:

You: What should I wear today?
Your Unconscious: Red.
You: Red what?
Your Unconscious: I don't know, just something red.
You: Why?
Your Unconscious: Feels good.
You: But I have an interview today; isn't red too aggressive?
Your Unconscious: You're missing the point.
You: What's the point?
Your Unconscious: You like red. It makes you feel happy.
You: What has happiness got to do with this?
Your Unconscious: Everything.
You: How?
Your Unconscious: You'll see; just trust me on this.

And perhaps in doing this, because you simply feel good, you exude more confidence at your interview, and you receive the job based on this. Perhaps your interviewer loves red, and enjoys that you were bold enough to not wear black. Perhaps the color is what makes you stand out from so many others. Who knows? The point is, you listened to your instincts and made your decision, including intuition and benefitting from it, without worrying about the logical reasons why.

But let's not stop there. Here are three ways to listen to that internal voice and allow its guidance into your everyday life:

1 - Keep a Journal. Writing your thoughts and feelings down on paper-even if you think you have little to say-helps the nonconscious mind open up. You may find you're writing words and phrases that don't make sense to you, or stir emotional responses rather than intellectual responses. When this happens...

2 - Turn Off Your Inner Critic. Oftentimes we rationalize away those voices within. This time, listen without judgment. Allow the inner dialogues to happen without fear or ridicule.

3 - Find a Solitary Place. A place where you can allow emotions to flow freely is an imperative part of finding and retaining the building blocks of intuition. Here you may also want to create an emotional connection to an object, a color, a piece of music or literature-anything that will allow feelings to stir that are solely from within.

These three exercises will aid you in creating a new, deeper relationship with the self, help clarify that inner voice, and allow you to bring your true instinctual awareness back into your rational everyday life.

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What Is Intuition, And How Do We Use It?

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We don't have to reject scientific logic in order to benefit from instinct.

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1. The Nature of Intuitions

Consider the claim that a fully rational person does not believe both p and not- p. Very likely, as you considered it, that claim seemed true to you. Something similar probably happens when you consider the following propositions:

[I2] Torturing a sentient being for fun is wrong.

[I3] It is impossible for a square to have five sides.

[I4] A person would survive having their brain transplanted into a new body.

The focus of this entry is intuitions-mental states or events in which a proposition seems true in the manner of these propositions.

It appears clear that ordinary usage includes more in the extension of the term "intuition" than such states, as it would allow that a parent might have an intuition that their child is innocent of some crime or an archaeologist might have an intuition that an ancient site of some interest was in a certain area. Some psychological research seems similarly permissive. Consider recent research on "intuitions" in naturalistic decision making (Klein 1998). Such research has shown that agents with sufficient experience in a given domain (e.g., neonatal nursing, fire-fighting, or chess) arrive at judgments and make decisions on the basis of a cognitive process other than conscious considerations of various options and the weighing of evidence and utilities. Such expert "intuitions" that some infant suffers from sepsis, that a fire will take a certain course, or that a certain chess move is a good one, appear immediately in consciousness.

Less important than linguistic usage in various domains is whether our theorizing captures the relevant psychological and epistemological joints to be found in the world. The focus of the present entry is the role of intuitions in distinctively philosophical (and other "armchair") inquiry. It is plausible (and will be assumed here, but see Nado 2014 for doubts) that the intuitions of interest in philosophy constitute a single epistemic and psychological kind exemplified by [I1]-[I4] and by many additional examples which appear in §2.2 and §2.3 below, but not the sort noted in the previous paragraph.

1.1 Intuitions as Beliefs

Some philosophers equate intuitions with beliefs or with some kind of belief. For example, David Lewis writes,

Our "intuitions" are simply opinions; our philosophical theories are the same. Some are commonsensical, some are sophisticated; some are particular, some general; some are more firmly held, some less. But they are all opinions.... (1983: x)

Such remarks suggest the following account:

Why adopt [A1]? Some may be moved to do so on grounds of ontological parsimony. If intuitions are beliefs, we need accept no new kind psychological state. Furthermore, there is clearly a tight link between intuitions and beliefs in that one typically believes the contents of one's intuitions.

However, that belief that p is neither necessary nor sufficient for intuition that p is suggested by conflicts between a person's beliefs and their intuitions. One plausible characterization of a paradox holds that it is a set of a propositions, each of which is intuitive, but not all of which could be true. If one has reasoned one's way to a satisfactory resolution of a paradox and identified the false proposition, one often still has the intuition that the rejected proposition is true. Hence, supposing that in such a case one's beliefs are not contradictory, one can have an intuition that p while one does not believe p and one can have a belief that p without having an intuition that p. Indeed, even before such reasoning, one might suspend belief about the contradictory set while each remained intuitive. More generally, it seems that one may believe something-that some theory is true, that some mathematical or logical proposition is a theorem, that one is hungry, or that a person is now speaking-without having any intuition that p and so belief that p is not sufficient for intuition that p.

Such cases also illustrate an important feature of intuitions-their relative causal independence from explicit belief. An analogy with perception is helpful. One might, when viewing the Müller-Lyer illusion, experience one line as longer than the other even though one, having repeatedly measured the lines, firmly believes them to be of equal length. Just such an analogy is invoked when, for example, it is suggested that some moral intuitions may be

ineliminable moral illusion[s], similar to certain optical illusions which do not lose their intuitive appeal even when theory tells us better. (Kagan 1989: 15)

A more discriminating version of this sort of account holds that intuitions are beliefs with a suitable etiology. One such account, favored by many psychologists and philosophers with naturalistic inclinations, treats intuitions as beliefs without a conscious or introspectively accessible inferential etiology (Gopnik and Schwitzgebel 1998; Devitt 2006: 491; Kornblith 1998) as in

On [A2], beliefs with an inferential origin of which a person is conscious are not intuitions. However, [A2] still mistakenly includes non-inferential perceptual beliefs, memory beliefs, and introspective beliefs as intuitions. Moreover [A2], like [A1], runs afoul of the fact that one can have intuitions the contents of which one does not believe. The former problem might be circumvented by a content restriction on the sort of non-inferential belief at issue or further etiological restrictions. The latter problem does not appear so easily circumvented.

A yet more discriminating etiological amendment to the belief analysis (Ludwig 2007: 135) is

[A3] S has the intuition thatp if and only if S forms the occurrent belief thatp solely on the basis of competence with the concepts involved inp.

This analysis is not open to many of the objections to [A1] and [A2]. It does not count an introspective, memory, or perceptual belief as an intuition. However, on the assumption that the concepts in question are not contradictory, it may imply (depending on what is required for competence with a concept) that intuitions are infallible. Even if intuitions are infallible, if S has mistakenly rejected one of the propositions making up a paradox, p, it seems she might, contrary to [A3], still have the intuition that p. Finally, [A3] appears to make the direct introspective judgment that one has an intuition difficult to justify, as one lacks direct introspective access to the non-conscious causes of one's beliefs.

1.2 Intuitions as Dispositions to Believe

Peter van Inwagen claims that intuitions might be

in some cases, the tendencies that make certain beliefs attractive to us, that 'move' us in the direction of accepting certain propositions without taking us all the way to acceptance. (1997: 309)

This suggests something like the following:

If a disposition to believe is a propositional attitude, such an account would allow that intuitions are propositional attitudes and, unlike belief analyses, allow that one may have an intuition without belief. However, [A4] appears too liberal in placing no constraints on the nature or source of the disposition in question. One might be disposed to believe that a dog is nearby if one turns one's head and looks, disposed to believe one is in pain if one reflects upon it, or even disposed to believe a complex theorem if one were to reason appropriately. None of these cases of being disposed to believe is, taken alone, sufficient for an intuition. Additionally, [A4] has, on some views of dispositions, the implication that a person's believing p cannot be explained by their having an intuition that p.

Such concerns about [A4] may be met with a restriction on the ground of the disposition. A more plausible account (Sosa 1998) is:

However, many claim that the primary notion of intuition is one on which S has an intuition that p only when S is occurrently in the relevant conscious psychological state. If so, any purely dispositionalist account fails to capture the occurrent conscious character of intuitions in much the way dispositional analyses of other conscious states fail. It is quite possible to have, at a time, a large number of dispositions to believe while failing to host, at that time, a single intuition. For example, a person might have an intuition that the naïve comprehension axiom is true when asked to consider it, but not have such an intuition while driving home in heavy traffic. And yet it may be true throughout that she is disposed to believe the proposition merely upon understanding it (Bealer 1998: 209). As well, one may now have direct introspective knowledge that one has an intuition that p while one has no such direct introspective knowledge regarding one's dispositions, especially one's non-activated dispositions, to believe on the basis of mere understanding. (For additional discussion of dispositionalist analyses see Pust 2000, Erlenbaugh and Molyneux 2009, and Koksvik 2011.)

1.3 Intuitions as Sui Generis States

A final family of accounts holds that an intuition is a sui generis occurrent propositional attitude, variously characterized as one in which a proposition occurrently seems true (Bealer 1998, 2002; Pust 2000; Huemer 2001, 2005), in which a proposition is presented to the subject as true (Chudnoff 2011a; Bengson 2015), or which pushes the subject to believe a proposition (Koksvik 2011). Such views are united in denying that belief that p is necessary or sufficient for an intuition that p and in rejecting dispositional analyses of intuition. The close connection between intuition that p and disposition to believe p is explained by claiming that intuitions typically serve as the ground of the disposition to believe p.

According to proponents of accounts of this sort, when one has an intuition that p, one does not merely represent or believe or consider p. Rather, p is the content of a distinctive occurrent conscious non-belief propositional attitude. Bealer, for example, claims that

When you have an intuition that A, it seems to you that A. Here 'seems' is understood, not in its use as a cautionary or "hedging" term, but in its use as a term for a genuine kind of conscious episode. For example, when you first consider one of de Morgan's laws, often it neither seems true nor seems false; after a moment's reflection, however, something happens: it now just seems true. (Bealer 1998: 207)

Some philosophers who endorse such views also hold that perceptual (and other) experiences have propositional contents and seek to provide an account of the distinctive features of intuition, perception and other seemings or experiences.

According to the "seemings" version of such a view, an indiscriminate account of intuition would be the following:

While this account seems fitting for much psychological work on the topic of intuitions, it is insufficiently discriminating. If memorial or introspective seemings with propositional content exist, they are not plausibly identified with intuitions of the sort with which this entry began. Moreover, when conjoined with the view that perceptual experience consists of a suitable seeming that p, this view implies that there are perceptual intuitions. Clarity is served by stipulating that such states are not intuitions even if they are all species of some common genus.

A more discriminating account is the following:

Some, however, have claimed that there is an important distinction between the intuitions of primary interest in philosophical inquiry and other states which involve intellectual seemings that p. Bealer, for example, claims that philosophical inquiry typically relies upon " a priori intuitions" which must be distinguished from the "physical intuitions" elicited by scientific thought experiments in that the latter do not present themselves as necessary while the former do (1998: 165). Those who wish to distinguish the states involved in scientific thought experiments from those typically involved in philosophical inquiry may either endorse [A7] and reject the suggestion that such physical intuitions involve the same intellectual seeming or impose further conditions on those intuitions of distinctive philosophical relevance as in the following accounts:

[A8] S has therational intuition that p if and only if it intellectually seems toS that necessarily p.

[A9] S has therational intuition that p if and only if either [A] (1) it intellectually seems toS that p and (2) if S were to consider whetherp is necessarily true, it would intellectually seem toS that necessarily p, or [B] it intellectually seems toS that necessarilyp.

[A8] renders all rational intuitions overtly modal in content and, on a view of concept possession according to which possessing the concept c at t requires the ability to deploy c in thought at t, requires a level of sophistication not obviously had by the philosophical innocent who is, nonetheless, presumably capable of having a rational intuition (Pust 2000: 38; Ludwig 2007: 136). Moreover, possibility intuitions are also essential to philosophical practice and if the proponent of [A8] wishes to include possibility claims as the contents of intuitions (rather than treating them as inferentially justified by a rational intuition and the principle that what is necessarily possible is possible), then they must treat such intuitions as possessed of an iterated modal propositional content.

[A9] (see Pust 2000: 46) requires a single occurrent conscious psychological state in rational intuition and distinguishes that state from physical intuitions while allowing that a naïve agent might have a rational intuition even though not currently deploying the concept of metaphysical necessity. It also does not require that a possibility intuition involve an occurrent iterated modal content. However, because it leaves the distinction between a rational and physical (or other) intuitions sometimes dependent on dispositional rather than occurrent factors, [A9] may raise worries about our ability to discern directly that we harbor a rational intuition.

Some philosophers maintain that such sui generis propositional attitudes do not exist or are not part of their own mental life. For example, Williamson writes,

For myself, I am aware of no intellectual seeming beyond my conscious inclination to believe the Gettier proposition... . These paradigms provide no evidence of intellectual seemings, if the phrase is supposed to mean anything more than intuitions in Lewis's or van Inwagen's sense. (2007: 217)

Proponents of such accounts must be concerned to explain the error of their opponents and, ideally, to enable them to locate the states in themselves. (See Chudnoff 2011a and Koksvik 2011 for attempts to help such skeptics by describing carefully that which they should seek.)

Williamson (2007: 218-219) argues against analyses of the sort now under consideration and in favor of a more permissive belief or dispositional analysis by noting that a wide variety of propositions may be properly called "counterintuitive" and that this class does not consist merely of the negations of propositions which are, according to more restrictive accounts of intuition, the contents of intuitions. For example, Williamson points out that philosophical views which entail that there are no mountains are often thought, in virtue of such entailments, to be highly counterintuitive. The proposition that there are mountains is, however, not the content of an intuition on any of the accounts in this family.

One possible rejoinder to Williamson's argument would be to characterize the counterintuitive claim as the claim that no suitable arrangement of matter is metaphysically sufficient for the presence of a mountain (i.e., that mountains are impossible) and there is no reason why the negation of this proposition cannot be, on more restrictive accounts of intuition, the content of an intuition. Another possible rejoinder would point out that we have extremely good grounds for believing that there are mountains and to suggest that the complaint that p is counterintuitive is merely the claim that not- p is extremely well-justified.

1.4 Propositions, Properties, and Faculties

It has thus far been assumed that intuitions always take propositions as their objects. Some might disagree, holding that we have de re or objectual intuitions of properties or states of affairs. Indeed, it might be held that our de re grasp of various properties is what grounds or justifies our assent to propositions involving them. Pursuit of this issue would require a detailed account of propositions and properties and their relations. It would also require detailed accounts of the de dicto and de re attitudes. None of these explorations can be undertaken here. It should be noted, however, that such a conception of our de re grasp of properties lurks under the surface of many rationalist accounts whether framed in terms of concepts or properties (Bealer 1998; BonJour 1998) and is even more explicit in the claim that we have knowledge by acquaintance of universals (Russell 1912).

In addition, the precise conception of propositional contents may have to be varied with the account of intuition. For example, those who appeal to propositions which seem true or which one is inclined to believe would presumably hold that what we are justified in believing via rational intuition is not a pure Russellian proposition but rather either a Fregean proposition or a Russellian proposition under something like a mode of presentation.

Finally, the focus above has been on intuitions as psychological states or events. Sometimes the issues surrounding intuitions are framed in terms of whether there is a distinct faculty of intuition. Of course, to the extent that intuitions are causally explicable, there is some process which produces them and some may wish to call that process a "faculty." If that is all that is meant by the term, then no harm is done. Still, while such talk may have its place (especially in various cognitive scientific attempts to explain the occurrence of intuitions), taking it to mean more than just suggested seems to prejudice the issue of how much intuitive justification is like the justification produced by empirical faculties like vision and to invite dismissive caricatures of the view that intuitions serve to justify beliefs.

2. The Epistemological Role of Intuitions

2.1 Philosophical and Non-Philosophical Uses of Intuitions

As noted in §1, the focus of the present entry is the role of intuitions in philosophy. It is as accounts of such intuitions that the accounts above were evaluated. Hence, in what follows, it will be assumed that the appropriate account of the states at issue is some relatively restrictive version of the sui generis state account ( §1.3). Such an assumption is not, however, essential to much of what follows.

In light of the discussion of §1, some of the states which are included in more expansive accounts of intuition might be better taken to be perceptual seemings or experiences of the sort endorsed by those who claim we have perceptual seemings or experiences with complex propositional content. In this connection, it is worth considering the views of various theorists who hold that perceptual experience can basically represent, and present to a subject, propositions featuring sophisticated properties well beyond phenomenological ones (Siegel 2010). On this kind of view, those with suitable training might have a perceptual experience that a child is ill or that a fire will soon engulf a room in the way that a non-expert has a perceptual experience that they are presented with something red. The epistemology of such propositional perceptual states (if they exist) must be addressed elsewhere.

2.2 The Method of Cases

Consider the following paradigmatic examples of contemporary philosophical reasoning in which a philosophical theory is taken to be prima facie undermined by contradicting an intuition regarding a particular hypothetical case:

The Gettier Case (Gettier 1963):

Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. Smith believes, on the basis of strong evidence, that Jones will get the job and also that Jones has ten coins in his pocket. He infers from this that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. However, imagine that, unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket.

Gettier Intuition: Smith does not know that the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.

Justified True Belief Theory of Knowledge: S knows that p IFF S has a justified true belief thatp.

The Transplant Case (Thomson 1976):

Suppose that you are a transplant surgeon and that you now have five patients, each in need of a different organ in order to prevent imminent and certain death. You also have a suitable donor in your hospital for a routine check-up. If you were to involuntarily (and secretly) take her organs and transplant them into the needy five, you are certain to bring about her death but also to prevent the death of the five.

Transplant Intuition: It is not morally permissible to take the organs of the one in order to save the five.

Act Utilitarian Theory of Morality: ActionA is morally right IFF A maximizes well-being.

The Chinese Nation Case (Block 1978)

Suppose that the citizens of China are organized so as to be functionally equivalent to a human brain and to interact with a human-like body in a manner functionally equivalent to that in which the brain interacts with the human body.

Chinese Nation Intuition: The nation of China, so organized, would lack qualia (i.e., there would be nothing it would be like to be the nation of China).

Functionalist Theory of Mind: S has mental stateM IFF S contains a realization of functional stateF.

The Flagpole Case (Bromberger 1966)

Suppose that a flagpole is standing on level ground in bright sunshine. From a specification of the length of the flagpole's shadow and the height of the sun in the sky one can, given the relevant laws of optics, deduce the height of the flagpole.

Flagpole Intuition: The height of the flagpole is not explained by the length of its shadow.

Deductive-Nomological Theory of Explanation: E is an explanation of F IFF E is a set of truths which deductively impliesF and the deduction relies essentially on a nomic generalization.

Such examples could easily be multiplied to include teletransportation and fission cases in the literature on personal identity, preemption and epiphenomena cases in the literature on causation and explanation, clairvoyance and evil demon cases in epistemology, Newcomb cases in decision theory, Frankfurt cases in the literature on free will, Twin-Earth and Swampman cases in the literature on mental content, Jackson's Mary case in the metaphysics of mind, trolley cases in applied ethics, experience machine cases in normative ethics, and many many others.

In each such instance, the fact that the theory or generalization in question contravenes the content of an intuition is treated as (defeasible) evidence against the theory or generalization. As well, the fact that a theory implies results which agree with intuitions is commonly taken to constitute prima facie support for the theory. (See the supplementary document " The Logical Structure of the Method of Cases " for further discussion of the logical structure of such reasoning.)

This use of intuitions is, perhaps, even clearer if we consider what seems to be a contrast between philosophical methodology and that of the natural sciences. An empirical scientist must engage in empirical observation of some sort in an order to confirm or disconfirm the theories with which her discipline is engaged. If judged by her practice, the philosopher, by contrast, appears able to proceed largely or entirely from the armchair. If one takes the evidence to which natural science is primarily responsive to be that produced by empirical observation, it seems that philosophical (and other) inquiry proceeding from the armchair must have some other (putative) evidential basis. A natural (though contested) suggestion is that intuitions are treated as the primary evidence in philosophical inquiry.

(Some contemporary discussion of the methodology and epistemology of the appeal to particular hypothetical cases treats them as "thought experiments" and endeavors to draw analogies between the role of such cases in philosophical inquiry and the role of thought experiments in empirical science (Horowitz and Massey 1991; Sorensen 1992). This analogy is not pursued here for reasons outlined in §1.3.)

2.3 General Intuitions

The four examples above ( §2.2) involve appeal to intuitions regarding particular hypothetical cases in philosophical theorizing. There are, however, other prominent examples of appeals to intuition, such as those of the epistemological rationalist. For present purposes, the epistemological rationalist is one who holds that belief in some propositions is not justified by sense experience, introspection, or memory, but rather by rational intuition (BonJour 1998; Bealer 1998).

One traditional argument for rationalism appeals to various propositions which (a) we seem clearly justified in believing, and (b) seem justified not by experience, but rather simply by our seeming to see or apprehend that they are true. Plausible candidates include principles of classical logic, basic arithmetic, analytic propositions, color or shape exclusion principles, and transitivity claims. The following examples are representative:

The hypothetical case examples which drive much philosophical theorizing in epistemology, moral theory, metaphysics, and the philosophy of mind are, in some sense, particular in content. The rationalist's examples are typically more general.

In fact, there are philosophically significant propositions at all levels of generality which may be the content of intuitions. Here are some examples of general propositions which have been alleged to be intuitive:

[G2] If X is a heap of sand, thenX remains a heap even if one grain of sand is removed.

[G3] S performs actA freely only if S could have done otherwise.

[G4] For every property P, there is a set of individuals (perhaps empty) which possessP.

[G5] Through a given point not on a given line, there exists exactly one line parallel to the given line.

[G6] Whether a later person, y, is numerically identical to an earlier person,x, can depend only on intrinsic facts about x andy and the relations between x andy.

[G7] Any two possible actions exactly alike in all non-moral respects must be exactly alike in all moral respects.

2.4 Intuitions as Evidence: Intuiteds vs. Intuitings

The previous sections have aimed to show that much philosophical inquiry depends in significant ways on intuitions as evidence or reasons. However, such a claim is ambiguous. To say that the intuition that p is treated as evidence might be to claim that the fact that a person has an intuition is taken to serve as some kind of evidence (the intuit ing) or it might be to claim that the propositional content of the intuition (the intuit ed) is treated as the evidence.

Treating the intuit ings as the exclusive evidence has been alleged to overly psychologize philosophy (Pust 2001) and to play into the hands of skeptics of both the armchair and empirical variety (Williamson 2007; Deutsch 2010). After all, if one's ultimate evidence is psychological, it can seem a difficult question why such states or events ought to be treated as evidence for claims which are not psychological at all-claims about the nature of knowledge, morality, modality, etc. (For the suggestion that philosophers should instead treat many of their efforts as aiming to explicate the structure and content of our mental representations, see Goldman 1999, 2007.) Furthermore, it doesn't seem at all plausible that most explicit philosophical argument and analysis proceeds from psychological premises (i.e., premises about what some person or persons find intuitive). Rather, they appeal to claims regarding knowledge, justification, morality, explanation, etc.

On the other hand, to fail to address the fact that the proposition in question is intuitive-that it is the content of an intuit ing-is, it seems, to neglect something important about one's apparent justification for believing the proposition. While most of our putative evidence in philosophy consists of non-psychological propositions, what qualifies such propositions as our evidence must have something to do with our epistemic justification for believing them. Even if philosophical argumentation rarely includes premises about the intuitiveness of a proposition, our justification for accepting the premises in an argument is of great importance in determining the ultimate justificatory force of the argument.

Hence, the view that intuitions are treated as evidence in philosophy is best thought of as the view that, with respect to many core questions of philosophy, our justification for believing an answer consists (at least substantially) in our having suitable intuitions. It does not follow that all explicit philosophical reasoning can be properly represented as beginning with propositions stating that we have intuitions of various sorts (that route is self-defeating and incapable of accounting for justification by reasoning). Put simply, the view is that the occurrence of an intuit ing is taken to provide the person in whom it occurs with prima facie justification for believing the intuit ed. Alternatively, it holds that S's having an intuition that p prima facie justifies S in believing that p. Given a capacious view of evidence, then, both the intuiting and the intuited are treated as evidence, the occurrence of the former being treated as prima facie non-inferential justification for accepting the latter and the latter as a potential inferential justification for further propositions.

Those who prefer to focus on knowledge rather than justification can take the claim that intuitions are treated as evidence as the claim that beliefs based on intuition (if intuitions are distinct from beliefs) or intuitive beliefs are usually taken to be knowledge and so taken as evidence for further claims. They may also allow that having an intuition that p is, when it is veridical, a way of knowing that p and thereby having p as part of one's evidence (Cath 2012).

The view that intuitions are treated as evidence in philosophy has come under recent attack by a number of philosophers (Williamson 2007; Cappelen 2012; Deutsch 2015). The critics seem clearly to wish to deny that philosophical practice treats the having of an intuition as prima facie justification for its content, either because they deny that intuitions (at least as characterized by the sui generis accounts) exist or because they are skeptical that such states could serve as prima facie justification for their contents. Though Williamson, as noted above, suggests he cannot introspectively locate such states, Cappelen and Deutsch largely avoid introspective appeals, arguing instead that attention to philosophical practice and writing reveals little evidence of appeals to intuitions. Instead, they claim that close attention to influential discussions in philosophy reveals the ultimate source of justification for various claims is to be found in arguments.

The rejoinder to such a revisionary view of the role of intuitions takes various forms. An understanding of the sort of state at issue may require careful introspection and theorizing of the sort appearing above. Moreover, one may doubt that a given account of the nature of intuitions is correct without doubting that intuitions exist. A further rejoinder would be to argue that much of the written work discussed by Cappelen and Deutsch features language which is plausibly used to designate intuitions and, additionally, that the provision of arguments supporting verdicts regarding various thought experiments is not inconsistent with the author's taking (implicitly or explicitly) intuitions to serve as prima facie justification for their contents (Bengson 2014; Devitt 2015).

3. Challenges and Defenses

3.1 Four Constraints on Skeptical Challenges

Skeptics about intuitions allege that we are not justified in believing the contents of our intuitions. Prior consideration of the features that a suitable skeptical argument must possess will allow greater concision below and will also aid in revealing common features of the arguments.

First, such arguments are arguments for the conclusion that intuitions (either intuitions generally or intuitions of some specific sort) do not justify us in believing their contents. Hence, any such skeptical argument must have a premise stating a necessary condition on the justification of belief. Call this premise, " the normative premise." Second, such an argument must contain a premise stating that beliefs based on the intuitions in question do not satisfy the necessary condition of justified belief advanced in the normative premise. Call this premise, " the non-normative premise. "

Third, a successful argument for selective skepticism regarding intuitions must be one which does not equally apply to many other sources of putatively justified belief. After all, if the argument at issue would also justify skepticism regarding perceptual belief and/or memorial and/or introspective belief, it shows nothing distinctively problematic about intuitions or beliefs based upon them. Call this constraint on a successful argument, " the local skepticism constraint. "

Finally, (a) the justification for the normative and the non-normative premises must be provided by some source of evidence or justification other than intuitions of the sort impugned by the argument and (b) we must lack good reason to think that our belief in the normative or factual premise fails the necessary condition on justified belief advanced by the normative premise. Call the conjunction of these requirements " the non-self-undermining constraint" (Bealer 1992; Pust 2001; but see Silva 2013). While running afoul of this constraint does not provide reason to think the argument at issue unsound, it appears a reasonable constraint on a skeptical argument meant to produce reflectively justified belief in a conclusion in virtue of its following from justified premises. Given that the proponents of the various skeptical arguments to be discussed are mere local skeptics, they certainly appear to be offering arguments aimed at inducing philosophically reasonable belief in a local skeptical thesis regarding intuition.

Attempts to construe skeptical arguments against intuition as a reductio of the supposition that intuitions have evidential worth will not be discussed below. Note, however, that their proponents (a) require some justification for the relevant inferential principles required by the reductio, and (b) are likely to be deprived of any justified positive epistemological position, let alone one sufficient to justify the typical intuition skeptic's high epistemic regard for empirical inquiry.

3.2 The Argument from Lack of Independent Calibration

Some skeptics regarding intuition argue that intuition is epistemically illegitimate because it cannot be independently calibrated. In Cummins' forceful presentation of the argument, this independent calibration requirement is used to justify the conclusion that we should "dismiss philosophical intuition as epistemologically valueless" (1998: 125).

Let us state the argument as follows:

The Argument from Lack of Independent Calibration

[P1] One is justified in believing the contents of a putative source of evidence only if one has independent justification for the belief that the putative source is reliable.

[P2] We lack independent justification for the belief that intuitions are reliable.

[C] We are not justified in believing the contents of intuitions.

Though it has substantial plausibility in connection with various derived epistemic sources such as scientific instruments, it is clear that [P1] runs afoul of the local skepticism constraint. It amounts to a demand which is in principle unsatisfiable. If, as [P1] implies, intuition must be calibrated by some other source, X, then, by [P1], X must itself be calibrated by yet another source of evidence, Y, which must itself be calibrated and so on. Some hold, in virtue of this fact, that it is impossible to arrive at justified belief and others that it is, in suitable circumstances, possible to do so. If the former is true, then [P1] runs afoul of the local skepticism constraint. If, instead, the latter is true, then [P1] is false. Additionally, it seems clear that an argument for [P1] will require evidential reliance on epistemic intuitions and so contravene the non-self-undermining requirement.

What of [P2]? Setting aside non-reductive accounts of testimony, independent calibrations look unlikely to succeed for the full range of philosophically relevant intuitions, at least given the more constrained accounts of intuition above. The primary reason is the lack of overlap between the contents of intuitions and those beliefs justified by suitably independent sources. One doesn't, it seems, use one's senses to discern if some hypothetical case is a case of knowledge or right action or a case in which the hypothetical entity is conscious or in which two temporally distinct persons are the same person. As well, while perception may indicate the truth of some proposition and hence its possibility, it seems incapable of itself demonstrating the possibility of non-actual truths or the necessity of any proposition.

3.3 Arguments from Unreliability

A more plausible normative premise would hold that unreliable (rather than uncalibratable) faculties cannot justify belief, yielding the following:

The Argument from Unreliability-First Version

[P1] One is justified in believing on the (sole) basis of a putative source of evidence only if it is reliable.

Insofar as the normative premise is meant to articulate a necessary truth, it is open to the "new evil demon" counterexample to the necessity of reliability (Cohen 1984) according to which subjects with exactly our experiences and beliefs are justified in believing as we do even if they are the victims of a deceptive evil demon. As a natural interpretation of the reliability condition would be contravened here, this is taken by many to demonstrate that reliability (so understood) is not a necessary condition of justified belief.

However, even those who reject [P1] typically allow that good reason to think a putative source of evidence is unreliable is sufficient to defeat whatever prima facie justification it may otherwise provide. Hence, we may reformulate the argument as follows in order to provide it with a more plausible normative premise:

The Argument from Unreliability-Second Version

[P1*] One is justified in believing on the (sole) basis of a putative source of evidence only if one lacks (undefeated) reason to think it unreliable.

As the defense of [P1] or [P1*] requires appeal to epistemic intuitions, any attempt to justify by such means a skeptical conclusion regarding all intuitions, all epistemic intuitions or even all normative intuitions, would fail to observe the non-self-undermining constraint.

Still, it is worth considering the possible ways of attempting to justify skeptical arguments of a more limited sort by arguing that intuitions of some sort (which does not include epistemic intuitions or at least the epistemic intuitions of the sort needed to justify the premises) are unreliable. Given that the relevant non-normative premise must claim that intuitions of the sort at issue are more frequently false than true (or equally likely to be false as to be true) it seems to require an inductive justification based on a sufficiently large number of cases in which we have justification for believing \({\sim}p\) while p is the content of an intuition.

One way of developing the case would involve a sufficiently large number of cases in which one has an intuition-independent justification for thinking \({\sim}p\) while intuition testifies that p ( intrapersonal intersource inconsistency). Another would involve a sufficiently large number of cases in which one has the intuition that p and either oneself or some other person has the intuition that \({\sim}p\). In the intrapersonal case, this might involve our finding a given proposition intuitive and, at some other time, our finding its explicit negation intuitive ( intrapersonal intrasource inconsistency). More likely is a less direct inconsistency, as when we have two intuitions which, though not the explicit propositional negations of each other, can be shown to contradict with the aid of some other justified principle. Many contemporary skeptics, however, wish to appeal to interpersonal disagreement as justification for their skepticism. Here we should distinguish between cases in which some other person has intuition-independent justification for believing the negation of the content of one of one's own intuitions ( interpersonal intersource inconsistency) and cases in which the other person has an intuition with a content contradicting one's own intuition or, perhaps, fails to have any intuition regarding p ( interpersonal intrasource inconsistency).

3.3.1 Intersource Inconsistency

As noted when conceding the factual premise, [P2], of the Argument from Lack of Independent Calibration ( §3.2), on the sui generis accounts of intuition ( §1.3), there are few, if any, direct conflicts between the putative deliverances of rational intuition and our other sources of evidence (Bealer 1998; BonJour 1998). Indirect conflicts would be ones in which the results of empirical theory contradict the content of rational intuitions. Such cases, if there are any, are quite rare.

Indeed, in view of the lack of direct conflicts, there is substantial reason to think indirect conflicts must be quite rare as standard empirical theorizing seems unlikely to yield conclusions about the domains about which intuition seems to inform us. These facts suggest that interpersonal interfaculty inconsistency will also be an insufficient basis for skepticism.

3.3.2 Intrasource Inconsistency

The main case of intrapersonal intrasource inconsistency has been mentioned previously-the case of paradoxes. To support the present (limited) skeptical argument, however, it must be parlayed into an argument that intuitions are so unreliable as to fail to justify belief at all.

It is not clear how this can be done. For one thing, there remains the fact that most of a person's intuitions are not in conflict with one another. For another, some conflicts between intuitions can be resolved by standard means or by favoring the more intuitive propositions. This is not to claim that such disagreements might not rationally require a suspension of judgment about the actual contradicting intuitions (if they are suitably balanced in strength). However, such a conclusion is quite limited and extends clearly only to areas of demonstrable and irresolvable inconsistency.

The case of greatest interest to skeptics is likely to be the case of interpersonal intrasource inconsistency or disagreement. We must be careful to distinguish between interpersonal conflicts of intuitions and conflicts between beliefs or between beliefs and intuitions. Philosophers disagree a great deal about the correct theory of free will, knowledge, justification and the like. This fact has been alleged to make a certain sort of epistemic modesty (though not complete skepticism) about the theoretical accomplishments of philosophy quite reasonable (Christensen 2007). However, philosophers seem to disagree less about what the relevant intuitions are. Bealer claims that

the on-balance agreement among our elementary concrete-case intuitions is one of the most impressive general facts about human cognition. (1998: 214)

(See, however, "the variation project" of experimental philosophers discussed in §4.1.) Functionalists, for example, don't usually claim to lack the intuition that the Chinese nation (Block 1978) would lack qualia. Rather, they often go to great lengths to explain away such intuitions, formulate the functionalist theory to accommodate them (Putnam 1967), or selectively deflate their epistemic value. Reliabilists don't typically claim that there is no new evil demon problem (Cohen 1984). Rather, they engage in considerable maneuvering to discount the intuition, to rephrase it in a way not damaging to straightforward reliabilism, or, most commonly, to provide an alternative, recognizably reliabilist, theory which accommodates the intuition.

Much of the recent literature on the epistemic significance of disagreement is focused on cases in which two persons disagree with respect to a single proposition which is inferentially justified, and in which the two parties are known to each other to have the same evidence and general cognitive virtues (Christensen 2009). The lessons of such cases for the present questions are likely to be limited. If intuitions are evidence which non-inferentially justify belief, then even if one ought to suspend judgment in the aforementioned kind of case, it will not follow that one ought to do so in the case of intuitive disagreements. Hence, we must instead focus on cases of disagreement between non-inferentially justified beliefs or, more appropriately, on the propositional content of some non-doxastic basis for such belief. Feldman (2007) provides a perceptual case (explicitly compared to something like rational intuition) in which one person seems to see p and the other, similarly situated, does not seem to see p. When the two become apprised of each other's appearances (and know each other to have equally good vision and to be honest), Feldman avers that they must withhold judgment on p. Perhaps the same is true with respect to philosophical intuitions.

However, it can be difficult to determine if another's failure to have an intuition that p is epistemically significant, as they may have yet to really grasp or consider the precise proposition at issue. An analogous claim is true in the perceptual case as well, as when one sees an object which is well camouflaged and another claims not to see it. Still, restricting ourselves to a situation in which one has good reason to think the other fully understands the content at issue and claims either not to have the intuition or to have the contrary intuition, we must ask what the appropriate responses to such cases is. Here, it does seem that the proper response is sometimes (depending on the proposition at issue) suspension of belief or some suitable diminution of credence (BonJour 1998: 138-142). Even if the correct response to disagreement about p in such cases is the suspension of belief (or a reduction of credence), it won't follow that beliefs in propositions about which no known disagreement exists are undermined. Nor could it follow that one must always have independent reason to think there is no disagreement prior to being justified in accepting the content of an intuition. That would be impossible.

A serious case for disagreement-based local skepticism regarding some entire class of intuitions which evades the non-self-undermining constraint would require justification for thinking that quite substantial disagreement with some equally (or more) competent other person has arisen. It cannot be supposed that the question of whether one is justified in thinking that some apparent competent interlocutor is sincerely testifying that p is entirely independent of the content of their apparent assertion or of one's total evidence relevant to existence of other minds and their mental contents of the appropriate sort. Some sorts of apparent disagreement call into question the understanding, sanity, intelligence, or sincerity of one's interlocutor, as when some other denies some basic truth of arithmetic. Consider a version of Feldman's perceptual case in which there are successive occasions on which one seems to see p and one's interlocutor apparently denies that they see any such thing. Were they to become frequent enough, there might be reason to doubt that the other is honest and competent, speaking one's language, or, indeed, whether there is another person to whom one is speaking. Similar obstacles arise for the possibility of very widespread disagreement of intuitions, especially on views according to which the reliability of intuitions is constitutive of possessing certain concepts (Bealer 1998; Huemer 2005; Ludwig 2007).

3.4 Arguments from Explanation

Many of the most interesting arguments for skepticism regarding philosophical intuitions do not appeal to direct evidence of unreliability, but are instead instances of what shall here be called "arguments from explanation." Such arguments maintain either that (a) the fact that our best explanations of the occurrence of intuitions (i.e., intuit ings) do not appeal to the truth of their contents is reason to think we are not justified in accepting such contents, or that (b) the fact that we cannot provide any explanation of how our intuitions are or could be reliable regarding the domains about which they might initially appear to inform us, is reason to think we are not justified in believing their contents. Let us call former sort of argument "the argument from lack of explanatory necessity" and the second sort, "the argument from inexplicability of reliability." Recent arguments of this sort have been discussed by those concerned with so-called "debunking arguments" regarding our moral beliefs and intuitions (Street 2006; Clarke-Doane 2015).

3.4.1 The Argument from Lack of Explanatory Necessity

Gilbert Harman (1977) suggests that moral theories are unjustified because they cannot be tested and confirmed in the way that scientific theories can. While he admits that we may "test" general moral principles against our intuitions regarding particular actual and hypothetical situations, he argues that we are not thereby testing our moral theories or principles against the world. Instead, we are merely testing them against our "moral sensibility" or against our tacitly held moral views.

Harman claims that there is an important difference between the use of observations in empirical science and the use of intuitions in moral inquiry, a difference which renders moral intuitions unable to provide evidence for moral theory. The alleged difference is that

you need to make assumptions about certain physical facts to explain the occurrence of the observations that support a scientific theory, but you do not seem to need to make assumptions about any moral facts to explain the occurrence

of the moral intuitions. When, for example, one has the intuition, in the Transplant case, that it would be wrong for a doctor to kill an unconsenting healthy patient to save the lives of five other patients,

an assumption about moral facts would seem to be totally irrelevant to the explanation of your making the judgment you make

and hence the intuition "does not seem ... to be ... evidence for or against any moral theory" (1977: 6-7). The argument seems to be:

The Argument from Lack of Explanatory Necessity

The normative premise, [P1], is perfectly general and hence may be equally deployed to undermine justified belief of any proposition failing its standard. Indeed, there seems equally good reason to think that the propositions which are the contents of most philosophical intuitions will not be part (outside of attitude contexts) of the best explanation of our having those intuitions. (See Goldman 1989, 1992 for similar skeptical arguments regarding the use of intuitions in contemporary metaphysics.)

One possible response to this sort of argument is to concede [P1] and to argue, for the class of propositions at issue, that they do satisfy the necessary condition of justification. This maneuver is represented by Sturgeon's (1984) rejoinder to Harman. Sturgeon suggests that it is often reasonable to think that we wouldn't think some action or person possessed a relevant moral property unless they in fact possessed the property. More precisely, he holds that in order for a given act or agent to have a different moral status it or they would have to differ in some non-moral way and then we often would not take it or them to have the same moral status. However, whatever the plausibility of this account with respect to actual token actions or persons, it is less clear how the counterfactual criterion would apply to the moral status of actions featured in the merely hypothetical cases found in typical methodology. Moreover, even if one takes Sturgeon's maneuver to be successful against Harman's attack on moral intuitions, it seems quite unclear how it is to be extended to the many appeals to intuition catalogued above ( §2).

It has also been argued that [P1] is unjustified (Pust 2001). There appear to be only two ways that [P1] could be justified. It might be justified by being intuitive or by being supported by our intuitions regarding particular cases of justified belief. [P1] is not, however, intuitive. Furthermore, an inductive argument for [P1] based on our intuitions about particular cases of justified belief will not support [P1] since many of what seem, intuitively, to be our most justified beliefs run afoul of [P1]. (See, for example, [I1]-[I4] from §1 and the examples in §2.2 and §2.3.) Many of our particular epistemic beliefs, moral beliefs, and modal beliefs seem, intuitively, no less justified than our empirical beliefs. Indeed, some of them seem more justified. Since it seems implausible that all of these propositions are required in the best explanation of the occurrence of our intuitions, it seems that [P1], which requires such a role, is undermined by such cases.

Even if there were sufficient intuitive support for [P1], defending this argument by such means would contravene both strands of the non-self-undermining constraint (Pust 2001). According to [P1], S's non-introspective belief that p is justified only if the proposition believed plays a role in the best explanation of S's mental states. No demonstration of explanatory relevance is involved in the two methods of justifying [P1] just discussed. Rather, each approach would take the mere fact that the principle is the content of an intuition or best explains the content of a set of particular intuitions (i.e., intuit eds) as sufficient for justified belief in that principle. This is to treat intuit eds as supporting evidence for a principle allowing only intuit ings to count as evidence. Moreover, since [P1] states a necessary condition for the justified acceptance of any proposition not about the occurrence of an observation or intuition, acceptance of [P1] itself is justified only if it satisfies the very requirement it articulates. Unfortunately, because [P1] is a normative proposition about when a belief is justified, it is difficult to see how its truth could play any role in the explanation of the occurrence of any of our experiences or intuitions. However, if [P1] does not satisfy [P1], then, if [P1] is true, we cannot be justified in believing [P1].

3.4.2 The Argument from Inexplicability of Reliability

The second argument from explanation has its origins in Benacerraf's (1973) epistemological objection to Platonism in mathematics. Benacerraf argued that the best semantic accounts of mathematics (e.g., Platonist ones) were in tension with our best theories of knowledge (e.g., causal ones) and that attempts to bring the truth conditions of mathematical statements into closer epistemic proximity to human subjects were semantically inadequate. Though he claimed to favor "a causal account of knowledge" and such an account is now generally thought mistaken, it should be noted that Benacerraf motivated the causal connection constraint by noting that one may justify the claim that S does not know p by arguing that S

could not have come into possession of the relevant evidence or reasons: that [ S 's] four-dimensional space-time worm does not make the necessary (causal) contact with the grounds of the truth of the proposition

for S to have adequate evidence (1973: 671).

Field (1989) provides a Benacerraf-style epistemic challenge to belief in mathematics (construed in a Platonist fashion), one which he alleges

does not depend on any theory of knowledge in the sense in which the causal theory is a theory of knowledge; that is it does not depend on any assumption about necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. (pp. 232-233)

On his account, the fundamental problem has to do with the impossibility of explaining "the reliability of our beliefs" in the domain in question. More precisely, he alleges that "if it appears impossible to explain" how our beliefs about some entities or our grounds for the beliefs "can so well reflect the facts about them," then

that tends to undermine the belief in .... (these) entities, despite whatever initial reasons we might have for believing in them. (p. 26, emphasis added)

Though Field's argument has various of our beliefs as it target, it seems to support the following argument against intuition:

The Argument from Inexplicability of Reliability

[P1] If we have good reason to think that there is no explanation of why our intuitions are reliable, then we are not justified in believing p on the basis of the intuition thatp.

[P2] We have good reason to think that there is no explanation of why our intuitions are reliable.

[C] We are not justified in believing p on the basis of the intuition thatp.

The non-normative premise, [P2], seems to extend to all necessary truths if the explanation of reliability mentioned in [P1] requires any sort of counterfactual sustaining relation between the truth makers of the propositions in question and our psychological states. The failure of explanation here is intimately linked to the intuitive deviance of counterfactuals featuring in their antecedents the negations of necessary propositions. The standard semantics treats them as uniformly and vacuously true and so there is little informative sense to be made of the notion that were some proposition we take to be (necessarily) true to be false we would believe (or intuit) otherwise than we do. As it is implausible that all our beliefs in non-contingent matters are unjustified, this cuts against [P1] if it is taken to require a counterfactual supporting kind of explanation.

If, on the other hand, [P1] requires only that we have reason to think our reliability not utterly mysterious, then, while [P1] is more plausible, the relevant instance of [P2] may be false. It has been suggested that the provision of an explanation of our having the intuitions we do would, in virtue of the impossibility of such propositions as we intuit having different truth values, suffice as an explanation of their reliability. There is no particular reason to think that our intuitions lack explanation while our other mental states have an explanation. That explanation, when conjoined with our prima facie justification for believing the contents of our intuitions (and our being prima facie justified isn't challenged on this construal of the argument) seems to suffice as an explanation of our reliability. Put another way, if our reliability is a necessary accompaniment of having a certain content, then we have no reason to think our reliability is inexplicable. The explanation, in this sense, of our reliability is a straightforward consequence of the necessarily true contents of our intuitions and the psychological explanation for our having those particular intuitions (Pust 2004; Grundmann 2007: 84; but see Schechter 2010).

It may also be argued (Pust 2004) that it isn't, as seems assumed by Field's objection, clearly possible for a creature to have intuitions significantly different from our own. Given the more constrained accounts of intuition discussed above, it is not clear that a creature might have intuitions with contents generally contradicting our own. That such a creature is metaphysically possible is itself a modal claim apparently requiring justification by intuition and such intuitions seem to be lacking. This response to the explanationist can be elaborated in the context of a theory of concept possession according to which a necessary condition of the genuine possession of a given concept (of the sort of primary interest in philosophical investigation) is the reliability of one's intuitions regarding hypothetical cases. Such an account is justified by intuitions and so cannot be an independent justification of them. It may, however, still reasonably be thought to be an explanation (though not a causal one) of their (necessary) reliability.

Finally, just as was true with respect to the Argument from Lack of Explanatory Necessity, there remains the concern that any attempt to justify believing [P1] and [P2] will run afoul of the non-self-undermining constraint by relying on intuitions about justification and explanation in order to argue that intuitions do not justify belief.

3.5 Defenses of Intuitions: Self-Support and Epistemic Circularity

There are, broadly speaking, two ways of defending the use of intuitions as evidence. The first possible defense would be an empirical defense of intuitions by arguing against the second premise of the Argument from Lack of Independent Calibration ( §3.2). The defense would proceed by providing an inductive argument, based on non-intuitive evidence, that the contents of intuitions (either generally or of some specific sort) are reliable.

The only other apparent possible defense of the thesis that intuitions prima facie justify belief in their content appeals, as does the traditional rationalist, to the fact that there are many particular propositions which one seems justified in believing simply in virtue of their being the content of a rational intuition (Bealer 1998; BonJour 1998). The strength of the conclusion is, of course, more supported to the extent that such examples are multiplied. And, as noted above, there appear to be many such examples.

This defense may be generalized by claiming that intuition is self-supporting insofar as the general claim that intuitions provide prima facie justification for belief in their contents is itself intuitive. The possibility of such a defense is the result of the same fact that revealed that all of the extant local skeptical arguments run afoul of the non-self-undermining constraint-the fact that intuitions seem to be the only source of justification for claims about justification, reason, evidence, and other epistemic properties.

The obvious concern about this sort of defense (in both its particular and general form) is the fact that it necessarily involves epistemic circularity of some kind. That is, it defends the appeal to intuitions as reasons for belief by appeal to intuitions. It seems clear that epistemically circular defenses are sometimes illegitimate, as when questions about the epistemic probity of appeals to a crystal ball are answered by consulting the ball. However, as indicated above ( §3.2), it also appears that some sort of epistemic circularity is inevitable in the attempt to defend our most basic modes of evidence and justification. Exactly when such circularity is epistemically disabling and when, if ever, it is acceptable is a difficult question which cannot be here treated in detail (Alston 1986, 1993; Bergmann 2006; Cohen 2002; Vogel 2008). However, a few remarks are in order.

First, if epistemic circularity is always unacceptable, then it is impossible to defend the appeal to intuition. However, the same result will follow (ultimately) for any putative source of evidence. So, while it will be the case that the use of intuitions as evidence cannot be defended, it will also follow that the reliance on perception, memory and introspection can also not be defended. Universal skepticism would appear to follow. Alternatively, if epistemic circularity is sometimes acceptable, then no reason has been provided why it is not acceptable in the case of rational intuition.

Second, if we focus on the question of whether we are prima facie justified in accepting the contents of our intuitions, there may be a feature which distinguishes intuition from all other putative sources of evidence. Only intuition is clearly capable of epistemic self-support because it is the only source which produces non-doxastic states with epistemically normative content. Whether or not apparent perception that p, introspection that p, or apparent memory that p justify us in believing their content is, it seems, a question they cannot answer as their content is never epistemic. Hence, intuition appears distinguishable from our other putative sources of evidence in being both required for a coherent epistemology and capable of epistemic self-support. So, if any source of evidence can be defended against global skeptical attack, it seems that intuitions can.

Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that the epistemic credentials of intuitions can be defended by appealing to similarities between perceptual justification and intuitive justification or to a general doctrine regarding non-inferential justification. According to perceptual dogmatism, a person having a perceptual experience or a perceptual seeming with propositional content p is thereby prima facie justified in believing p (Pryor 2000). According to intuitive dogmatism, a person having an intuition or intellectual seeming with propositional content p is thereby prima facie justified in believing p. According to general dogmatism, when it seems to a person that p, that person is thereby prima facie justified in believing p. It follows from general dogmatism that intuitions, as characterized by the various versions of the sui generis state view above ( §1.3), are a source of justification (Huemer 2005, 2007). Moreover, it seems extremely plausible that if perceptual dogmatism is true, then so is intuitive dogmatism (Chudnoff 2011b; Koksvik 2011; Bengson 2015).

Whatever the merits of general or perceptual dogmatism, it is important to recognize that appealing to them in defending intuitive dogmatism involves exactly the same sort of epistemic circularity as that involved in the more straightforward defense previously noted. This is because all versions of dogmatism are themselves justified entirely on intuitive grounds-by the fact that they properly accommodate our various intuitions about the conditions under which a person has non-inferential propositional justification. Hence, appeals to dogmatism of any sort are ultimately justified only if intuitions do provide prima facie justification and so cannot serve as an independent defense of the appeal to intuitions. Epistemic circularity in the epistemology of intuition appears unavoidable.

4. Experimental Philosophy and Intuitions

4.1 The Nature of Experimental Philosophy

In the last ten to fifteen years, there has been an explosion of interest in research involving the scientific or empirical investigation of intuitions of philosophical interest. Such projects are now frequently grouped under the rubric of "experimental philosophy." (For general characterizations of experimental philosophy see Knobe and Nichols 2008, Appiah 2008, and Nadelhoffer and Nahmias 2007.) At least four broadly-individuated projects in experimental philosophy can be distinguished.

The first project, " the psychology project," aims to discover how people ordinarily think. Knobe and Nichols claim that the results of such inquiries "have great philosophical significance in their own right ... for traditional philosophical questions" (2008: 12). This claim is motivated in part by the idea that questions which occupied the attention of historically significant philosophers ought to count as philosophically significant questions. As many philosophers of antiquity and the early modern period made various claims about human psychology, such questions, it is claimed, count as philosophical questions which may be better pursued by modern psychological inquiry.

The second project, " the verification project," aims to determine if the various propositions which philosophers allege to be intuitive, pre-theoretical, or "part of common sense" are, in fact, intuitive to ordinary non-philosophers. This project is motivated both by the general conviction that empirical claims, such as those regarding the extent to which some belief or intuition is shared by others, require adequate empirical support, and by the suspicion that what philosophers find intuitive or regard as commonsensical may be the result of their specialized training, theoretical allegiance, or general cognitive biases (Nadelhoffer and Nahmias 2007: 125; Knobe and Nichols 2008: 9). An example of this approach can be found in Nahmias and colleagues' investigations of free will (2006, 2007).

The third project, " the sources project, " aims to discover the psychological mechanisms or processes that produce people's intuitions. According to Knobe and Nichols, it is motivated by the "hope ... that we can use the information to help determine whether the psychological sources ... undercut the warrant for the beliefs" based upon the source (2008: 9). Similarly, Allman and Woodward suggest that

better understanding of the sources and character of moral intuition will help to clarify whether and when it has a legitimate role in moral argument. (2008: 167)

Examples of this approach include: Greene's (Greene et al. 2001; Greene 2003: 848) fMRI investigations of moral judgment (criticized in Berker 2009), Horowitz's (1998) attempt (see also Sunstein 2005) to explain certain intuitions taken to support the doctrine of doing and allowing using Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory (criticized in Kamm 1998 and van Roojen 1999), and aspects of Nichols and Knobe's (2007) investigations of the role of affect on judgments regarding the compatibility of determinism and moral responsibility.

The fourth project, " the variation project," seeks to determine the extent of variation in intuitions between different groups, persons or persons-at-times or persons-in-contexts. Many working on this project hold that the empirically discovered variation in intuitions gives us reason to believe that intuitions are unreliable (Alexander et al. 2010). Examples of this approach (which traces its main intellectual lineage back to Stich 1988) include Weinberg et al. (2001) on cross-cultural variation in intuitions about knowledge (criticized in Sosa 2007), Swain et al. (2008) on order effects in intuitions about knowledge (criticized in Sosa 2007), Buckwalter and Stich (2013) on gender variation in intuitions of many sorts, and Machery et al. (2004) and Mallon et al. (2009) on cross-cultural variation in intuitions about reference (criticized in Ludwig 2007; Devitt 2011; Deutsch 2009; Sytsma and Livengood 2011).

4.2 The Experimental Evidence

For experimental philosophers seeking to investigate the sources, character, and distribution of intuitions of philosophical interest, the primary method has consisted of asking subjects questions about hypothetical scenarios, or less frequently, about principles or generalizations. The evidence has been responses (whether binary [yes/no] responses or graded [Likert scale] responses) to such survey questions. Those pursuing the sources project and the variation project also aim to determine which factors co-vary with answers-cultural or ethnic group, socio-economic status, region of brain or cognitive processes implicated in answering the question, psychopathology, order of questions, framing of questions, etc.

Of course, traditional first-person armchair methods seek to determine which features of the content of the scenario under consideration vary with one's intuitions. Indeed, this is exactly how one endeavors to test or to make more precise some general thesis in many areas of philosophy. Proponents of the sources project and the variation project however, seek to determine which features of those considering the scenario or of framing or presenting the same question vary with the relevant intuitions.

There have been a variety of worries raised about the adequacy of survey methods as means of gaining access to intuitions of the relevant sort. The strength of these worries vary according to the conception of intuition. If, as claimed by various sui generis state accounts ( §1.3), intuitions are not beliefs or mere dispositions to believe, then the inferential route from evidence consisting of survey responses to conclusions about intuitions is considerably lengthened.

First, differences in responses may be produced by different ways of "filling in" a schematic hypothetical case (Sosa 2007; Horvath 2015). Second, there may be multiple concepts answering to a single word (Sosa 2007). (For some recognition of this fact by experimental philosophers, see the use of the "coin-flipping" case by Weinberg et al. (2001) and Swain et al. (2008) to exclude subjects who use " S knows that p" to mean merely that S has high confidence that p.) These two suggestions do not raise the possibility that that the subjects in such surveys are not responding on the basis of intuitions. Rather, they raise the possibility that the intuitions are not intuitions regarding the same property or about the same case. (See Alexander and Weinberg 2007 for the suggestion that both of these concerns apply equally to non-solipsistic proponents of the traditional armchair methodology.)

A third, more general, worry is that such surveys run a risk of eliciting from subjects responses determined by something other than their intuitions regarding the answer to the survey question-e.g., by implicatures determined by what a sentence is typically used to communicate (Adams and Steadman 2004; Deutsch 2009; Bach 2002) and by more general pragmatic factors governing the determination of speaker meaning and task interpretation. These worries may be especially pressing in the odd and ambiguous context of a set of hypothetical and often bizarre cases presented by a philosopher to a philosophically naïve subject unaware of the nature of the discipline (Scholl 2007: 580; Cullen 2010; Ludwig 2007). Bengson (2013) argues that it is plausible that many survey responses are often not indicative of subjects' intuitions but are instead the product of guesses, hunches, or inferences.

Some proponents of survey methods claim that such worries have very low prior probability and should not be taken seriously without experimental confirmation. Those who raise them, however, claim to have significant independent evidence of their general relevance (Cullen 2010; Scholl 2007) or their importance in producing the particular results at issue (Bengson 2013). Some of these problems seem difficult to control for without engaging subjects in something like philosophical dialogue and dialectic (see Kauppinen 2007)-i.e., by doing philosophy with them-which is thought by many experimental philosophers to be a form of biasing or data contamination.

A final worry, of relatively recent vintage, concerns the extent to which the results in question are reproducible or robust. A number of recent studies have provided reason to think that many published psychological results are not reproducible, with studies in social psychology being especially likely to fail attempts at reproduction. Exactly what to make of this fact and how to respond to it is a matter of much current debate, but it should be noted that experimental philosophers have begun to pay attention to the problem and to seek replication of their results. The issue is quite complicated and the research moving quickly, but it appears that quite a few of the claims of cultural or gender differences have not proved robust (Seyedsayamdost 2014, 2015; Adleberg et al. 2014). These claims of variation, as noted below, have been the primary empirical basis of skepticism regarding the evidential value of intuition.

Nothing precludes experimental philosophers from circumventing some of the concerns just noted by using experimental paradigms other than the administering of surveys. They may use reaction-time studies from cognitive psychology (Arico et al. 2011), empirical evidence from neuroscience (Allman and Woodward 2008; Greene et. al. 2001), evolutionary biology, or other sources. While such sources of evidence are not subject to the difficulties of surveys, they also appear unlikely to produce direct evidence of use to the verification project or the variability project because these projects require responses to the abstract and detailed linguistic descriptions of cases one typically presents in philosophical analysis. Indeed, Scholl (2007) suggests that the most methodologically satisfactory experimental philosophy will be primarily a version of the sources project implicating rather low-level processes immune, in virtue of their modularity, from the interpretive and pragmatic difficulties outlined above.

4.3 Experimental Philosophy and Skeptical Challenges

The sources project is, as noted above, often presented as a possible means of justifying skepticism regarding some class of philosophical intuitions. An analogy suggested by Knobe and Nichols (2008) is to debunking explanations of religious beliefs. Theorists engaged in such projects argue that religious belief (or religious experience on which such belief is based) is produced by some questionable process such as wish fulfillment, desire for a father figure, cultural indoctrination, etc. It is then argued (or assumed) that this fact about the source of the belief (or its direct internal ground) undermines the epistemic credentials of such beliefs.

This may suggest that some skeptical proponents of the sources project aim to motivate an instance of the Argument from Unreliability ( §3.3). As an example, consider Greene's fMRI-based arguments (Greene et al. 2001; Greene 2003, 2007) against certain "characteristically deontological" intuitions in ethics. The primary experimental data on which his argument is based is the fact that portions of the brain independently implicated in emotional reaction are more active when subjects consider cases giving rise to characteristically deontological intuitions than when they consider cases giving rise to characteristically consequentialist intuitions. However, critics will allege ( §3.3) that attempts to show that a process is unreliable (independent of disagreement) require independent access to the target domain and such intuition-independent access seems lacking for most of the target domains of philosophical inquiry. In this vein, Berker (2009) argues that the best argument in Greene's work rests largely on other intuitions about the general normative insignificance of the factors within hypothetical cases to which Greene believes deontological intuitions are responsive. (See Unger 1996 for an entirely a priori criticism of many "characteristically deontological" intuitions for their apparent responsiveness to intuitively normatively insignificant factors.)

The aforementioned analogy to debunking explanations of religious belief might also be taken to suggest a version of the Argument from Lack of Explanatory Necessity ( §3.4.1). According to that argument, the provision of an explanation of the occurrence of the intuitions in question (the intuit ings) which does not appeal to the truth of their contents (the intuit eds) undermines belief in their contents. The role of experimental work might be thought to be to support the factual premise of that argument (see Greene 2003: 849 for such a suggestion). As we have seen ( §3.4.2), critics will claim that the argument relies on a questionable normative premise and violates the non-self-undermining constraint. They may also suggest that the plausibility of the non-normative premise of the argument derives from very general armchair (perhaps even entirely a priori) reflections on the contents of the intuitions, their truth-makers, and the nature of explanation. If so, then the experimental investigations are idle.

Some proponents of the variation project present us empirical evidence of disagreement between intuitions in order to motivate a version of the Argument from Intrasource Inconsistency ( §3.3.2). Some critics of skepticism motivated by the variation project claim, contrary to what was suggested earlier ( §2.4), that intuitions are not treated as evidence or reasons in philosophical inquiry (Deutsch 2015; Williamson 2007; Cappelen 2012). Whether such a maneuver really evades whatever skeptical implications follow from disagreement depends on whether disagreements of belief are epistemologically less troubling than variations in non-doxastic justifiers.

Though critical of the variation project, Sosa's suggests that

there will definitely be a prima facie problem for the appeal to intuitions in philosophy if surveys show that there is extensive enough disagreement on the subject matter supposedly open to intuitive access. (Sosa 2007)

Relevant to determining whether the antecedent of Sosa's conditional is satisfied are the methodological concerns about survey methods noted above and their ability to support claims of intuition disagreement. Relevant to determining the possibility of the antecedent of Sosa's conditional being satisfied are the distinctively a priori concerns raised above ( §3.4.2) about the possible extent of disagreement, about how the existence of widespread disagreement could be justifiably believed to exist ( §3.3.2), and, importantly, about the non-self-undermining constraint.

5. Further Research

In light of the foregoing, it seems that further research on the following issues would be especially beneficial.

The first is determining the precise conditions under which epistemic circularity is problematic. Though some epistemic circularity appears unavoidable, this would aid in determining the relative initial epistemological standing of intuition and perception.

The second is determining the exact actual and possible extent of intuitive disagreement and the proper response to such disagreement. This would enable the proper evaluation of what appears to be the most serious sort of skeptical argument.

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Seyedsayamdost, Hamid, 2014, "On Gender and Philosophical Intuition: Failure of Replication and Other Negative Results", Philosophical Psychology, 28(5): 642-673. doi:10.1080/09515089.2014.893288

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Consider the claim that a fully rational person does not believe both p and not- p. Very likely, as you considered it, that claim seemed true to you. Something similar probably happens when you consider the following propositions: [I2] Torturing a sentient being for fun is wrong.

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What color is Tuesday? Exploring synesthesia - Richard E. Cytowic

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What color is Tuesday? Exploring synesthesia - Richard E. Cytowic

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How does one experience synesthesia -- the neurological trait that combines two or more senses? Synesthetes may taste the number 9 or attach a color to each day of the week. Richard E. Cytowic explains the fascinating world of entangled senses and why we may all have just a touch of synesthesia.

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What color is Tuesday? Exploring synesthesia - Richard E. Cytowic

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Using Your 5 Senses To Jump-Start The Creative Process

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Using Your 5 Senses To Jump-Start The Creative Process

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If we use all five senses–scent, sight, sound, touch, and taste–to stimulate our minds while working, then this may spark more creativity.

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Taste and smell: What is it like to live without them?

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Taste and smell: What is it like to live without them?

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Double Olympic gold medallist James Cracknell says he is unable to smell or taste very much due to a brain injury he suffered. What is life like without these senses?

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Double Olympic gold medallist James Cracknell says he is unable to smell or taste very much due to a brain injury he suffered. What is life like without these senses?

Duncan Boak lost his sense of smell in 2005 after a fall resulted in a serious brain injury. With smell said to be responsible for 80% of the flavours we taste, the impact of losing it has been huge.

"It's so hard to explain but losing your sense of smell leaves you feeling like a spectator in your own life, as if you're watching from behind a pane of glass," he says.

"It makes you feel not fully immersed in the world around you and sucks away a lot of the colour of life. It's isolating and lonely."

Like Boak, double Olympic gold medallist James Cracknell suffered a serious brain injury. He was hit by a petrol tanker while riding a bike in the US in 2010. In an interview with the Radio Times this week he said he was now unable to smell or taste very much.

Eating is just something he has to do to survive, like putting petrol in a car.

The loss of taste, known as ageusia, is rare and has much less of an impact on daily life, say experts. Most people who think they have lost their sense of taste have actually lost their sense of smell. It's known as anosmia and the physical and psychological impact can be devastating and far reaching.

"Studies have shown that people who lose their sense of smell end up more severely depressed and for longer periods of time than people who go blind," says Prof Barry C Smith, co-director and founder of the Centre for the Study of the Senses.

"Smell is such an underrated sense. Losing it doesn't just take the enjoyment out of eating, no place or person smells familiar anymore. It is also closely linked to memory. Losing that emotional quality to your life is incredibly hard to deal with."

Sue Mounfield lost her sense of smell three years ago after having the flu. She says the smells she misses the most are not to do with food.

"It's things like smelling my children, my home and my garden. When they're gone you realised just how comforting and precious these smells are. They make you feel settled and grounded. Without them I feel as if I'm looking in on my life but not fully taking part."

Losing your sense of smell also makes the world a much more dangerous place. Even in the womb smell and taste are "gatekeepers" for allowing things into our bodies and rejecting harmful toxins, says Smith.

It nearly had extremely serious consequences for Alan Curr, who lost his sense of smell after knocking himself out in a gym lesson when he was eight.

"When I was at university someone left the gas on by accident. I was home all day but never noticed. At about 3pm my flatmates returned and I was in a bit of a daze but had no idea why. They smelt gas as soon as they walked in the door."

Boak says he only really started to understand why he was feeling depressed six years after his accident. He started to read about the sense of smell and had a "road to Damascus" realisation that it was the reason he was feeling such emotions. He has now set up the UK's first anosmia support group, Fifth Sense.

There are no official figures for how many people in the UK suffer from the loss of smell or taste, but estimates for the US and Europe put the number at 5% of the population.

Losing smell happens for several reasons. Some people are born without a sense of smell, it can be the result of a frontal head injury or something as mundane as an infection. Old age is also a factor, with smell and taste deteriorating rapidly after the age of 75.

Unexplained disturbances in smell and taste can indicate the onset of brain illnesses such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, often years before other more recognisable symptoms emerge.

"An unexplained loss of smell or taste acts like a canary in cage, it is a warning that something is wrong," says Smith. "People need to get it checked out quickly but they don't."

Often the problem is dismissed as trivial by the medical profession, adds Smith. Sufferers agree they are regularly turned away doctors who dismiss the loss of smell as trivial and say there is no treatment.

"Because you're not in pain many doctors basically just tell you to live with it," says Mounfield.

Outside the medical profession people often find it amusing and something of an oddity.

The physical consequences can also be extreme. People often lose weight because they no longer get any pleasure from food. Boak says he has been contacted by people who have been hospitalised because they find eating so difficult.

Whether or not anosmia can be cured depends on the underlying cause. Smell can improve for some people but never return for others. It can come back but odours might have been re-coded by the brain so things don't taste the same. Chocolate can smell like beef.

But unlike sight and hearing, you can improve your smell by training it, say experts. Studies have also shown this applies to anosmia sufferers.

But for Boak it is a case of working with what he has left. With his taste buds still working he can bring out things like the sweetness and saltiness of food. Textures have also become important.

"I can even detect the different texture of different types tomatoes," he says. "Not something I thought I would ever have mastered before losing my sense of smell."

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Taste and smell: What is it like to live without them?

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Double Olympic gold medallist James Cracknell says he is unable to smell or taste very much due to a brain injury. What is life like without these sense?

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How does the way food looks or its smell influence taste?

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How does the way food looks or its smell influence taste?

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In a classic experiment, French researchers colored a white wine red with an odorless dye and asked a panel of wine experts to describe its taste.

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How does the way food looks or its smell influence taste?

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Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the world and shape our lives.

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A new study looks at what happens when a language doesn't have words for numbers

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A new study looks at what happens when a language doesn't have words for numbers

By Joshua Hartshorne

My seventh-grade English teacher exhorted us to study vocabulary with the following: "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." This compound notion that language allows you to have ideas otherwise un-haveable, and that by extension people who own different words live in different conceptual worlds -- called "Whorfianism" after its academic evangelist, Benjamin Lee Whorf -- is so pervasive in modern thought as to be unremarkable.

Eskimos, as is commonly reported, have myriads of words for snow, affecting how they perceive frozen percipitation. A popular book on English notes that, unlike English, "French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition ... and knowledge that results from understanding." Politicians try to win the rhetorical battle ("pro-life" vs. "anti-abortion"; "estate tax" vs. "death tax") in order to gain the political advantage.

For all its social success, Whorfianism has fared less well scientifically. Careful consideration of the examples above shows why. Try calling dry snow "dax" and wet snow "blicket," and see if you notice a change in how you think about snow. I didn't. The English book's statement assumes that if you don't have a word for something, you can't talk about it ... a claim that the sentence proves false. Finally, calling the law of October 26, 2001 the "USA Patriot Act" may have done as much to stain the word "patriot" as increase enthusiasm for the law.

Oh, and Eskimos don't have all that many words for snow.

In fact, scientists have had so much difficulty demonstrating that language affects thought that in 1994 renown psychologist Steven Pinker called Whorfianism dead. Since then, Whorfianism has undergone a small resurgence. For instance, Lera Boroditsky and colleagues found that speakers of Russian, which treats light blue and dark blue as primary colors, are faster to categorize shades of blue.

While fascinating and important work, these and other similar results are a bit short of showing that "the more words you know, the more thoughts you can have." The recent study that comes closest is an investigation of number.

Although number words and counting are a fixture of life in most cultures from the time we are old enough to play hide-and-go-seek, some languages have only a handful of number words. In a paper published in 2008, MIT cognitive neuroscientist Michael Frank and colleagues demonstrated that Pirahã, a language spoken by a small Amazonian community, has no number words at all. The research team simply asked Pirahã speakers to count different numbers of batteries, nuts and other common objects. Rather than having a word consistently used to describe "one X" a different word for "two Xs" and yet another word for "three Xs," the Pirahã used hói to describe a small number of objects, hoí to describe a slightly larger number, and baágiso for an even larger number. Basically, these words mean "around one," "some" and "many."

The lack of number words had a profound and surprising effect on what the Pirahã could do. In a series of experiments, the researchers presented Pirahã participants with some number of spools of thread. The participants' task was simply to give the researcher the same number of balloons. If the participants were allowed to line up the balloons next to the spools of thread one-by-one, they did fine. But if they weren't allowed this crutch -- for instance, if the spools of thread were dropped into a bucket one at a time, and then the participant had to produce the same number of balloons -- they failed. Although they were generally able to stay in the ballpark -- if a lot of spools went into the bucket, they produced a lot of balloons; a small number of spools, a small number of balloons -- their responses were basically educated guesses.

Could it be that the Pirahã not understand the concept of "same amount"? That's unlikely. When allowed to match the balloons to spools one-by-one, they succeeded in the task. Instead, it seems that they failed to give the same number of balloons only when they had to rely on memory.

This actually makes a lot of sense. Try to imagine exactly seventeen balloons in your head, but without counting them. It's impossible. Decades of research have shown that people can tell the difference between one object and two or between three objects and four without counting, but such fine distinctions with larger numbers like seventeen versus eighteen requires counting. You wouldn't match seventeen balloons to seventeen spools by sight alone. You would count the spools and then count out the same number of balloons.

But the Pirahã can't count. They don't have number words.

This suggests a different way of thinking about the influence of language on thought: words are very handy mnemonics. We may not be able to remember what seventeen spools looks like, but we can remember the word seventeen. In his landmark The Language of Thought, philosopher Jerry Fodor argued that many words work like acronyms. French students use the acronym bans to remember which adjectives go before nouns ("Beauty, Age, Number, Goodneess, and Size"). Similarly, sometimes its easier to remember a word (calculus, Estonia) than what the word stands for. We use the word, knowing that should it becomes necessary, we can search through our minds -- or an encyclopedia -- and pull up the relevant information (how to calculate an integral; Estonia's population, capital and location on a map). Numbers, it seems, work the same way.

I don't know whether my seventh-grade English teacher would be disappointed. Do more words mean more thoughts? Probably not. But more words do make it easier to remember those thoughts -- and sometimes that's just as important.

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A new study looks at what happens when a language doesn't have words for numbers

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'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed?

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'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed?

In April 2010 the informal online banter of the internet-savvy collided with the traditional and austere language of the court room.

Christopher Poole, founder of anarchic image message board 4Chan, had been called to testify during the trial of the man accused of hacking into US politician Sarah Palin's e-mail account.

During the questioning he was asked to define a catalogue of internet slang that would be familiar to many online, but which was seemingly lost on the lawyers.

At one point during the exchange, Mr Poole was asked to define "rickrolling".

"Rickroll is a meme or internet kind of trend that started on 4chan where users - it's basically a bait and switch. Users link you to a video of Rick Astley performing Never Gonna Give You Up," said Mr Poole.

"And the term "rickroll" - you said it tries to make people go to a site where they think it is going be one thing, but it is a video of Rick Astley, right?," asked the lawyer.

"He was some kind of singer?"

The internet prank was just one of several terms including "lurker", "troll" and "caps" that Mr Poole was asked to explain to a seemingly baffled court.

But that is hardly a surprise, according to David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor, who says that new colloquialisms spread like wildfire amongst groups on the net.

"The internet is an amazing medium for languages," he told BBC News.

"Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."

People using word play to form groups and impress their peers is a fairly traditional activity, he added.

"It's like any badge of ability, if you go to a local skatepark you see kids whose expertise is making a skateboard do wonderful things.

"Online you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the internet."

One example of this is evident in Ukraine, where a written variation of the national tongue has sprung up on internet blogs and message boards called "padronkavskiy zhargon" - in which words are spelled out phonetically.

It is often used to voice disapproval or anger towards another commentator, says Svitlana Pyrkalo, a producer at the BBC World Service Ukrainian Service.

"Computer slang is developing pretty fast in Ukraine," she said.

The Mac and Linux communities even have their own word for people who prefer Microsoft Windows - віндузятники (vinduzyatnyky literally means "Windowers" but the "nyky" ending makes it derogatory).

"There are some original words with an unmistakably Ukrainian flavour," said Ms Pyrkalo.

The dreaded force-quit process of pressing 'Control, Alt, Delete' is known as Дуля (dulya).

"A dulya is an old-fashioned Ukrainian gesture using two fingers and a thumb - something similar to giving a finger in Anglo-Saxon cultures," she said.

"And you need three fingers to press the buttons. So it's like telling somebody (a computer in this case) to get lost."

For English speakers there are cult websites devoted to cult dialects - "LOLcat" - a phonetic and deliberately grammatically incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, and "Leetspeak" in which some letters are replaced by numbers which stem from programming code.

"There are about a dozen of these games cooked up by a crowd of geeks who, like anybody, play language games," said Professor Crystal.

"They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. They are fashionable at the moment but will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."

For him, the efforts of those fluent in online tongues is admirable.

"They might not be reading Shakespeare and Dickens but they are reading and cooking up these amazing little games - and showing that they are very creative. I'm quite impressed with these movements."

One language change that has definitely been overhyped is so-called text speak, a mixture of often vowel-free abbreviations and acronyms, says Prof Crystal.

"People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it you find they're not," he said.

In fact only 10% of the words in an average text are not written in full, he added.

They may be in the minority but acronyms seem to anger as many people as they delight.

Stephen Fry once blasted the acronym CCTV (closed circuit television) for being "such a bland, clumsy, rythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word".

But his inelegant group of letters is one of many acronyms to earn a place in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The secret of their success is their longevity.

"We need evidence that people are using a word over a period of time," said Fiona McPherson, senior editor in the new words group at the OED.

She says the group looks for evidence that a word has been in use for at least five years before it can earn its place in the dictionary.

Such evidence comes in the form of correspondence from the public and trawling through dated material to find out when a term first started appearing.

Hence TMI (Too Much Information) and WTF (you may wish to look that one up for yourself) are in, while OMG (Oh My God) has yet to be included in the quarterly dictionary updates.

"Some people get quite exercised and say, 'do these things belong in our language?'," said Ms McPherson.

"But maybe this has always happened. TTFN [ta ta for now] is from the ITMA (It's That Man Again) radio series in the 1940s."

There is no doubt that technology has had a "significant impact" on language in the last 10 years, says Ms McPherson.

Some entirely new words like the verb 'to google', or look something up on a search engine, and the noun 'app', used to describe programmes for smartphones (not yet in the OED), have either been recently invented or come into popular use.

But the hijacking of existing words and phrases is more common.

Ms McPherson points out that the phrase "social networking" debuted in the OED in 1973. Its definition - "the use or establishment of social networks or connections" - has only comparatively recently been linked to internet-based activities.

"These are words that have arisen out of the phenomenon rather than being technology words themselves," she added.

"Wireless in the 1950s meant a radio. It's very rare to talk about a radio now as a wireless, unless you're of a particular generation or trying to be ironic. The word has taken on a whole new significance."

For Prof Crystal it is still too early to fully evaluate the impact of technology on language.

"The whole phenomenon is very recent - the entire technology we're talking about is only 20 years old as far as the popular mind is concerned."

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a word is that it becomes too mainstream, he argues.

"Remember a few years ago, West Indians started talking about 'bling'. Then the white middle classes started talking about it and they stopped using it.

"That's typical of slang - it happens with internet slang as well."

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites.

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'To Google' has become a universally understood verb and some countries are developing their own internet slang. But is everyone up to speed?

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Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century.

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Does Your Language Shape How You Think? (Published 2010)

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The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all.

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History is littered with animals who have "communicated" with humans, but as work with dolphins shows it is difficult to strike up a two-way conversation.

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"What's that Flipper? The treasure is over there?" So went a typical plotline for the popular TV series featuring the cute, bottlenosed dolphin who could communicate with his human guardians, and who - in the time-honoured fashion - used his animal powers to apprehend criminals.

The idea that animals like Flipper can communicate with humans is not just the preserve of the small and big screen. History is littered with celebrity animals who have communicated with human scientists, with varying degrees of success. Many apes, including Washoe and Nim the chimps, and Kanzi the bonobo, have learned to communicate by using sign language or symbols on a keyboard. Alex, an African grey parrot learned over 100 English words, which he could use and combine appropriately; his poignant last words to Irene Pepperberg, his scientist handler, were "You be good. I love you. See you tomorrow."

Dolphins hold a particular fascination; we are captivated by their intelligence and beauty, and swimming with dolphins features regularly on lists of things to do before you die. Denise Herzing has a lifetime of such experiences. For the last 27 years, she has been swimming with a group of Atlantic spotted dolphins in Florida as part of the Wild Dolphin Project. She can identify every individual and they, in turn, seem to trust and recognise her. It is a solid foundation for the boldest attempt yet to talk with dolphins.
One-way chat
"Talk" is tricky to define. A SeaWorld trainer who prompts a dolphin to jump for fish is arguably communicating with it. But such simple one-way interactions are a far cry from the conversational world of Dr Doolittle. Here, the dolphin responds, but says nothing intelligible back. Herzing's vision is much more ambitious - she wants to establish two-way communication with her dolphins, with both species exchanging and understanding information.

The idea of talking to dolphins has a long and chequered history. It was widely publicised in the 1960s by John Lilly, who argued that dolphins have such large brains that they must be extremely intelligent and have a natural language. All we had to do was to "crack the code". Much of Lilly's work was highly questionable. He once flooded a house to keep a captive dolphin, instigated failed attempts to teach them spoken English, and even gave the animals LSD (while taking the drug himself). But there is no denying his influence in popularising the idea of two-way dolphin communication. "He said that in a few years, we will have established complex dialogue with them," says Justin Gregg from the Dolphin Communication Project. "And he was saying that every few years."

Lilly was right about dolphin intelligence, but not dolphin language. A true language involves small elements that combine into larger chains, to convey complex, and sometimes abstract, information. And there is no good evidence that dolphins have that, despite their rich repertoire of whistles and clicks.
Little less conversation
Wild dolphin communication is hard to study. They are fast-moving and hard to follow. They travel in groups, making it hard to assign any call to a specific individual. And they communicate at frequencies beyond what humans can hear. Despite these challenges, there is some evidence that dolphins use sounds to represent concepts. Each individual has its own "signature whistle" which might act like a name. Developed in the first year of life, dolphins use these whistles as badges of identity, and may modulate them to reflect motivation and mood. This year, a study showed that when wild dolphins meet, one member of each group exchanges signature whistles.

But beyond this, dolphin chat is still largely mysterious. "To communicate with dolphins, we need to understand how they communicate with each other in the natural world," says psychologist Stan Kuczaj at the University of Southern Mississippi. "We still don't know basic things like what the units of dolphin communication are. Is a whistle the equivalent of a "word" or a "short sentence"? We don't know."

We may not be able to understand them yet, but we know that dolphins can learn to understand us. In the 1970s, Louis Herman taught an invented sign language, complete with basic syntax, to a bottlenose dolphin called Akeakamai. For example, if he made the gestures for "person surfboard fetch", Akeakamai would bring the board to him, while "surfboard person fetch" would prompt her to carry the person to the board. His experiments showed that dolphins could understand hundreds of words, and how those words could be combined using grammatical rules.
What's my motivation?
Herman's work was groundbreaking, but this was still one-way communication. It focused on comprehension, not conversation. In the 1980s, Diana Reiss had more luck by showing that dolphins could use underwater keyboards to make basic requests. When they prodded keys with their snouts, a whistle would play and Reiss gave a reward like a ball. Eventually, the dolphins used the artificial whistles to ask for the associated rewards.

But as conversations go, these were shallow ones. "The dolphins were only really interested in communicating about needs that they had, like a tool they needed or a fish they wanted," says Kuczaj, who was involved in a similar project at DisneyWorld's EPCOT Center. "We hoped they would also comment on other things going on in the aquarium but they didn't."

It is difficult persuading dolphins to learn some arbitrary signals, like a whistle signifying a ball, and then use them in a social context, admits Gregg. "They don't seem to run with it the same way that chimps or bonobos have. The big stumbling block is motivation. Dolphins don't seem to care."

Herzing disagrees. She notes that captive animals, which often lack stimulation, will respond to systems like the underwater keyboards. She thinks that these experiments disappointed because they were cumbersome. "The dolphins swim very fast and went to where they were requested, but humans are very slow in the water. There wasn't enough real-time interaction."
Chat line
Herzing is trying to solve that problem with Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT) - a lighter, portable version of the underwater keyboards. It consists of a small phone-sized computer, strapped to a diver's chest and connected to two underwater recorders, or hydrophones. The computer will detect and differentiate dolphin sounds, including the ultrasonic ones we cannot hear, and use flashing lights to tell the diver which animal made the call.

The CHAT device can also play artificial calls, allowing Herzing to coin dolphin-esque "words" for things that are relevant to them, like "seaweed" or "wave-surfing". She hopes the dolphins will mimic the artificial whistles, and use them voluntarily. By working with wild animals, and focusing on objects in their natural environment, rather than balls or hoops, Herzing hopes to pique their interest.

Herzing emphasises that her device is not a translator. It will not act as a dolphin-human Rosetta stone. Instead, she wants both species create a joint form of communication that they are both invested in. She hopes that CHAT will tap into the "natural propensity" that dolphins have "for creating common information when they have to interact". For example, in Costa Rica, distantly related bottlenose and Guyana dolphins will adopt a shared collection of sounds when they come together, using sounds that they don't use when apart.

As with past projects, all of this depends on whether the dolphins play along. Kuczaj says, "It's a remarkable challenge because she is working with wild dolphins so they've got the option to participate or not." Here, Herzing has an edge, since the animals know her, and vice versa. "We've been observing them underwater every summer since 1985," she says. "I know the individuals personally - their personalities and relationships. We've got a pretty good handle on what they'd be interested in." Perhaps this combination of cutting-edge technology and old-school fieldwork will finally produce the conversations that have eluded scientists for so long.
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History is littered with animals who have "communicated" with humans, but as work with dolphins shows it is difficult to strike up a two-way conversation.

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How much could you know about the world if you had no language or means of communicating with other people?

How easy is it to misunderstand the body language of someone from a different culture?

?? Do you think animals have language ?

?? Is it possible to think without language? How does language facilitate, extend, direct or limit thinking?

?? To what extent is your use of language accompanied by images?  Does every word conjure up an image or only some of them?

?? Do you think communication would be improved if we got rid of vague words, or do you think they sometimes serve a useful purpose?

?? To what extent can punctuation help to reduce the ambiguity of a sentence?

?? In what ways does learning a second language contribute to, and expand, your knowledge of the world? Give some examples of words in your own language, or your second language, which have no precise English equivalent.

?? What are the main advantages and disadvantages of classifying people according to their nationality?

?? If you are fluent in more than one language, to what extent do you think differently when you switch between languages?

??  What kinds of experiences elude language altogether? Do we have alternative means of communication?

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How the language you speak changes your view of the world

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How the language you speak changes your view of the world

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Bilinguals get all the perks. Better job prospects, a cognitive boost and even protection against dementia.

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German speakers think more about their goals. German speaking via FuzzBones/www.shutterstock.com

Bilinguals get all the perks. Better job prospects, a cognitive boost and even protection against dementia. Now new research shows that they can also view the world in different ways depending on the specific language they are operating in.

The past 15 years have witnessed an overwhelming amount of research on the bilingual mind, with the majority of the evidence pointing to the tangible advantages of using more than one language. Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.

Just as regular exercise gives your body some biological benefits, mentally controlling two or more languages gives your brain cognitive benefits. This mental flexibility pays big dividends especially later in life: the typical signs of cognitive ageing occur later in bilinguals - and the onset of age-related degenerative disorders such as dementia or Alzheimer's are delayed in bilinguals by up to five years.

Germans know where they're going

In research we recently published in Psychological Science, we studied German-English bilinguals and monolinguals to find out how different language patterns affected how they reacted in experiments.

We showed German-English bilinguals video clips of events with a motion in them, such as a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards the supermarket and then asked them to describe the scenes.

When you give a scene like that to a monolingual German speaker they will tend to describe the action but also the goal of the action. So they would tend to say "A woman walks towards her car" or "a man cycles towards the supermarket". English monolingual speakers would simply describe those scenes as "A woman is walking" or "a man is cycling", without mentioning the goal of the action.

The worldview assumed by German speakers is a holistic one - they tend to look at the event as a whole - whereas English speakers tend to zoom in on the event and focus only on the action.

The linguistic basis of this tendency appears to be rooted in the way different grammatical tool kits situated actions in time. English requires its speakers to grammatically mark events that are ongoing, by obligatorily applying the -ing morpheme: "I am playing the piano and I cannot come to the phone" or "I was playing the piano when the phone rang". German doesn't have this feature.

Research with second language users shows a relationship between linguistic proficiency in such grammatical constructions and the frequency with which speakers mention the goals of events.

In our study we also found that these cross-linguistic differences extend beyond language usage itself, to nonverbal categorisation of events. We asked English and German monolinguals to watch a series of video clips that showed people walking, biking, running, or driving. In each set of three videos, we asked subjects to decide whether a scene with an ambiguous goal (a woman walks down a road toward a parked car) was more similar to a clearly goal-oriented scene (a woman walks into a building) or a scene with no goal (a woman walks down a country lane).

German monolinguals matched ambiguous scenes with goal-oriented scenes more frequently than English monolinguals did. This difference mirrors the one found for language usage: German speakers are more likely to focus on possible outcomes of people's actions, but English speakers pay more attention to the action itself.

Switch languages, change perspective

When it came to bilingual speakers, they seemed to switch between these perspectives based on the language context they were given the task in. We found that Germans fluent in English were just as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. But a similar group of German-English bilinguals tested in English in the United Kingdom were just as action-focused as native English speakers.

In another group of German-English bilinguals, we kept one language in the forefront of their minds during the video-matching task by making participants repeat strings of numbers out loud in either English or German. Distracting one language seemed to automatically bring the influence of the other language to the fore.

When we "blocked" English, the bilinguals acted like typical Germans and saw ambiguous videos as more goal-oriented. With German blocked, bilingual subjects acted like English speakers and matched ambiguous and open-ended scenes. When we surprised subjects by switching the language of the distracting numbers halfway through the experiment, the subjects' focus on goals versus process switched right along with it.

These findings are in line with other research showing distinct behaviour in bilinguals depending on the language of operation. Israeli Arabs are more likely to associate Arab names such as Ahmed and Samir with positive words in an Arabic language context than in a Hebrew one, for example.

People self-report that they feel like a different person when using their different languages and that expressing certain emotions carries different emotional resonance depending on the language they are using.

When judging risk, bilinguals also tend to make more rational economic decisions in a second language. In contrast to one's first language, it tends to lack the deep-seated, misleading affective biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived. So the language you speak in really can affect the way you think.

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How the language you speak changes your view of the world

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Bilinguals think differently depending on the language they're operating in.

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It’s hard to find clarity in a sea of over 7,000 languages. With Ethnologue you can get the details right – and make wise decisions for your business, clients, or research.

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This site aims to help students learn about - and teachers teach - the English language.
See The Site Map for a full list of pages and themes.
There are tasks to help work through the material, expert advice and strategies for identifying unknown texts..

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Understanding Body Language & The Signals...

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Understanding Body Language & The Signals...

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Body language is one our most subtle, yet important modes of communication. Understanding body language, or non-verbal communication, enables us to positively develop our communication style, and improve our relationships with people around us.

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Body language is an important part of communication. We discuss unspoken communication and what it might mean.

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How authors from Dickens to Dr Seuss invented the words we use every day

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How authors from Dickens to Dr Seuss invented the words we use every day

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The English language didn't just spring from nowhere. So who introduced such gems as 🤬, meme, nerd and butterfingers?

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Charles Dickens used the term in his 1836 The Pickwick Papers (more properly called The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club): "At every bad attempt at a catch, and every failure to stop the ball, he launched his personal displeasure at the head of the devoted individual in such denunciations as 'Ah, ah!-stupid'-'Now, butter-fingers'-'Muff'- 'Humbug'-and so forth."

Originally this word meant to be decorated or covered with chintz, a calico print from India, or suggestive of a pattern in chintz. It was extended to mean unfashionable, cheap or stingy, coming from none other than Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name George Eliot, who wrote in a letter in 1851: "The effect is chintzy and would be unbecoming."

Blend of "chuckle" and "snort", created by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass: "'O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!' He chortled in his joy." Carroll also coined the term "portmanteau word", for merging two existing words into one new word. In such blending, parts of two familiar words are yoked together (usually the first part of one word and the second part of the other) to produce a word that conveys the meanings and sound of the old ones - smog from "smoke" + "fog", and brunch from "breakfast" + "lunch". Portmanteau itself is a quaint word for suitcase, originally combining the French porter (to carry) and manteau (cloak) to make a name for a cloak-transporting suitcase designed for carrying on horseback. Lexicographer Ben Zimmer has noted that the portmanteau "remains perhaps the most popular method of new word formation in English, from slang ('chillax', 'geektastic') to business jargon ('webinar,' 'advertorial')".

Testicles in the allegorical sense, representing courage and tenacity. Imported from Spanish by Ernest Hemingway in his 1932 nonfiction bullfighting opus Death in the Afternoon: "It takes more cojones," he wrote, "to be a sportsman where death is a closer party to the game."

A word created by the novelist, biographer and former advertising copywriter William E Woodward for the process of exposing false claims. He used it in his 1923 novel Bunk, in which he also created the term debunker and debunking. Others would later debunk Woodward's biographies of George Washington and Ulysses S Grant, which attempted to debunk great figures of history but were generally dismissed as exercises in cynicism and little else.

As a metaphor applied to a person upon whom other people "wipe their boots". First used in this sense by Dickens in Great Expectations: "She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats under our feet, and how we dared to use her so."

William Shakespeare coined this word for something that is offensive to the eye. In The Taming of the Shrew, Baptista demanded: "Doff this habit, shame to your estate, an eyesore to our solemn festival!" The term was invoked with proper acknowledgment to its coiner in 2005 when plans were unveiled to build a massive metal shed in Stratford-on-Avon as a temporary home for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. It was immediately dubbed the Rusty Shed.

A term created by Norman Mailer in 1973 for a piece of information that becomes accepted as a fact, although it is not actually true; or an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print. Mailer wrote in Marilyn: "Factoids ... that is, facts which have no existence before appearing in a magazine or newspaper, creations which are not so much lies as a product to manipulate emotion in the Silent Majority." Lately, factoid has come to mean a trivial fact. That usage makes it a contranym (also called a Janus word) in that it means both one thing and its opposite, such as cleave (to cling or to split) or sanction (to permit or to punish).

One who advocates social, political and all other rights of women equal to those of men. Created by Alexandre Dumas (fils) in 1873 as féministe, translated as feminist by G Vandenhoff and identified in his translation as a neologism: "The feminists [Vr. féministes] (excuse this neologism) say, with perfectly good intentions, too: All the evil rises from the fact that we will not allow that woman is the equal of man."

Coined by the Royal Naval Air Service sometime during the first world war, this word was made known by a children's book called The Gremlins: A Royal Air Force Story, written in 1943 by Roald Dahl. According to the story, a gremlin is a small creature that causes mechanical problems in aircraft. After 1943, gremlins were blamed by Allied aircraft personnel for various mechanical and engine problems during the second world war. The name was bestowed on a small car by American Motors, but given its association with mechanical problems, it was replaced by Spirit in 1978.

A ploy in which an attractive person, usually a woman, lures another, usually a man, into revealing information; by extension, a person employing such a ploy. The term first came into play in 1974 in novelist John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: "You see, long ago when I was a little boy I made a mistake and walked into a honey-trap."

Coined by Jeremy Bentham in the book An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation published in 1789. In the very first instance where the term appears, it is aligned with the word "jurisprudence". International jurisprudence is suggested by the author to replace the term law of nations, which he deems to be "a misnomer".

Word coined by Alice Rush McKeon, a fierce and early advocate of highway beautification ... Her 1931 book The Litterbug Family was instrumental in passing the first billboard-control law in her home state of Maryland.

The fundamental units of culture, like DNA. First coined in 1976 by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, a meme, according to one neat summation, "represents ideas, behaviours or styles that spread from person to person. It can be a trendy dance, a viral video, a new fashion, a technological tool or a catchphrase. Like viruses, memes arise, spread, mutate and die."

A small computer employing microprocessors based on a single chip. In the July 1956 issue of the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Isaac Asimov debuted the term in a story called The Dying Night in this line: "It had become the hallmark of the scientist, much as ... the microcomputer that of the statistician."

James Fenimore Cooper's term for a man of superior strength. He first used it in 1838 in Homeward Bound: "I suppose these muscle men will not have much use for any but the oyster-knives, as I am informed they eat with their fingers." According to the OED, the use of the term to mean a man who uses force to get his way does not come into the language until 1929.

The word first appears in print in 1950 in the children's book If I Ran the Zoo by American children's writer Dr Seuss. In the book, a boy named Gerald McGrew makes a great number of delightfully extravagant claims as to what he would do if he were in charge at the zoo where, he insists, the animals housed there were boring. Among these fanciful schemes is: "And then just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And bring back an IT-KUTCH, a PREEP, and a PROO, A NERKLE, a NERD, and SEERSUCKER, too!"

The accompanying illustration for nerd shows a grumpy Seuss creature with unruly hair and sideburns, wearing a black T-shirt. For whatever reasons, it-kutch, preep, proo and nerkle have never been enshrined in any dictionary.

Originally a fictional university introduced in William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Pendennis: "'Rough and ready, your chum seems,' the Major said. 'Somewhat different from your dandy friends at Oxbridge.'" Later, it was taken as a composite for Oxford and Cambridge as a way of distinguishing those two universities from other British universities.

For book 1 of his epic poem Paradise Lost, published in 1667, John Milton invented Pandemonium - from the Greek pan (all), and daimon (evil spirit), literally "a place for all the demons" - or, as Milton first expressed in the poem: "A solemn Councel forthwith to be held At Pandæmonium, the high Capital Of Satan and his Peers." Later in the work he calls it the "citie and proud seat of Lucifer". By the end of the century, Pandemonium had become a synonym not just for hell, but, because the devils created a lot of noise, uproar and tumult. In 1828, Edward Bulwer-Lytton applied it to a common location: "We found ourselves in that dreary pandaemonium ... a Gin-shop." Today, the term is applied to any scene of disarray, confusion or even heightened activity as in the headline: iPad pandemonium.

No one had an English word for someone who goes about on foot until 1791, when William Wordsworth coined the noun.

Coinage of Czech writer Karel Čapek's in his 1921 work R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). Čapek took the Czech term for "serf labor" and adopted it to the animatrons that we think of today. Asimov invented the words robotic and robotics after Čapek, in 1941.

General term for a misfit. From the name for a cartoon character created for Yank magazine by American cartoonist George Baker in 1942 for a hapless and blundering army private.

A timid person; a coward. Introduced in 1933 by US author Dorothy Parker in a short story The Waltz with this line: "Oh, yes, do let's dance together. It's so nice to meet a man who isn't scaredy-cat about catching my beri-beri."

The word was coined in 1840 by the Reverend William Whewell in his book The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, which contained a 70-page section on the Language of Science. In it he discusses how the new words of science should be constructed. He then coins the universally accepted term physicist, remarking that the existing term physician cannot be used in that sense. He then moves on to the larger concept. "We need very much a name to describe a cultivator of science in general. I should incline to call him a scientist." The word that scientist replaced was philosopher. An account of this coinage in Word Study, a newsletter published by Merriam-Webster in 1948, noted: "Few deliberately invented words have gained such wide currency, and many people will be surprised to learn that it is just over a century old."

A wedding made in haste or under duress by reason of the bride's pregnancy. The term and the concept were introduced in print by Sinclair Lewis in 1927 in his novel Elmer Gantry: "There were, in those parts and those days, not infrequent ceremonies known as 'shotgun weddings.'"

To suffer a great betrayal; to be destroyed by the bad faith of another, especially one who you trusted. The exact term and the action from which the metaphor derives is from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, which describes in heartrending detail the tragic breakup of black Kentucky families who were actually sold to plantations farther down the Mississippi river where conditions were harsher. The term existed before Stowe used it, but she infused it with a sense of tragedy and betrayal.

A miserly person; one who keeps his wad of paper money tightly rolled. This word first appears in 1900 in George Ade's More Fables, a book in which familiar stories were told in slang.

The word that supplanted mid-1930s coinage unlaydownable after Raymond Chandler said of a book in 1947, "I found it absolutely ... unputdownable."

Term coined by Ford Madox Ford for a not-yet-complete artistic, theatrical or musical work, often made available for public viewing or listening. Ford applied it for snippets of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which he published as the editor of the Transatlantic Review. (The term is now used to describe young athletes who are raw but talented.)

In 1971, Dr Wayne E Oates wrote Confessions of a Workaholic: The Facts about Work Addiction, adding a word to the lexicon of the English language. His concept was that work can become an addiction, akin to alcoholism. Oates remarked in an interview at the time the book was published that the work addict "drops out of the human community" in a drive for peak performance. Oates's use of -aholic opened the drawbridge for a host of new words implying addictions. Although chocoholic and cakeaholic were already in use, in the wake of workaholic, came shopaholics, computerholics and so on.
Extracted from Authorisms: Words Wrought by Authors by Paul Dickson, published by Bloomsbury at £14.99 on 3 July 2014. To order a copy for £11.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

This article was amended on 19 June 2014. An earlier version referred to James Joyce's Ulysses instead of Finnegans Wake, and misspelled "cleave" as "cleve".

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How authors from Dickens to Dr Seuss invented the words we use every day

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The English language didn't just spring from nowhere. So who introduced such gems as cojones, meme, nerd and butterfingers, asks Paul Dickson

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The power of the spoken word is a concept shared by many cultures and its roots go deep into pre-literate history.

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The power of the spoken word is a concept shared by many cultures. Can a word create a world?

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Language In Usehear it, speak it,understand it & use it

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Language In Usehear it, speak it,understand it & use it

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This site aims to help students learn about - and teachers teach - the English language.
See The Site Map for a full list of pages and themes.
There are tasks to help work through the material, expert advice and strategies for identifying unknown texts..

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A worldwide collaboration tostrengthen endangered languages

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A worldwide collaboration tostrengthen endangered languages

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Use the category buttons below to easily search our resources on information, academic publications, and research concerning the world’s endangered languages! Our resources include information on anthropology, sociology, education, cognitive science, environmental science, public policy, and more and have been uploaded by users and researchers alike.

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The Endangered Languages Project is a collaborative online platform for sharing knowledge and resources for endangered languages. Join this global effort to conserve linguistic diversity.

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"From Nazi to Chocolate, words play a vital role in our lives.
And each word has its own story.
But where do they come from? What do they mean? How do they change?
Some of these questions will be answered by "Words of the World" - a series of short videos presented by experts from the University of Nottingham's School of Modern Languages and Cultures."

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SCRABBLE® is a registered trademark. All intellectual property rights in and to the game are owned in the USA and Canada by Hasbro Inc., and the rest of the world by J.W. Spear & Sons Limited of Maidenhead, Berkshire, England, a subsidiary of Mattel Inc. Words with Friends is a trademark of Zynga With Friends.

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Why Can't Reason and Imagination Just Be Friends?

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Why Can't Reason and Imagination Just Be Friends?

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Surely the greatest scientific discoveries are the product of imaginative energy and curiosity no less intense or pure than that which animates Hamlet or King Lear. Still, the petty squabble between Reason and Imagination that began in the 17th century persists . . .

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Why Can’t Reason and Imagination Just Be Friends?

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Surely the greatest scientific discoveries are the product of imaginative energy and curiosity no less intense or pure than that which animates Hamlet or King Lear. Still, the petty squabble between Reason and Imagination that began in the 17th century persists . . .

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To imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are. One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one's own. Unlike perceiving and believing, imagining something does not require one to consider that something to be the case. Unlike desiring or anticipating, imagining something does not require one to wish or expect that something to be the case.

Imagination is involved in a wide variety of human activities, and has been explored from a wide range of philosophical perspectives. Philosophers of mind have examined imagination's role in mindreading and in pretense. Philosophical aestheticians have examined imagination's role in creating and in engaging with different types of artworks. Epistemologists have examined imagination's role in theoretical thought experiments and in practical decision-making. Philosophers of language have examined imagination's role in irony and metaphor.

Because of the breadth of the topic, this entry focuses exclusively on contemporary discussions of imagination in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. For an overview of historical discussions of imagination, see the sections on pre-twentieth century and early twentieth century accounts of entry on mental imagery; for notable historical accounts of imagination, see corresponding entries on Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Gilbert Ryle; for a more detailed and comprehensive historical survey, see Brann 1991; and for a sophisticated and wide-ranging discussion of imagination in the phenomenological tradition, see Casey 2000.

1. The Nature of Imagination

A variety of roles have been attributed to imagination across various domains of human understanding and activity ( section 3). Not surprisingly, it is doubtful that there is one component of the mind that can satisfy all the various roles attributed to imagination (Kind 2013). Nevertheless, perhaps guided by these roles, philosophers have attempted to clarify the nature of imagination in three ways. First, philosophers have tried to disambiguate different senses of the term "imagination" and, in some cases, point to some core commonalities amongst the different disambiguations ( section 1.1). Second, philosophers have given partial taxonomies to distinguish different types of imaginings ( section 1.2). Third, philosophers have located norms that govern paradigmatic imaginative episodes ( section 1.3).

1.1 Varieties of Imagination

There is a general consensus among those who work on the topic that the term " imagination " is used too broadly to permit simple taxonomy. Indeed, it is common for overviews to begin with an invocation of P.F. Strawson's remarks in "Imagination and Perception", where he writes:

The uses, and applications, of the terms "image", "imagine", "imagination", and so forth make up a very diverse and scattered family. Even this image of a family seems too definite. It would be a matter of more than difficulty to identify and list the family's members, let alone their relations of parenthood and cousinhood. (Strawson 1970: 31)

These taxonomic challenges carry over into attempts at characterization. In the opening chapter of Mimesis as Make-Believe -perhaps the most influential contemporary monograph on imagination-Kendall Walton throws up his hands at the prospect of delineating the notion precisely. After enumerating and distinguishing a number of paradigmatic instances of imagining, he asks:

What is it to imagine? We have examined a number of dimensions along which imaginings can vary; shouldn't we now spell out what they have in common?-Yes, if we can. But I can't. (Walton 1990: 19)

Leslie Stevenson (2003: 238) makes arguably the only recent attempt at a somewhat comprehensive inventory of the term's uses, covering twelve of "the most influential conceptions of imagination" that can be found in recent discussions in "philosophy of mind, aesthetics, ethics, poetry and ... religion".

1.2 Taxonomies of Imagination

To describe the varieties of imaginings, philosophers have given partial and overlapping taxonomies.

Some taxonomies are merely descriptive, and they tend to be less controversial. For example, Kendall Walton (1990) distinguishes between spontaneous and deliberate imagining (acts of imagination that occur with or without the one's conscious direction); between occurrent and nonoccurrent imaginings (acts of imagination that do or do not occupy the one's explicit attention); and between social and solitary imaginings (episodes of imagining that occur with or without the joint participation of several persons).

One notable descriptive taxonomy concerns imagining from the inside versus from the outside (Williams 1973; Wollheim 1973; see Ninan 2016 for an overview). To imagine from the outside that one is Napoleon involves imagining a scenario in which one is Napoleon. To imagine from the inside that one is Napoleon involves that plus something else: namely, that one is occupying the perspective of Napoleon. Imagining from the inside is essentially first-personal, imagining from the outside is not. This distinction between two modes of imagining is especially notable for its implications for thought experiments about the metaphysics of personal identity (Nichols 2008; Ninan 2009; Williams 1973).

Some taxonomies aim to be more systematic-to carve imaginings at their joints, so to speak-and they, as one might expect, tend to be more controversial.

Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft (2002) distinguishes creative imagination (combining ideas in unexpected and unconventional ways); sensory imagination (perception-like experiences in the absence of appropriate stimuli); and what they call recreative imagination (an ability to experience or think about the world from a perspective different from the one that experience presents). Neil Van Leeuwen (2013, 2014) takes a similar approach to delineate three common uses of "imagination" and cognate terms. First, these terms can be used to refer to constructive imagining, which concerns the process of generating mental representations. Second, these terms can be used to refer to attitude imagining, which concerns the propositional attitude one takes toward mental representations. Third, these terms can be used to refer to imagistic imagining, which concerns the perception-like format of mental representations.

Amy Kind and Peter Kung (2016b) pose the puzzle of imaginative use-on the seeming irreconcilability between the transcendent uses of imagination, which enables one to escape from or look beyond the world as it is, and the instructive uses of imagination, which enables one to learn about the world as it is. Kind and Kung ultimately resolve the puzzle by arguing that the same attitude can be put to these seemingly disparate uses because the two uses differ not in kind, but in degree-specifically, the degree of constraint on imaginings.

Finally, varieties of imagination might be classified in terms of their structure and content. Consider the following three types of imaginings, each illustrated with an example. When one imagines propositionally, one represents to oneself that something is the case. So, for example, Juliet might imagine that Romeo is by her side. To imagine in this sense is to stand in some mental relation to a particular proposition (see the entry on propositional attitude reports). When one imagines objectually, one represents to oneself a real or make-believe entity or situation (Yablo 1993; see also Martin 2002; Noordhof 2002; O'Shaughnessy 2000). So, for example, Prospero might imagine an acorn or a nymph or the city of Naples or a wedding feast. To imagine in this sense is to stand in some mental relation to a representation of an (imaginary or real) entity or state of affairs. When one imagines X-ing, one simulatively represents to oneself some sort of activity or experience (Walton 1990). So, for example, Ophelia might imagine seeing Hamlet or getting herself to a nunnery. To imagine in this sense is to stand in a first-personal mental relation to some (imaginary or real) behavior or perception.

1.3 Norms of Imagination

There are general norms that govern operations of imagination (Gendler 2003).

Mirroring is manifest to the extent that features of the imaginary situation that have not been explicitly stipulated are derivable via features of their real-world analogues, or, more generally, to the extent that imaginative content is taken to be governed by the same sorts of restrictions that govern believed content. For example, in a widely-discussed experiment conducted by Alan Leslie (1994), children are asked to engage in an imaginary tea party. When an experimenter tips and "spills" one of the (empty) teacups, children consider the non-tipped cup to be "full" (in the context of the pretense) and the tipped cup to be "empty" (both within and outside of the context of the pretense). In fact, both make-believe games and more complicated engagements with the arts are governed by principles of generation, according to which prompts or props prescribe particular imaginings (Walton 1990).

Quarantining is manifest to the extent that events within the imagined or pretended episode are taken to have effects only within a relevantly circumscribed domain. So, for example, the child engaging in the make-believe tea party does not expect that "spilling" (imaginary) "tea" will result in the table really being wet, nor does a person who imagines winning the lottery expect that when she visits the ATM, her bank account will contain a million dollars. More generally, quarantining is manifest to the extent that proto-beliefs and proto-attitudes concerning the imagined state of affairs are not treated as beliefs and attitudes relevant to guiding action in the actual world.

Although imaginative episodes are generally governed by mirroring and quarantining, both may be violated in systematic ways.

Mirroring gives way to disparity as a result of the ways in which (the treatment of) imaginary content may differ from (that of) believed content. Imagined content may be incomplete (for example, there may be no fact of the matter (in the pretense) just how much tea has spilled on the table) or incoherent (for example, it might be that the toaster serves (in the pretense) as a logical-truth inverter). And content that is imagined may give rise to discrepant responses, most strikingly in cases of discrepant affect-where, for example, the imminent destruction of all human life is treated as amusing rather than terrifying.

Quarantining gives way to contagion when imagined content ends up playing a direct role in actual attitudes and behavior (see also Gendler 2008a, 2008b). This is common in cases of affective transmission, where an emotional response generated by an imagined situation may constrain subsequent behavior. For example, imagining something fearful (such as a tiger in the kitchen) may give rise to actual hesitation (such as reluctance to enter the room). And it also occurs in cases of cognitive transmission, where imagined content is thereby "primed" and rendered more accessible in ways that go on to shape subsequent perception and experience. For example, imagining some object (such as a sheep) may make one more likely to "perceive" such objects in one's environment (such as mistaking a rock for a ram).

2. Imagination in Cognitive Architecture

One way to make sense of the nature of imagination is by drawing distinctions, giving taxonomies, and elucidating governing norms ( section 1). Another, arguably more prominent, way to make sense of the nature is by figuring out, in a broadly functionalist framework, how it fits in with more well-understood mental entities from folk psychology and scientific psychology (see the entry on functionalism).

There are two related tasks involved. First, philosophers have used other mental entities to define imagination by contradistinction (but see Wiltsher forthcoming for a critique of this approach). To give an oversimplified example, many philosophers hold that imagining is like believing except that it does not directly motivate actions. Second, philosophers have used other mental entities to understand the inputs and outputs of imagination. To give an oversimplified example, many philosophers hold that imagination does not output to action-generating systems.

Amongst the most widely-discussed mental entities in contemporary discussions of imagination are belief ( section 2.1), desire ( section 2.2), mental imagery ( section 2.3), memory ( section 2.4), and supposition ( section 2.5). The resolution of these debates ultimately rest on the extent to which the imaginative attitude(s) posited can fulfill the roles ascribed to imagination from various domains of human understanding and activity ( section 3).

2.1 Imagination and Belief

To believe is to take something to be the case or regard it as true (see the entry on belief). When one says something like "the liar believes that his pants are on fire", one attributes to the subject (the liar) an attitude (belief) towards a proposition (his pants are on fire). Likewise, when one says something like "the liar imagines that his pants are on fire", one attributes to the subject (the liar) an attitude (imagination) towards a proposition (his pants are on fire). The similarities and differences between the belief attribution and the imagination attribution point to similarities and differences between imagining and believing.

Imagining and believing are both cognitive attitudes that are representational. They take on the same kind of content: representations that stand in inferential relationship with one another. On the single code hypothesis, it is the sameness of the representational format that grounds functional similarities between imagining and believing (Nichols & Stich 2000, 2003; Nichols 2004a). As for their differences, there are two main options for distinguishing imagining and believing (Sinhababu 2016).

The first option characterizes their difference in normative terms. While belief aims at truth, imagination does not (Humberstone 1992; Shah & Velleman 2005). If the liar did not regard it as true that his pants are on fire, then it seems that he cannot really believe that his pants are on fire. By contrast, even if the liar did not regard it as true that his pants are on fire, he can still imagine that his pants are on fire. While the norm of truth is constitutive of the attitude of belief, it is not constitutive of the attitude of imagination. In dissent, Neil Sinhababu (2013) argues that the norm of truth is neither sufficient nor necessary for distinguishing imagining and believing.

The second option characterizes their difference in functional terms. One purported functional difference between imagination and belief concerns their characteristic connection to actions. If the liar truly believes that his pants are on fire, he will typically attempt to put out the fire by, say, pouring water on himself. By contrast, if the liar merely imagines that his pants are on fire, he will typically do no such thing. While belief outputs to action-generation system, imagination does not (Nichols & Stich 2000, 2003). David Velleman (2000) and Tyler Doggett and Andy Egan (2007) point to particular pretense behaviors to challenge this way of distinguishing imagining and believing. Velleman argues that a belief-desire explanation of children's pretense behaviors makes children "depressingly unchildlike". Doggett and Egan argue that during immersive episodes, pretense behaviors can be directly motivated by imagination. In response to these challenges, philosophers typically accept that imagination can have a guidance or stage-setting role in motivating behaviors, but reject that it directly outputs to action-generation system (Van Leeuwen 2009; O'Brien 2005; Funkhouser & Spaulding 2009; Everson 2007; Kind 2011; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002).

Another purported functional difference between imagination and belief concerns their characteristic connection to emotions. If the liar truly believes that his pants are on fire, then he will be genuinely afraid of the fire; but not if he merely imagines so. While belief evokes genuine emotions toward real entities, imagination does not (Walton 1978, 1990, 1997; see also related discussion of the paradox of fictional emotions in Supplement on Puzzles and Paradoxes of Imagination and the Arts). This debate is entangled with the controversy concerning the nature of emotions (see the entry on emotion). In rejecting this purported functional difference, philosophers also typically reject narrow cognitivism about emotions (Nichols 2004a; Meskin & Weinberg 2003; Weinberg & Meskin 2005, 2006; Kind 2011; Spaulding 2015; Carruthers 2003, 2006).

Currently, the consensus is that there exists some important difference between imagining and believing. Yet, there are two distinct departures from this consensus. On the one hand, some philosophers have pointed to novel psychological phenomena in which it is unclear whether imagination or belief is at work-such as delusions (Egan 2008a) and immersed pretense (Schellenberg 2013)-and argued that the best explanation for these phenomena says that imagination and belief exists on a continuum. In responding to the argument from immersed pretense, Shen-yi Liao and Tyler Doggett (2014) argue that a cognitive architecture that collapses distinctive attitudes on the basis of borderline cases is unlikely to be fruitful in explaining psychological phenomena. On the other hand, some philosophers have pointed to familiar psychological phenomena and argued that the best explanation for these phenomena says that imagination is ultimately reducible to belief. Peter Langland-Hassan (2012, 2014) argues that pretense can be explained with only reference to beliefs-specifically, beliefs about counterfactuals. Derek Matravers (2014) argues that engagements with fictions can be explained without references to imaginings.

2.2 Imagination and Desire

To desire is to want something to be the case (see the entry on desire). Standardly, the conative attitude of desire is contrasted with the cognitive attitude of belief in terms of direction of fit: while belief aims to make one's mental representations match the way the world is, desire aims to make the way the world is match one's mental representations. Recall that on the single code hypothesis, there exists a cognitive imaginative attitude that is structurally similar to belief. Is there a conative imaginative attitude-call it desire-like imagination (Currie 1997, 2002a, 2002b, 2010; Currie & Ravenscroft 2002), make-desire (Currie 1990; Goldman 2006), or i-desire (Doggett & Egan 2007, 2012)-that is structurally similar to desire?

The debates on the relationship between imagination and desire is, not surprisingly, thoroughly entangled with the debates on the relationship between imagination and belief. One impetus for positing a conative imaginative attitude comes from behavior motivation in imaginative contexts. Tyler Doggett and Andy Egan (2007) argue that cognitive and conative imagination jointly output to action-generation system, in the same way that belief and desire jointly do. Another impetus for positing a conative imaginative attitude comes from emotions in imaginative contexts (see related discussions of the paradox of fictional emotions and the paradoxes of tragedy and horror in Supplement on Puzzles and Paradoxes of Imagination and the Arts). Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft (2002) and Doggett and Egan (2012) argue the best explanation for people's emotional responses toward non-existent fictional characters call for positing conative imagination. Currie and Ravenscroft (2002), Currie (2010), and Doggett and Egan (2007) argue that the best explanation for people's apparently conflicting emotional responses toward tragedy and horror too call for positing conative imagination.

Given the entanglement between the debates, competing explanations of the same phenomena also function as arguments against conative imagination (Nichols 2004a, 2006b; Meskin & Weinberg 2003; Weinberg & Meskin 2005, 2006; Spaulding 2015; Kind 2011; Carruthers 2003, 2006; Funkhouser & Spaulding 2009; Van Leeuwen 2011). In addition, another argument against conative imagination is that its different impetuses call for conflicting functional properties. Amy Kind (2016b) notes a tension between the argument from behavior motivation and the argument from fictional emotions: conative imagination must be connected to action-generation in order for it to explain pretense behaviors, but it must be disconnected from action-generation in order for it to explain fictional emotions. Similarly, Shaun Nichols (2004b) notes a tension between Currie and Ravenscroft's (2002) argument from paradox of fictional emotions and argument from paradoxes of tragedy and horror.

2.3 Imagination, Imagery, and Perception

To have a (merely) mental image is to have a perception-like experience triggered by something other than the appropriate external stimulus; so, for example, one might have "a picture in the mind's eye or ... a tune running through one's head" (Strawson 1970: 31) in the absence of any corresponding visual or auditory object or event (see the entry on mental imagery). While it is propositional imagination that gets compared to belief and desire, it is sensory or imagistic imagination that get compared to perception (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002). Although it is possible to form mental images in any of the sensory modalities, the bulk of discussion in both philosophical and psychological contexts has focused on visual imagery.

Broadly, there is agreement on the similarity between mental imagery and perception in phenomenology, which can be explicated as a similarity in content (Nanay 2016b; see, for example, Kind 2001; Nanay 2015; Noordhof 2002). Potential candidates for distinguishing mental imagery and perception include intensity (Hume's Treatise of Human Nature; but see Kind 2017), voluntariness (McGinn 2004; Ichikawa 2009), causal relationship with the relevant object (Noordhof 2002); however, no consensus exists on features that clearly distinguish the two, in part because of ongoing debates about perception (see the entries on contents of perception and epistemological problems of perception).

What is the relationship between imaginings and mental imagery?

Historically, mental imagery is thought to be an essential component of imaginings. Aristotle's phantasia, which is sometimes translated as imagination, is a faculty that produces images ( De Anima; see entry on Aristotle's conception of imagination; but see Caston 1996). René Descartes ( Meditations on First Philosophy) and David Hume ( Treatise of Human Nature) both thought that to imagine just is to hold a mental image, or an impression of perception, in one's mind. However, George Berkeley's puzzle of visualizing the unseen ( Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous) arguably suggests the existence of a non-imagistic hypothetical attitude.

Against the historical orthodoxy, the contemporary tendency is to recognize that there is at least one species of imagination-propositional imagination-that does not require mental imagery. For example, Kendall Walton simply states, "imagining can occur without imagery" (1990: 13). In turn, against this contemporary tendency, Amy Kind (2001) argues that an image-based account can explain three crucial features of imagination-directedness, active nature, and phenomenological character-better than its imageless counterpart. As a partial reconciliation of the two, Peter Langland-Hassan (2015) develops a pluralist position on which there exists a variety of imaginative attitudes, including ones that can take on hybrid contents that are partly propositional and partly sensorily imagistic. (For a nuanced overview of this debate, see Gregory 2016: 103-106.)

Finally, the relationship between mental imagery and perception has potential implications for the connection between imagination and action. The orthodoxy on propositional belief-like imagination holds that imagination does not directly output to action-generation system; rather, the connection between the two is mediated by belief and desire. In contrast, the enactivist program in the philosophy of perception holds that perception can directly output to action-generation system (see, for example, Nanay 2013). Working from the starting point that imagistic imagination is similar to perception in its inclusion of mental imagery, some philosophers have argued for a similar direct connection between imagistic imagination and action-generation system (Langland-Hassan 2015; Nanay 2016a; Van Leeuwen 2011, 2016b). That is, there exist imagery-oriented actions that are analogous to perception-oriented actions. For example, Neil Van Leeuwen (2011) argues that an account of imagination that is imagistically-rich can better explain pretense behaviors than its propositional-imagination-only rivals. Furthermore, Robert Eamon Briscoe (2008, 2018) argues that representations that blend inputs from perception and mental imagery, which he calls "make-perceive", guide many everyday actions. For example, a sculptor might use a blend of the visual perception of a stone and the mental imagery of different parts of the stone being subtracted to guide their physical manipulation of the stone.

2.4 Imagination and Memory

To remember, roughly, is to represent something that is no longer the case. On the standard taxonomy, there are three types of memory. Nondeclarative memory involves mental content that is not consciously accessible, such as one's memory of how to ride a bike. Semantic declarative memory involves mental content that are propositional and not first-personal, such as one's memory that Taipei is the capital of Taiwan. Episodic declarative memory involves mental content about one's own past, such as one's memory of the birth of one's child. (See the entry on memory for a detailed discussion of this taxonomy, and especially the criterion of episodicity.) In situating imagination in cognitive architecture, philosophers have typically focused on similarities and differences between imagination and episodic declarative memory.

There are obvious similarities between imagination and memory: both typically involve imagery, both typically concern what is not presently the case, and both frequently involve perspectival representations. Thomas Hobbes ( Leviathan: 2.3) claims that "imagination and memory are but one thing, which for diverse consideration has diverse names". In making this bold statement, Hobbes represents an extreme version of continuism, a view on which imagination and memory refer to the same psychological mechanisms.

The orthodoxy on imagination and memory in the history of philosophy, however, is discontinuism, a view on which there are significant differences between imagination and memory, even if there are overlaps in their psychological mechanisms. Some philosophers find the distinction in internalist factors, such as the phenomenological difference between imagining and remembering. Most famously, David Hume sought to distinguish the two in terms of vivacity-"the ideas of the memory are much more lively and strong than those of the imagination" ( Treatise of Human Nature: 1.3; but see Kind 2017). Others who have adopted a phenomenological criterion include René Descartes, Bertrand Russell, and William James (De Brigard 2017). Other philosophers find the distinction in externalist factors, such as the causal connection that exists between memories and the past that is absent with imagination. Aristotle uses the causal connection criterion to distinguish between imagination and memory ( De Anima 451a2; 451a8-12; see De Brigard 2017). Indeed, nowadays the idea that a causal connection is essential to remembering is accepted as "philosophical common sense" (see the entry on memory; but see also De Brigard 2014 on memory traces). As such, it is unsurprising that discontinuism remains the orthodoxy. As J. O. Urmson (1967: 83) boldly claims, "One of these universally admitted distinctions is that between memory and imagination".

In recent years, two sets of findings from cognitive science has given philosophers reasons to push back against discontinuism.

The first set of findings concern distortions and confabulations. The traditional conception of memory is that it functions as an archive: past experiences are encapsulated and stored in the archive, and remembering is just passively retrieving the encapsulated mental content from the archive (Robins 2016). Behavioral psychology has found numerous effects that challenge the empirical adequacy of the archival conception of memory. Perhaps the most well-known is the misinformation effect, which occurs when a subject incorporates inaccurate information into their memory of an event-even inaccurate information that they received after the event (Loftus 1979 [1996]).

The second set of findings concern the psychological underpinnings of "mental time travel", or the similarities between remembering the past and imagining the future, which is also known as mental time travel (see Schacter et al. 2012 for a review). Using fMRI, neuroscientists have found a striking overlap in the brain activities for remembering the past and imagining the future, which suggest that the two psychological processes utilize the same neural network (see, for example, Addis et al. 2007; Buckner & Carroll 2007; Gilbert & Wilson 2007; Schacter et al. 2007; Suddendorf & Corballis 1997, 2007). The neuroscientific research is preceded by and corroborated by works from developmental psychology (Atance & O'Neill 2011) and on neurodivergent individuals: for example, the severely amnesic patient KC exhibits deficits with remembering the past and imagining the future (Tulving 1985), and also exhibits deficits with the generation of non-personal fictional narratives (Rosenbaum et al. 2009). Note that, despite the evocative contrast between "remembering the past" and "imagining the future", it is questionable whether temporality is the central contrast. Indeed, some philosophers and psychologists contend that temporality is orthogonal to the comparison between imagination and memory (De Brigard & Gessell 2016; Schacter et al. 2012).

These two set of findings have given rise to an alternative conception that sees memory as essentially constructive, in which remembering is actively generating mental content that more or less represent the past. The constructive conception of memory is in a better position to explain why memories can contain distortions and confabulations (but see Robins 2016 for complications), and why remembering makes use of the same neural networks as imagining.

In turn, this constructive turn in the psychology and philosophy of memory has revived philosophers' interest in continuism concerning imagination and memory. Kourken Michaelian (2016) explicitly rejects the causal connection criterion and defends a theory on which remembering, like imagining, centrally involves simulation. Karen Shanton and Alvin Goldman (2010) characterizes remembering as mindreading one's past self. Felipe De Brigard (2014) characterizes remembering as a special instance of hypothetical thinking. Robert Hopkins (2018) characterizes remembering as a kind of imagining that is controlled by the past. However, the philosophical interpretation of empirical research remain contested; in dissent, Dorothea Debus (2014, 2016) considers the same sets of findings but ultimately concludes that remembering and imagining remain distinct mental kinds.

2.5 Imagination and Supposition

To suppose is to form a hypothetical mental representation. There exists a highly contentious debate on whether supposition is continuous with imagination, which is also a hypothetical attitude, or whether there are enough differences to make them discontinuous. There are two main options for distinguishing imagination and supposition, by phenomenology and by function.

The phenomenological distinction standardly turns on the notion of vivacity: whereas imaginings are vivid, suppositions are not. Indeed, one often finds in this literature the contrast between "merely supposing" and "vividly imagining". Although vivacity has been frequently invoked in discussions of imagination, Amy Kind (2017) draws on empirical and theoretical considerations to argue that it is ultimately philosophically untenable. If that is correct, then the attempt to demarcate imagination and supposition by their vivacity is untenable too. More rarely, other phenomenological differences are invoked; for example, Brian Weatherson (2004) contends that "supposing can be coarse in a way that imagining cannot".

Table 1. Architectural similarities and differences between imagination and supposition (Weinberg & Meskin 2006).

There have been diverse functional distinctions attributed to the discontinuity between imagination and supposition, but none has gained universal acceptance. Richard Moran (1994) contends that imagination tends to give rise to a wide range of further mental states, including affective responses, whereas supposition does not (see also Arcangeli 2014, 2017). Tamar Szabó Gendler (2000a) contends that while attempting to imagine something like that female infanticide is morally right seems to generate imaginative resistance, supposing it does not (see the discussion on imaginative resistance in Supplement on Puzzles and Paradoxes of Imagination and the Arts). Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft (2002) contend that supposition involves only cognitive imagination, but imagination involves both cognitive and conative imagination. Alvin Goldman contends that suppositional imagination involves supposing that particular content obtains (for example, supposing that I am elated) but enactment imagination involves "enacting, or trying to enact, elation itself." (2006: 47-48, italics omitted). Tyler Doggett and Andy Egan (2007) contend that imagination tends to motivate pretense actions, but supposition tends not to. On Jonathan Weinberg and Aaron Meskin (2006)'s synthesis, while there are a few functional similarities, there are many more functional differences between imagination and supposition (Table 1).

There remain ongoing debates about specific alleged functional distinctions, and about whether the functional distinctions are numerous or fundamental enough to warrant discontinuism or not. Indeed, it remains contentious which philosophers count as continuists and which philosophers count as discontinuists (for a few sample taxonomies, see Arcangeli 2017; Balcerak Jackson 2016; Kind 2013).

3. Roles of Imagination

Much of the contemporary discussion of imagination has centered around particular roles that imagination is purported to play in various domains of human understanding and activity. Amongst the most widely-discussed are the role of imagination in understanding other minds ( section 3.1), in performing and recognizing pretense ( section 3.2), in characterizing psychopathology ( section 3.3), in engaging with the arts ( section 3.4), in thinking creatively ( section 3.5), in acquiring knowledge about possibilities ( section 3.6), and in interpreting figurative language ( section 3.7).

The variety of roles ascribed to imagination, in turn, provides a guide for discussions on the nature of imagination ( section 1) and its place in cognitive architecture ( section 2).

3.1 Mindreading

Mindreading is the activity of attributing mental states to oneself and to others, and of predicting and explaining behavior on the basis of those attributions. Discussions of mindreading in the 1990s were often framed as debates between "theory theory"-which holds that the attribution of mental states to others is guided by the application of some (tacit) folk psychological theory-and "simulation theory"-which holds that the attribution of mental states is guided by a process of replicating or emulating the target's (apparent) mental states, perhaps through mechanisms involving the imagination. (Influential collections of papers on this debate include Carruthers & Smith (eds.) 1996; Davies & Stone (eds.) 1995a, 1995b.) In recent years, proponents of both sides have increasingly converged on common ground, allowing that both theory and simulation play some role in the attribution of mental states to others (see Carruthers 2003; Goldman 2006; Nichols & Stich 2003). Many such hybrid accounts include a role for imagination.

On theory theory views, mindreading involves the application of some (tacit) folk psychological theory that allows the subject to make predictions and offer explanations of the target's beliefs and behaviors. On pure versions of such accounts, imagination plays no special role in the attribution of mental states to others. (For an overview of theory theory, see entry on folk psychology as a theory).

On simulation theory views, mindreading involves simulating the target's mental states so as to exploit similarities between the subject's and target's processing capacities. It is this simulation that allows the subject to make predictions and offer explanations of the target's beliefs and behaviors. (For early papers, see Goldman 1989; Gordon 1986; Heal 1986; for recent dissent, see, for example, Carruthers 2009; Gallagher 2007; Saxe 2005, 2009; for an overview of simulation theory, see entry on folk psychology as mental simulation).

Traditional versions of simulation theory typically describe simulation using expressions such as "imaginatively putting oneself in the other's place". How this metaphor is understood depends on the specific account. (A collection of papers exploring various versions of simulation theory can be found in Dokic & Proust (eds.) 2002.) On many accounts, the projection is assumed to involve the subject's imaginatively running mental processes "off-line" that are directly analogous to those being run "on-line" by the target (for example Goldman 1989). Whereas the "on-line" mental processes are genuine, the "off-line" mental processes are merely imagined. For example, a target that is deciding whether to eat sushi for lunch is running their decision-making processes "on-line"; and a subject that is simulating the target's decision-making is running the analogous processes "off-line"-in part, by imagining the relevant mental states of the target. Recent empirical work in psychology has explored the accuracy of such projections (Markman, Klein, & Suhr (eds.) 2009, section V; Saxe 2005, 2006, 2009.)

Though classic simulationist accounts have tended to assume that the simulation process is at least in-principle accessible to consciousness, a number of recent simulation-style accounts appeal to neuroscientific evidence suggesting that at least some simulative processes take place completely unconsciously. On such accounts of mindreading, no special role is played by conscious imagination (see Goldman 2009; Saxe 2009.)

Many contemporary views of mindreading are hybrid theory views according to which both theorizing and simulation play a role in the understanding of others' mental states. Alvin Goldman (2006), for example, argues that while mindreading is primarily the product of simulation, theorizing plays a role in certain cases as well. Many recent discussions have endorsed hybrid views of this sort, with more or less weight given to each of the components in particular cases (see Carruthers 2003; Nichols & Stich 2003.)

A number of philosophers have suggested that the mechanisms underlying subjects' capacity to engage in mindreading are those that enable engagement in pretense behavior (Currie & Ravenscroft 2002; Goldman 2006; Nichols & Stich 2003; for an overview of recent discussions, see Carruthers 2009.) According to such accounts, engaging in pretense involves imaginatively taking up perspectives other than one's own, and the ability to do so skillfully may rely on-and contribute to-one's ability to understand those alternate perspectives (see the entry on empathy). Partly in light of these considerations, the relative lack of spontaneous pretense in children with autistic spectrum disorders is taken as evidence for a link between the skills of pretense and empathy.

3.2 Pretense

Pretending is an activity that occurs during diverse circumstances, such as when children make-believe, when criminals deceive, and when thespians act (Langland-Hassan 2014). Although "imagination" and "pretense" have been used interchangeably (Ryle 1949), in this section we will use "imagination" to refer to one's state of mind, and "pretense" to refer to the one's actions in the world.

Different theories of pretense disagree fundamentally about what it is to pretend (see Liao & Gendler 2011 for an overview). Consequently, they also disagree about the mental states that enable one to pretend. Metarepresentational theories hold that engaging in pretend play requires the innate mental-state concept pretend (Baron-Cohen, Leslie, & Frith 1985; Friedman 2013; Friedman & Leslie 2007; Leslie 1987, 1994). To pretend is to represent one's own representations under the concept pretend. Behaviorist theories hold that engaging in pretend play requires a process of behaving-as-if (Harris 1994, 2000; Harris & Kavanaugh 1993; Jarrold et al. 1994; Lillard & Flavell 1992; Nichols & Stich 2003; Perner 1991; Rakoczy, Tomasello, & Striano 2004; Stich & Tarzia 2015). Different behaviorist theories explicate behaving-as-if in different ways, but all aim to provide an account of pretense without recourse to the innate mental-state concept pretend.

Philosophical and psychological theories have sought to explain both the performance of pretense and the recognition of pretense, especially concerning evidence from developmental psychology (see Lillard 2001 for an early overview). On the performance side, children on a standard developmental trajectory exhibit early indicators of pretend play around 15 months; engage in explicit prop-oriented play by 24 months; and engage in sophisticated joint pretend play with props by 36 months (Harris 2000; Perner, Baker, & Hutton 1994; Piaget 1945 [1951]). On the recognition side, children on a standard developmental trajectory distinguish pretense and reality via instinctual behavioral cues around 15-18 months; and start to do so via conventional behavioral cues from 36 months on (Friedman et al. 2010; Lillard & Witherington 2004; Onishi & Baillargeon 2005; Onishi, Baillargeon, & Leslie 2007; Richert and Lillard 2004).

Not surprisingly, the debate between theories of pretense often rest on interpretations of such empirical evidence. For example, Ori Friedman and Alan Leslie (2007) argue that behavioral theories cannot account for the fact that children as young as 15 months old can recognize pretend play and its normativity (Baillargeon, Scott, & He 2010). Specifically, they argue that behavioral theories do not offer straightforward explanations of this early development of pretense recognition, and incorrectly predicts that children systematically mistake other acts of behaving-as-if-such as those that stem from false beliefs-for pretense activities. In response, Stephen Stich and Joshua Tarzia (2015) has acknowledged these problems for earlier behaviorist theories, and developed a new behaviorist theory that purportedly explains the totality of empirical evidence better than metarepresentational rivals. Importantly, Stich and Tarzia argue that their account can better explain Angeline Lillard (1993)'s empirical finding that young children need not attribute a mental concept such as pretend to someone else in order to understand them as pretending.

The debate concerning theories of pretense has implications for the role of imagination in pretense. Behaviorist theories tend to take imagination as essential to explaining pretense performance; metarepresentational theories do not. (However, arguably the innate mental-state concept pretend posited by metarepresentational theories serve similar functions. See Nichols and Stich's (2000) discussion of the decoupler mechanism, which explicitly draws from Leslie 1987. Currie and Ravenscroft (2002) give a broadly behaviorist theory of pretense that does not require imagination.) Specifically, on most behaviorist theories, imagination is essential for guiding elaborations of pretense episodes, especially via behaviors (Picciuto & Carruthers 2016; Stich & Tarzia 2015).

Most recently, Peter Langland-Hassan (2012, 2014) has developed a theory that aims to explain pretense behavior and pretense recognition without appeal to either metarepresentation or imagination. Langland-Hassan argues that pretense behaviors can be adequately explained by beliefs, desires, and intentions-including beliefs in counterfactuals; and that the difference between pretense and sincerity more generally can be adequately characterized in terms of a person's beliefs, intentions, and desires. While Langland-Hassan does not deny that pretense is in some sense an imaginative activity, he argues that we do not need to posit a sui generis component of the mind to account for it.

3.3 Psychopathology

Autism and delusions have been-with much controversy-characterized as disorders of imagination. That is, the atypical patterns of cognition and behavior associated with each psychopathology have been argued to result from atypical functions of imagination.

Autism can be characterized in terms of a trio of atypicalities often referred to as "Wing's triad": problems in typical social competence, communication, and imagination (Happé 1994; Wing & Gould 1979). The imaginative aspect of autism interacts with other prominent roles of imagination, namely mindreading, pretense, and engagement with the arts (Carruthers 2009). Children with autism do not engage in spontaneous pretend play in the ways that typically-developing children do, engaging instead in repetitive and sometimes obsessional activities; and adults with autism often show little interest in fiction (Carpenter, Tomasello, & Striano 2005; Happé 1994; Rogers, Cook, & Meryl 2005; Wing & Gould 1979). The degree to which an imaginative deficit is implicated in autism remains a matter of considerable debate. Most radically, Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft (2002) have argued that, with respect to Wing's triad, problems in typical social competence and communication are rooted in an inability to engage in imaginative activities.

Delusions can be characterized as belief-like mental representations that manifest an unusual degree of disconnectedness from reality (Bortolotti & Miyazono 2015). Particularly striking examples would include Capgras and Cotard delusions. In the former, the sufferer takes her friends and family to have been replaced by imposters; in the latter, the sufferer takes himself to be dead. More mundane examples might include ordinary cases of self-deception.

One approach to delusions characterize them as beliefs that are dysfunctional in their content or formation. (For a representative collection of papers that present and criticize this perspective, see Coltheart & Davies (eds.) 2000). However, another approach to delusions characterize them as dysfunctions of imaginings. Currie and Ravenscroft (2002: 170-175) argue that delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by the subject as the result of an inability to keep track of the sources of one's thoughts. That is, a delusion is an imagined representation that is misidentified by the subject as a belief. Tamar Szabó Gendler (2007) argues that in cases of delusions and self-deceptions, imaginings come to play a role in one's cognitive architecture similar to that typically played by beliefs. Andy Egan (2008a) likewise argues that the mental states involved in delusions are both belief-like (in their connection to behaviors and inferences) and imagination-like (in their circumscription); however, he argues that these functional similarities suggest the need to posit an in-between attitude called "bimagination".

3.4 Engagement with the Arts

There is an entrenched historical connection between imagination and the arts. David Hume and Immanuel Kant both invoke imagination centrally in their exploration of aesthetic phenomena (albeit in radically different ways; see entries on Hume's aesthetics and Kant's aesthetics). R.G. Collingwood (1938) defines art as the imaginative expression of feeling (Wiltsher 2018; see entry on Collingwood's aesthetics). Roger Scruton (1974) develops a Wittgensteinian account of imagination and accords it a central role in aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment.

In contemporary philosophy, the most prominent theory of imagination's role in engagement with the arts is presented in Kendall Walton's Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990). (Although Walton uses "fictions" as a technical term to refer to artworks, his conception of the arts is broad enough to include both high-brow and low-brow; popular and obscure; a variety of specific arts such as poetry and videogames; and-as Stacie Friend (2008) clarifies-both fictive and non-fictive works.) Walton's core insight is that engagement with the arts is fundamentally similar to children's games of make-believe. When one engages with an artwork, one uses it as a prop in a make-believe game. As props, artworks generate prescriptions for imaginings. These prescriptions also determine the representational contents of artworks (that is, "fictionality", or what is true in a fictional world). When one correctly engages with an artwork, then, one imagines the representational contents as prescribed.

Out of all the arts, it is the engagement with narratives that philosophers have explored most closely in conjunction with imagination (see Stock 2013 for an overview). Gregory Currie (1990) offers an influential account of imagination and fiction, and Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (1996) discuss literature specifically. Indeed, this research program-despite many criticisms of Walton's specific theory-remains lively today (see, for example, papers in Nichols (ed.) 2006b). For example, Kathleen Stock (2017) argues that a specific kind of propositional imagination is essential for engagement with fictions. In dissent, Derek Matravers (2014) argues that, contra Walton, imagination is not essential for engagement with fictions.

Philosophers have also done much to articulate the connection between imagination and engagement with music (see the entry on philosophy of music; see also Trivedi 2011). Some philosophers focus on commonalities between engagement with narratives and engagement with music. For example, even though Walton (1990, 1994a, 1999) acknowledges that fictional worlds of music are much more indeterminate than fictional worlds of narratives, he maintains that the same kind of imagining used in experiencing narratives is also used in experiencing various elements of music, such as imagining continuity between movements and imagining feeling musical tension. Similarly, Andrew Kania (2015) argues that experiencing musical space and movement is imaginative like our experience of fictional narratives. Other philosophers draw parallels between engagement with music and other imaginative activities, namely as understanding other minds ( section 3.1) and interpreting metaphor ( section 3.7). As an example of the former, Jerrold Levinson (1996) argues that the best explanation of musical expressiveness requires listeners to experience music imaginatively-specifically, imagining a persona expressing emotions through the music. As an example of the latter, Scruton (1997) argues that musical experience is informed by spatial concepts applied metaphorically, and so imaginative perception is necessary for musical understanding (but see Budd 2003 for a criticism; see also De Clercq 2007 and Kania 2015). Stephen Davies (2005, 2011) and Peter Kivy (2002) notably criticize the imaginative accounts of engagement with music on empirical and theoretical grounds.

Other imaginative accounts of engagement with the arts can be found in entries on philosophy of film and philosophy of dance. Indeed, imagination's aesthetic significance extends beyond the arts; philosophical aestheticians have recognized the role of imagination in appreciating nature (Brady 1998) and in appreciating mundane objects, events, and activities (see the entry on aesthetics of the everyday).

Philosophers have sought to clarify the role of imagination in engagement with the arts by focusing on a number of puzzles and paradoxes in the vicinity. The puzzle of imaginative resistance explores apparent limitations on what can be imagined during engagements with the arts and, relatedly, what can be made fictional in artworks. The paradox of emotional response to fictions (widely known as "paradox of fiction") examines psychological and normative similarities between affective responses prompted by imaginings versus affective responses by reality-directed attitudes. The paradox of tragedy and the paradox of horror examine psychological and normative differences between affective responses prompted by imaginings versus affective responses by reality-directed attitudes. Finally, the puzzle of moral persuasion is concerned with real-world outputs of imaginative engagements with artworks; specifically, whether and how artworks can morally educate or corrupt. For more detail on each of these artistic phenomena, see the Supplement on Puzzles and Paradoxes of Imagination and the Arts.

3.5 Creativity

The idea that imagination plays a central role in creative processes can be traced back to Immanuel Kant ( Critique of Pure Reason), who takes artistic geniuses as paradigmatic examples of creativity. On Kant's account, when imagination aims at the aesthetic, it is allowed to engage in free play beyond the understanding available to oneself. The unconstrained imagination can thereby take raw materials and produce outputs that transcend concepts that one possesses.

While the precise characterization of creativity remains controversial (see Gaut & Kieran (eds.) 2018; Paul & Kaufman (eds.) 2014), contemporary philosophers typically conceive of it more broadly than Kant did. In addition to creative processes in the aesthetic realm, they also consider creative processes in, for example, "science, craft, business, technology, organizational life and everyday activities" (Gaut 2010: 1034; see also Stokes 2011). As an example, Michael Polanyi (1966) gives imagination a central role in the creative endeavor of scientific discovery, by refining and narrowing the solution space to open-ended scientific problems (see Stokes 2016: 252-256). And, in addition to creative processes of geniuses, contemporary philosophers also consider creative processes of ordinary people.

With this broadened scope, contemporary philosophers have followed Kant's lead in exploring the role of imagination in creativity (see Stokes 2016 for an overview). Berys Gaut (2003) and Dustin Stokes (2014) argue that two characteristic features of imagination-its lack of aim at truth and its dissociation from action-make it especially suitable for creative processes. Peter Carruthers (2002) argues that the same cognitive resources, including imagination, underlie children's pretend play and adults' creative thinking. Specifically, Carruthers hypothesizes that children's play evolutionarily developed as precursors to and practices for adults' creative thinking.

There are two points of disagreement regarding the role of imagination in creative processes. First, philosophers disagree about the nature and the strength of the connection between imagination and creativity. Kant takes imagination to be constitutive of creativity: what makes a creative process creative is the involvement of imagination aiming at the aesthetic (see also A. Hills & Bird forthcoming). Gaut and Stokes, by contrast, thinks there is only an imperfect causal connection between imagination and creativity: while imagination is useful for creative processes, there are creative processes that do not involve imagination and there are imaginings that are uncreative (see also Beaney 2005). Second, philosophers disagree about the type of imagination involved in creative processes. By hypothesizing a common evolutionary cause, Carruthers suggests that the same imaginative capacity is involved in pretense and in creativity. By contrast, perhaps echoing Kant's distinction of productive versus reproductive imagination, Currie and Ravenscroft (2002) sharply distinguish recreative imagination, which is involved in pretense and mindreading, from creative imagination.

3.6 Knowledge

Imagination plays a role in the acquisition of knowledge. Many philosophical arguments call on imagination when they appeal to metaphysical modal knowledge (see the entry on epistemology of modality; the papers collected in Gendler & Hawthorne (eds.) 2002; and Kung 2016 and Strohminger & Yli-Vakkuri 2017 for overviews). The kind of thought experiments that are regularly used in scientific theorizing is also plausibly premised on imaginative capacities (see the entry on thought experiments). As already discussed, people use imagination to understand the perspectives of others ( section 3.1). Moreover, people often make decisions via thinking about counterfactuals, or what would happen if things had been different from how they in fact are (see the entries on causation and counterfactual conditionals). However, the phenomenon of transformative experience has recently called into question which kind of imaginary scenarios are truly epistemically accessible. (For a representative collection of papers that explore different epistemic roles of imagination, see Kind & Kung (eds.) 2016a.)

Broadly speaking, thought experiments use imaginary scenarios to elicit responses that (ideally) grant people knowledge of possibilities. A special, but prominent, type of thought experiment in philosophy concerns the link between imagination, conceivability, and metaphysical possibility. René Descartes famously offered a modal argument in the Sixth Meditation, reasoning from the fact that he could clearly and distinctly conceive of his mind and body as distinct to the real distinctness between them. The current prevalence of similar modal arguments can be verified by entries on zombies and dualism. These modal arguments all rely, in some way, on the idea that what one can imagine functions as a fallible and defeasible guide to what is really possible in the broadest sense.

Pessimists, notably Peter Van Inwagen (1998: 70), doubt that imagination can give us an accurate understanding of scenarios that are "remote from the practical business of everyday life", such as those called upon in philosophical modal arguments. Optimists typically take it as a given that there is some connection between imagination and metaphysical modal knowledge, but focus on understanding where the connection is imperfect, such as when one (apparently) imagines the impossible. To just give a few examples, Saul Kripke (1972 [1980]), Stephen Yablo (1993), David Chalmers (2002), Dominic Gregory (2004), Timothy Williamson (2007, 2016), Peter Kung (2010), and Magdalena Balcerak Jackson (2018) have each developed a distinctive approach to this task. For example, Kripke adopts a redescription approach to modeling (some) modal errors: in some cases where one is apparently imagining the impossible, one is in fact imagining a possible scenario but misconstruing it as an impossible one. On this diagnosis, in such cases, the error resides not with imaginative capacities, but with the capacity to describe one's own imaginings.

Other thought experiments are scoped more narrowly; for example, scientific thought experiments are intended to allow people to explore nomic possibilities. Galileo ( On Motion) famously offered a thought experiment that disproved Aristotle's theory of motion, which predicts that heavier objects fall more quickly. In this thought experiment, Galileo asked people to imagine the falling of a composite of a light and heavy object versus the falling of the heavy object alone. When one runs the thought experiment-that is, when one elaborates on the starting point of this imaginary scenario-one notices an incoherence in Aristotle's theory: on the one hand, it should predict that the composite would fall more slowly because the light object would slow down the heavy object; on the other hand, it should also predict that the composite would fall more quickly because the composite is heavier than the heavy object alone. While it is incontrovertible that imagination is central to thought experiments, debates remain on whether imagination can be invoked in the context of justification (Gendler 2000b; Williamson 2016) or only in the context of discovery (Norton 1991, 1996; Spaulding 2016).

The role of imagination in counterfactual reasoning-and, in particular, the question of what tends to be held constant when one contemplates counterfactual scenarios-has been explored in detail in recent philosophical and psychological works (Byrne 2005; Williamson 2005, 2007, 2016). Williamson suggests that

When we work out what would have happened if such-and-such had been the case, we frequently cannot do it without imagining such-and-such to be the case and letting things run. (2005: 19)

It is imagination that lets one move from counterfactuals' antecedents to their consequents. Williamson (2016) argues that our imaginings have evolved to be suitably constrained, such that such counterfactual reasoning can confer knowledge. Indeed, he argues that if one were to be skeptical about gaining knowledge from such a hypothetical reasoning process, then one would be forced to be (implausibly) skeptical about much of ordinary reasoning about actuality. Developing an idea anticipated by Williamson (2007), Margot Strohminger and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri (forthcoming) argue that the same imaginative mechanisms that capable of producing metaphysical modal knowledge are also capable of producing knowledge of other restricted modalities, such as nomic and practical modality. In parallel, Amy Kind (2016c, 2018) argues that imaginings can confer knowledge when they are guided by reality-sensitive constraints, in a manner akin to computer simulations.

Thinking about counterfactuals is just one way that imagination can factor into mundane decision-making. Neil Van Leeuwen (2011, 2016a, 2016b) and Bence Nanay (2016a) have recently started to elaborate on the connection between imagination and actions via decision-making. Although neither authors focus on the epistemic status of imagination, their accounts of decision-making seem to suggest that imagination is used to gain practical knowledge about the probability and value of actions' possible outcomes.

At the same time, the recently prominent discussion of transformative experiences calls into question the extent to which imagination can be epistemically useful for making life-altering decisions. L.A. Paul (2014, 2015, 2018; see also Jackson 1982, 1986; D. Lewis 1988) argues that some types of knowledge-especially de se knowledge concerning one's values-are inaccessible by imaginings; only actual experiences can confer these types of knowledge. For example, one cannot really know whether one wants to become a parent without experiencing being a parent because parenthood itself can transform one's values. If one cannot reasonably imagine oneself with radically different values, then plausibly one cannot appropriately imagine the values associated with the outcomes of one's actions. As such, despite their epistemic worth in ordinary contexts, imaginings might not help in making life-altering decisions.

3.7 Figurative Language

Finally, imagination might play a role in interpreting figurative language. The exact role ascribed to imagination varies greatly from theory to theory. In part, this variation arose from a longstanding debate in philosophy of language concerning the divide between literal and figurative language: while some imaginative theories of figurative language (such as Walton 1990) accept a strong divide, others (such as Lepore & Stone 2015) reject it. Although this controversy cannot be avoided entirely, it is worth reiterating that the present aim is only to highlight the possible role(s) that imagination might play in the psychology of irony, metaphor, and nearby linguistic phenomena.

Despite immense differences between them, numerous theories of irony have converged on the idea that interpreting irony involves imagination. Kendall Walton (1990) treats ironic and metaphoric speech as props in momentary games of make-believe. On Walton's theory, imagination is central to understanding and interpreting such figurative speech. Herbert Clark and Richard Gerrig (1984) and Gregory Currie (2006) connect irony to pretense, but without further linking all cases of pretense to imaginative capacities. Elisabeth Camp (2012) similarly endorses a role for pretense in the interpretation of irony and the related case of sarcasm. Finally, this idea that interpreting irony involves imagination is corroborated by psychological research: irony recognition is difficult for neurodivergent individuals who lack imaginative capacities (Happé 1991)-specifically, in individuals with Asperger's syndrome, who have deficits with meta-representation-and in individuals with schizophrenia, who have deficits with theory-of-mind (Langdon et al. 2002).

Again, despite immense differences between them, numerous theories of metaphor have also converged on the idea that interpreting metaphor involves imagination (see the entry on metaphor). The first family of theories focus on imagination's role in pretense. As mentioned earlier, Walton (1990) takes metaphors to be props in momentary games of make-believe. Walton (1993, 2000) and David Hills (1997) further develop this idea. (Importantly, Walton (1993) notes that interpretation of a metaphor may not involve actual imaginings, but only the recognition of the type of imaginings prescribed.) Andy Egan (2008b) extends the idea to account for idioms. These theories remain controversial: in particular, Camp (2009) and Catherine Wearing (2011) have offered forceful criticisms. The second family of theories focus on imagination's role in providing novel perspectives. While Camp (2009) criticizes the first family of theories, she also acknowledges a role for imagination. On her account, pretense and metaphor typically involve distinct types of imaginings: pretense-imaginings allow one to access counterfactual content, but metaphor-imaginings allow one to re-interpret actual content from a novel perspective. Indeed Camp (2007) argues that the kind of imagination involved in interpreting metaphors is also used to interpret similes and juxtapositions. The third family of theories focus on imagination's role in providing mental images. Paul Ricoeur (1978), Richard Moran (1989), and Robyn Carston (2010) all propose theories on which mental imagery plays an important role in processing metaphors. Outside of philosophy of language, James Grant (2011) argues that metaphors are prevalent in art criticism because they prompt readers' imaginings.

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Acknowledgments

No one can have an encyclopedic knowledge on a topic as vast as imagination. The previous iteration of the entry could not have existed without the help of Paul Bloom, David Chalmers, Gregory Currie, Tyler Doggett, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Shaun Nichols, Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Jonathan Weinberg, Ed Zalta, an anonymous referee, and-most of all-Aaron Norby. This iteration of the entry could not exist without the help of Tyler Doggett, Elisabeth Camp, Felipe De Brigard, Anna Ichino, Andrew Kania, Amy Kind, Peter Langland-Hassan, Aaron Meskin, Kengo Miyazono, Eric Peterson, Mark Phelan, Dustin Stokes, Margot Strohminger, Mike Stuart, Neil Van Leeuwen, Jonathan Weinberg, Nick Wiltsher, and two anonymous referees.

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To imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are. One can use imagination to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one's own.

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"Science is not about memorizing facts," says Michio Kaku. It’s about innovation and curiosity and imagining Internet access in your contact lenses.

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Michio Kaku: I believe that science is the engine of prosperity. Everything we see around us, the goods and services, the iPods, the internet, the GPS system, all of it comes from science. But what is the rocket fuel? What is the rocket fuel that makes science work? That makes this engine propel itself? And I think that rocket fuel is curiosity. It's imagination. It's the innovative spirit. That's what keeps science alive. And I would hope that we could nourish that among our young people. But unfortunately, oftentimes, that rocket fuel is wasted.

If you take a look at our educational system, you'll realize that all of us are born scientists. All of us are born wondering why does the sun shine? Where did I come from? What's out there? How big is the world anyway? All of us are born scientists until we hit the danger years. When we hit about 13, 14, 15, those are the danger years and we start to lose these young scientists left and right. So, by the time they graduate from high school, we have only a tiny, tiny fraction of the original 100% of young people who are born scientists. They drop like flies. What's wrong?

Well, many things are wrong. But among that is the way that we teach science. We teach science as a list of facts and figures to memorize and we crush, literally crush, any curiosity and spirit of innovation and imagination from young children. For example, my daughter once took the New York State Regional Exam. She took the exam in geology, and I had a chance to tutor her by looking at this manual. And I realized that the entire manual consisted mainly of memorizing the names of crystals, the names of minerals, hundreds of them, and of course, all the things that you are going to forget the day after your exam. So, it's not that our students are stupid, they can memorize these things. They are so smart. They've figured out that this material is totally useless. Our students are so smart they've figured out they're never going to see these things ever again. They just have to memorize it once in their life, throw away their book, and they're absolutely right. They will never, ever see these hundreds of minerals, crystals, again in their life.

So, my daughter comes up to me after struggling with all this memorization and she says to me, "Daddy, why would anyone want to become a scientist?" That was the most humiliating day of my life. I spent my entire life being a scientist trying to understand the way nature works, trying to tease apart some of the fundamental laws of physics, and my own daughter says, "Why would anyone want to become a scientist?"

At that point, I felt like taking this book and ripping it apart. Well, in the future **** the Internet in our contact lenses. And we're going to be able to see in our contact lenses the entire sum total of all knowledge accumulated since antiquity. And our kids are going to be able to download all the exam questions that depend on memorization of silly facts and figures they will never ever see again in their life. And you know something? I think that's the way it should be. Because science deals with concepts, principles. And how many principles are there? Not many. The principle of evolution, the principle of relativity, draconian physics, quantum theory, they're not that many principles that drive all of science. And so I believe that in the future, when we have the Internet everywhere, in our contact lenses, in our eye glasses, professors and educators are going to have to throw away their exams and begin to teach science in the way it should be taught.

Richard Feynman, Nobel laureate, tells this story. When the future Nobel laureate was a child, his father would take him into the forest. And his father would tell him about birds; why certain birds are shaped the way they are, the coloration, the shape of the beak, their feeding habits. Everything about the life history and lifestyle of birds. And then one day, a bully comes up to him and says, "Hey Dick, what's the name of that bird over there?" Well, he didn't know. He could tell that bully everything about that bird, its coloration, its shape, the shape of its beak, its feeding habits. Everything about that bird except one thing. Its name. And then the bully says, "Hey Dick, what's the matter? You stupid or something?" And at that point, he got it. He began to realize that for most people science is nothing but memorization. But what is memorization? You can look it up on the internet in the future. Science is not about memorizing facts and figures. Of course, you have to know the basics, but science is about principle. It's about concepts.

You know, my favorite Einstein quote is as follows. Einstein once said, "If a theory cannot be explained to a child, then the theory is probably worthless." Meaning that great ideas are pictorial. Great ideas can be explained in the language of pictures. Things that you can see and touch, objects that you can visualize in the mind. That is what science is all about, not memorizing facts and figures.

Image courtesy of John A Davis/Shutterstock

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"Science is not about memorizing facts," says Michio Kaku. It's about innovation and curiosity and imagining Internet access in your contact lenses.

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How to Memorize Fast and Easily | How to remember things easily

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How to Memorize Fast and Easily | How to remember things easily

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How to Memorize Anything | How to remember things easily Do you want to learn how to memorize anything quickly?

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How to Memorize Fast and Easily | How to remember things easily

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World Memory Champion Alex Mullen Masters 'Memory Palace'

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World Memory Champion Alex Mullen Masters 'Memory Palace'

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Alex Mullen, a second-year medical student at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, is a memory athlete.

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World Memory Champion Alex Mullen Masters 'Memory Palace'

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Feats of memory anyone can do | Joshua Foer

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Feats of memory anyone can do | Joshua Foer

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http://www.ted.com There are people who can quickly memorize lists of thousands of numbers, the order of all the cards in a deck (or ten!), and much more. Science writer Joshua Foer describes the technique -- called the memory palace -- and shows off its most remarkable feature: anyone can learn how to use it, including him. TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes. Featured speakers have included Al Gore on climate change, Philippe Starck on design, Jill Bolte Taylor on observing her own stroke, Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop per Child, Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Bill Gates on malaria and mosquitoes, Pattie Maes on the "Sixth Sense" wearable tech, and "Lost" producer JJ Abrams on the allure of mystery. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and TEDTalks cover these topics as well as science, business, development and the arts. Closed captions and translated subtitles in a variety of languages are now available on TED.com, at http://www.ted.com/translate If you have questions or comments about this or other TED videos, please go to http://support.ted.com

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Feats of memory anyone can do | Joshua Foer

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Mistaken Identifications are the Leading Factor In Wrongful Convictions

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In 2012, the Arkansas Association of Chiefs of Police (AACP) released a model policy for eyewitness identification procedures. The model policy includes: blind administration, proper use of fillers, proper instructions to the witness, and witness confidence statements. The AACP policy also includes procedure for show up identifications. Adopted: 2012.
Read the AACP policy.

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Eyewitness Identification Reform in Arkansas - Innocence Project

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In 2012, the Arkansas Association of Chiefs of Police (AACP) released a model policy for eyewitness identification procedures. The model policy includes: blind administration, proper use of fillers, proper instructions to the witness, and witness confidence statements. The AACP policy also includes procedure for show up identifications. Adopted: 2012.

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In 1984, George Orwell told the story of Winston Smith, an employee in the propaganda office of a totalitarian regime. Smith's job at the fictional Ministry of Truth was to destroy photographs and alter documents, remaking the past to fit the needs of the present.

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Pursuing deep thinking and moral imagination, social courage and joy, to renew inner life, outer life, and life together.

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In this season of On Being and those to come, we are going to train the core human questions on the emerging "generative AI." Beyond the hype and the doom, what is this new technology calling us to as human beings? What is our agency to shape it to human purpose, and how might it bring us - literally - to our senses? This inaugural conversation with Reid Hoffman is a wide and deep beginning foundation. He and Krista venture into unexpectedly relevant places, like the nature of friendship in human life, and what it would mean to create "contained, boundaried AI" - and Reid's use of words like "delightful" and "elevating" as qualities we can impart to this technology which, as we're hearing again and again, is going to change everything.

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Deep thinking and moral imagination, social creativity - and joy. Podcasts, convenings, and much, much more.

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Debate - Does God Exist? William Lane Craig vs Peter Millican 

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Debate - Does God Exist? William Lane Craig vs Peter Millican 

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Debate - Does God Exist? William Lane Craig vs Peter Millican (Birmingham University, October 2011)

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Our guest this week is Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and head of the Skeptics Society, and a longtime commentator on issues relating to science, critical thinking, and the paranormal.

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This is point of inquiry for Monday, June 6th, 2011.

Welcome to Point of Inquiry. I'm Chris Mooney. Point of inquiry is the radio show and the podcast of the Center for Inquiry, a think tank advancing reason, science and secular values in public affairs. And at the grassroots. My guest this week is Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and head of the Skeptic Society and a longtime commentator on issues relating to science, critical thinking and the paranormal. I asked Michael on to discuss his new book, which is entitled The Believing Brain From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and reinforce them as Truths. Clearly, much of what Shermer has to say will be of great relevance to skeptics and free thinkers everywhere and along the way. I also got to discuss with him some of my pet issues like global warming and how to promote evolution in a religious America. Michael Shermer, welcome to Point of Inquiry.

Good morning.

It's great to have you on. Strange beliefs have been a lot in the news lately. We had Harold Camping's predictably failed prediction of the world ending. We had the birthers finally getting the birth certificate and still not changing their minds, at least the hardcore ones. In your new book, The Believing Brain, you say we're all carrying around a, quote, belief engine on our shoulders were hard wired for this stuff. So what we're seeing is what we should expect to see.

Exactly. Right. The belief comes first, the reasons for believe, the data, the evidence, whatever it comes second. And that's the case for everybody. Politicos and religious people, religious faith, economic ideologies, even scientific theories are a form of belief.

And scientists are no different than anybody else. They have their pet theories that they prefer. And they're they're as likely as anybody else to only remember the hits and forget the misses that support it and all that. That's true.

But in the believing brain, the point to make is that science is the one tool we have to help us get out of that trap. When I called a belief dependent realism trap, that is our reality is this. But our understanding of it is filtered through our beliefs. But science at least has the benefit of having self-correcting machinery and devices to help us work around those cognitive biases. So that's what sets it apart, I think, from economic ideologies, political beliefs, religious faith and so on.

One obvious question that arises from all this is, would you say that all beliefs are equal? In other words, you know, I believe in God. I believe in chiropractic. I believe in the Democratic Party. Do we hold them all in the same way? And do they act as a perceptual screen in the same way or as or some different than others in some inherent way?

On a general level, they're all beliefs and they all match my thesis that the beliefs come first. The reasons for belief come second. They aren't equally true. And that's the one saving grace for science, is that it provides us a means of of stepping out of our own brains and this objectivity of our own perceptions and at least having some corroboration between brains, even if the original holder of the theory refuses to change his mind. But the community as a whole will shift from one world view to another, from one paradigm to another, to one belief to another as the evidence mounts. So global warming would be a good example of this. You know, the whole movement started in the 1970s and there were lots of skeptics and there were skeptics through the 80s. And the scientific community was reasonably split on it until the late 90s when the evidence started, a mountain in the community began to shift. And yes, of course, you're still holdouts. There's a few global warming skeptics that are, you know, real climate scientists, but there are many left and they may never change their mind. But that is a matter because the community as a whole has shifted enough that that the world view directs our politics and economics in response to it and that sort of thing. So I do think I think there's hope for us in that sense. I mean, another example would be evolution. I mean, it was reasonable to be skeptical of Darwin's theory for a while. You know, there wasn't that much evidence. The fossil record was pretty spotty. There was no mechanism for how it could work until DNA was discovered. And there were there are plenty reasons to challenge the specifics of the theory intel, you know, the mid 20th century or so. And then and then things began to shift pretty dramatically, where now virtually nobody's a skeptic of evolution.

But based on your account of how the brain works, it'd be one thing for the scientific community as a group of individuals to eventually shift, then be quite another thing for average citizens who aren't scientists, who are perceiving snippets of what scientists know to make their minds up one way or another, whether it's true.

Yeah. So that's the problem we have is how do we move the country to one position or another when we know we're right or we're pretty confident we're right? Like on the global warming issue. I mean, I get a lot of mail from global warming skeptics a lot either through Scientific American or through skeptic and especially skeptic, because I feel like, well, if you're a skeptic, you're a real skeptic. You'd be skeptical. Global warming. So what is skepticism? Is it skepticism of global warming or skepticism of the global warming skeptic, which makes you a believer, which is sort of weird. But so in that sense, the idea of the the IPCC, a consensus of sorts, is to try to tell a public, look, these are complex models, not very many people understand, but we have here a committee of people who do understand them and their, you know, the checks and balances and they're competitive with each other. And if there were problems, they would find them. Like with the East Anglia disaster that turned out to be much ado about nothing, there was just nothing in there. Although the skeptics out there must be. Here's the smoking gun of the cover up and so on. It just wasn't there. And even that recent report of the one of the last holdout, scientific global warming skeptics who changed his mind, he said, you know what, the evidence to so overwhelming. It's just there. And the idea that is by publishing that is to try to to send a signal to the marketplace of ideas. Look, here is where the people who know what they're talking about are at and then try to influence social policy that way.

You know, it's funny. I want to I want to go more into the brain and the belief engine. But since we are since we've gotten into global warming, you know, I have on my blog I said I'm interviewing Michael Shermer and all these people want me to press you on global warming. Actually, you sound to me like you're agreeing with all of the basic science, but there's still a perception out there that you are a skeptic.

Why you don't? Because I do find that a little disturbing, that if you don't toe the line at every single point, you're you're a global warming skeptic.

I completely accept that the fact that the earth is getting warmer and that that's is incontrovertible and that it's probably mostly human caused, although I do think there is plenty there is room for some cyclical activity that could have some kind of an effect. Although, you know, I think we can we're safe to say that it's largely human caused. So that's the first two of the five points that I bring up. So the third point is, well, how much warmer is you going to get? Well, which what time horizon in the next 50 years? Hundred years. Five hundred years. Thousand years. You know, the further out on the time horizon you go, the wider the error bars get. So I think it's reasonable to say, well, you know, somewhere between perhaps half a degree and two degree centigrade. And and therefore, point number four, what will the consequences be of the earth getting warmer? That depends on which point. On the on the air bar you're at the low end of the prediction model, say, half a degree of Senate centigrade. I don't think it's going to be too consequential. Maybe, you know, there's some changes, but nothing that we can't deal with in the normal way of letting market forces work their magic and so on. But if it's, you know, two to three degrees centigrade, well, then that that may be hugely consequential. So let's pay attention and keep track of what's going on as time unfolds. And then five, finally, what should we do about it? Well, here I here is probably what what the mail is you're getting directed at. That is, I'm not too crazy about a top down government program like a Manhattan Project. And we can we spend a trillion dollars in that sort of thing. First of all, we don't have a trillion dollars. We don't have any money to spend. We're broke.

So and I I believe that market forces work better than anything. You just raise the price of gas and people will really shift almost instantly their driving preferences. We've seen that just in the last six months. I mean, the fastest selling cars now are these four cylinders. Almost nobody is making eights anymore already. Just instantly you see shifts like that. That's what I'll drive. People people are motivated by incentives and and they do better when they their bottom up financial incentives, tax breaks, things like that, versus top down government controls. And I you know, I'm out here in Palm Desert this weekend and, you know, we have wind farms out here. They're everywhere. It's fantastic. It's amazing. The winds just rifling through these canyons and there's these gigantic wind farms. It's great. But it's so I'd like to think, you know, if we had solar panels everywhere and wind farms would be great because that's in the long run. That's where we have to go, renewable sources of energy and get off fossil fuels. But for everything I've read, that's not going to do it. We can't get off fossil fuels. We're a long ways from that side. You know, I don't know what I want to say. That's just how I read it. So I can't hardly think that that makes me a global warming skeptic by any means. But, you know, there it is.

No, you're not. You're not a skeptic by the standard definition based on what you said. Let's do a little more of this and then go back to the book. But what I think the the point of contention is, is probably in what I hear the point of contention would be that you seem to think that it's going to be likely on the low end of warming. And I think the uncertainty could cut in a very, very bad way. I mean, it's uncertainty, right, in that we know it's going to be the lesser of the bout goes rather than the most grave of the outcomes. So given the possible gravity.

Right. That's the precautionary principle. Well, I'm I'm skeptical of the precautionary principle. And many are not just with the global warming thing, but in many areas. I think it's too easy to push the panic button and spend a lot of money in one area when you really don't know if you need to or not. And it's. It's easy to make the case for the precautionary principle. In one particular area. But there's so many places in society where we need to spend money on all kinds of problems. You know, let's start with health care. I think Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, these are hugely pressing issues are going to far surpass anything global warming will ever do to us in the next 50 years. That I'd rather see change come about in those areas.

Yeah. Big government shift. That's where I'd like to see it.

I'll just leave one more people. People are. Want me to debate you on that. Right. I don't really want you, but. But actually, no, I think that global warming is is really the unique problem because if the worst case scenarios are right, then you're losing land based ice on Greenland and coastal cities are going to be submerged. And then then you're really talking trillions of dollars of impact.

Well, that's true in the long run, right? You're talking maybe by 20, 100.

Well, the you know, the projections differ. We don't know how vulnerable Greenland. If we knew we'd be maybe we would know what to do.

Yeah, maybe. Again, I just. I just think it's. Yes, OK. You can make the case. Well, OK, if Greenland collapses in the next century or something. But I don't see that from what I've read. I think we're talking like 500, 1000 years from GLE for Greenland to melt. Right.

I think we don't know. We don't know. OK. So. All right. So let's just wait and see more of the wait and see kind of camp. I just I'm just not worry about it.

I will. Let's move on. One thing that I think is really interesting about your book, but I also have a question.

You talk about the evolutionary origins of Y. You know, belief is such a central part of human nature, why we see patterns, why we ascribe agency to things that are inanimate.

What I think is still hard to understand is why evolution would create creatures that make lots of mistakes. Because you would think that we would have evolved to be accurate because being accurate would help us survive.

Right. So the argument is that the default rule of thumb is to make one kind of error over another. It's not that. It's it's a slightly different argument that we were pattern seeking primates. We connect the dots, A is connected, B and B is connected to C and and often we're good at that. And that's called Learning Association learning, whether it's classical conditioning or operant conditioning. And so our brains have altered all animals. Do it from C. elegans to sapiens. You know, this is how animals survived the genomes, not variable enough to deal with a rapidly changing environment. So we have brains. Now, the problem is, you know, you hear the rustle in the grass to a dangerous predator. Is it just the wind in my thought experiment? Well, if you assume that it's it's a dangerous predator, but it turns out it's just the wind. You've made a type one error, false positive. But that's not so bad. You just become more cautious and vigilant and you move around the bush or whatever. But if you make the other kind of error, you assume that the rustle in the grass is just the way in and turns as a dangerous predator. You're lunch. Congratulations. You've just been given a Darwin award for taking yourself out of the gene pool that before in reading and passing your genes on. So I claim as a natural selection to make more of one kind of air than the other, more false positives than false negatives, more of the evidence based on Hamilton's rule of who are more likely to support and be and be altruistic, too. And so it depends on the cost of the behaviors factor by the benefit in the genome in the long run. So I'm claiming the same kind of formula applies, that the cost of making one kind of error over the other is much lower and therefore we're more likely to make it so.

The default rule of thumb is just assume most rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not the wind. If you have to make that choice, especially because those kinds of decisions have to be made in a split second, there's not enough time to gather more data and consider the evidence and so on. In fact, that does that is gel well with what we know from like the behavioral economists who say that the people at a study decision making, that we rarely make decisions based on evidence gathering, collecting more data, weighing it, laying it out on the table and looking at it carefully and then weigh in are our options and then deciding we don't.

And this gets back to my original thesis that we just form beliefs really fast. We just kind of have a hunch, a feeling and intuition. And we go with it and then we start collecting data. And rarely does anybody, you know, lay the data out on the table and go, huh, OK, let's see. Is this one or that one, especially if you have any kind of vested interest? Some. So it's you know, it's my first book was Why People Believe Weird Things in this book. I'm interested in why people believe things. Period. Full stop anything. So it's not just a pattern nicety that the word I coined Tennessee to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise is not like Parad Doyley or some of these other terms that just deal with. Why people see Jesus in the in a grilled cheese sandwich or the Virgin Mary on the side of a building. That that is explain this as city. But but why we find any patterns at all? Well, we have to. And because we're not good at discriminating too from false patterns, we just tend to find all kinds of patterns. And so the key the rub here is in sciences that we develop these tools to help us tell the difference. And so, for example, that's why we have blinded controls and double blinded controls, because we know that if the subject knows which condition he's in, it'll is a placebo effect that will affect how he acts if the experimenter knows which condition the subject's in. That'll affect how the data's collected. So we have all those things because we know that even even professionally trained, these scientists are not objective. And that's because of all these psychological, subjective, emotional cognitive biases that we have.

I want to remind our listeners that Michael Shermer is new book The Believing Brain is available through our Web site Point of Inquiry, Dawg. You know, it's really interesting. You start the book with a quotation from Francis Bacon.

He was concerned about this kind of thing. Centuries ago, the birth of science is closely tied to trying to put some kind of control on all of our cognitive biases. It's taken us this long to get inside of the brain and really understand the basis of those biases.

Yeah, well, the Enlightenment vision of human nature as humans, as like homo economicus were rational calculators. We maximize our utility, we have free will and we make free choices. And when we make our free choices, we we calculate them out to maximize our happiness and so on. The entire, you know, Declaration of Independence and then the Constitution. All these things are based on this enlightenment vision of human nature that we're rational and it's just it's taken us a couple centuries to figure out that we're not really it's only the last couple of decades that we figured out that we're not because of the research in cognitive neuroscience that shows how irrational we are in a took two psychologists, Tversky and counterman, to show us that it's a show Economists' that we're not rational calculators. I mean, all the way up until the 90s, economists were still assuming that humans make rational choices and we don't. So what we're bucking up against is, you know, three centuries worth of enlightenment, philosophy trickle down into academia and science, that humans are rational and we're not. And that's the problem. I mean, I like that. I like to believe we are. I like to think I am. But I'm pretty sure I'm not any any more than anybody else and that we're not as a species. And, you know, that's that's sort of the point of the believing brain. The belief is everything and it's very subjective.

Yeah. Well, I certainly can contests that. I even want to try out a little area of this that I've been really interested in. I think you will certainly agree with this, but it's not a term that you use in the concept is motivated reasoning. You don't write about it explicitly in the book. But you cite a few studies on it, like Drew Westen, study of Democrats and Republicans who they see if they see that candidate they don't like is hypocritical. And the candidate they do like is not hypocritical. Right. Even though they've both directly contradicted each other.

What would what bugs people out about this? Right, is that this response is happening automatically and subconsciously and emotions are firing. If we have a negative feeling toward something that threatens our beliefs and we don't even know we're doing it. And so then we start rationalizing and then we commit any kind of cognitive error that will help us get where we want to go. So it's almost like a reflex. It's almost like we're automatons.

Yeah, absolutely. Exactly, yeah.

These cognitive biases like the confirmation bias, this tendency to to look for confirming evidence, to support your theory and ignore the disconfirming evidence. Remember the hits, forget the misses. This happens very rapidly. Instincts. Instinctively, we don't think about it. We just do it. Conservatives read The Wall Street Journal. They listen to conservative talk radio. They they don't even pay attention to what the other side says. And liberals do the same thing. Everybody does it. And it's easy to marshal the facts. I mean, this is where all this global warming skepticism comes from is largely driven by right wing talk radio. I mean, I occasionally listen to these guys and pretty much every any any given day of the week, you can find somebody citing some new study saying that global warming is not real. It's all a myth or something then. And where do they get this stuff? Well, they just find the one guy left that like that Rich Richard Lindzen at M.I.T. who will say that he remains skeptical and they'll cite him and ignore the thousands of other scientists on the other side. And that's just what our brains do, especially in politics. But again, we like to think, at least in science, in principle, we should be able to get at the answer and work around those biases and not be affected by them. And so often we're dependent on our authorities. I mean, I don't really understand string theory and quantum physics and so on, so I can't tell which one is pretty sound or which one isn't from my own knowledge. So I have to go to my friends at Caltech. OK. So what's the deal here with the string theory? And then they tell me now, how do they know? Well, I kind of trust them, not based on faith, but on experience that science is very competitive and that what one guys support of string theory is to boost his career will be countered by some other guy who's going to boost his career by knocking it down. And so that's why I like comp competition is so good, because it forces people to to be careful about what they publish and because they know somebody else is going to be checking on them. And that's what I think keeps me confident in science.

Yeah, it's sort of like after all this is done, it's sort of the last thing we can panic is just compete with each other and hopefully they'll ketso all the mistakes.

I want to ask you more about the role of emotion in all this. You seem to say in the book. All right. So we have beliefs. We vigorously reaffirm them. It happens automatically and we commit all kinds of errors and biases in doing it. You say also that we get a thrill, not a thrill maybe, but we get good feelings for doing it. We get reinforced dopamine, neurotransmitters, fires. I would just say, in other words, a circuit builds up and we keep using and it feels good to use it.

Yeah, that's right. Exactly. So, I mean, it it begins really with the believing neuron, as I call it. It's just basic internal connections. So you have about a set of neurons in there, you know, 100 billion of them. And they're they're not physically connected. There's a little gap between each of them called the snap. And across that gap or release these neurotransmitter substances like dopamine and some others. And and that's how they communicate with each other. They talk to each other through chemistry. And when you learn something, there's a certain pathway of neurons that gets reinforced. Just more dopamine builds up in there. And the more they fire, the stronger the those patterns become. And that's that's called learning. So that process then scales up, you know, just patterns on top of patterns on top of pattern. So a really simple thing, like a Pavlovian conditioning. You ring the bell and you give the dog some food. This elevates hearing the Bellingham's of Judy Salvaje during the Bellotti salivates. You know, he's figured the pattern out so that it's everything that's that that describes everything we do. So the question is the rub here is which patterns are real and which aren't? And that appears to be related to some substances like the opening. So here I am thinking of Peter Broilers Research Team, Christine Moore, where they gave subjects L dopa, which increases amount of dopamine in their brain. And those subjects that got that were more likely to see random patterns as meaningful, like there was something in it. In the pattern you use came a random thought pattern or a scramble of letters and words and things like that. And they they try to make sense of it. And our brains are pretty good at finding patterns anyway. But if you give Mel Dopa, they're even more likely to find it. So and this is also more likely to happen in the right hemisphere than the left hemisphere. And we're starting to kind of pinpoint where in the brain these sorts of processes occur. And again, it's not the same pattern as he's a bad thing. I'm just saying this is the way it is. And then the question is, how open minded should you be to patterns being real? And you don't want to be too skeptical because then you'll never see any new patterns and you'll be, you know, an uncreative, boring person. But if you're so open minded, your brains fall out. I like to say you think everything's a pattern, then you're paranoid schizophrenic. So by example, the book is, by contrast, Richard Feynman with John Nash or Richard. Wins the Nobel Prize for finding a new pattern in quantum physics about how subatomic particles interact. He describes his beautifully with these Feynman diagrams that are still used today and in well deserving of the prize. He saw something no one else saw in his mind and translated at individual images on the page with mathematical formulas. Beautiful. John Nash won the Nobel Prize of Mathematics for his discovery of game theory and Nash equilibrium in how subjects in a game contest interact with each other. But he also saw patterns that were not real, people that didn't exist in government, cover ups and aliens and so on and is. Everybody knows who see the movie A Beautiful Mind. He was paranoid schizophrenic or schizophrenic. So that's that's seen too many patterns. And we don't really know what the cause of schizophrenia is exactly, but it's obviously a brain chemistry thing. So that tells us that these patterns are, you know, they're in the mind, they're influenced by brain chemistry. And what you want to do is find some balance there between, you know, seeing everything as a pattern and see nothing as a new pattern. And all of art and creativity, music and so on. These these are all just new patterns. People see that no one else has seen. That's how you see create new things. And that's that's why there's this interesting research on madness and and and artistic genius or creativity is, I think is a fruitful avenue of research, because I do think there's a link there between seemed to many batters and being crazy and and just enough to be a creative genius, but hovering on that edge. Nancy Andreasen has a lot of interesting research on this. She's got a big genius creativity project at the University of Iowa where she brings in all these creative juices, scans, brains and stuff. And she's she's finding evidence that for really super creative people, there's a pretty good trend line, that they're also manic depressive and have schizophrenia running in their family. And they're they're sort of hovering on the brink there. So, yeah, it's it's pretty it's pretty interesting research.

Yeah. I just it makes me remind there's this figure nut figure image in your book and you say that the skeptics don't see patterns in it. Then people are less skeptical. Look at the image and do see a pattern. I didn't see a pattern. I guess I guess we differ on that.

Yeah. Well, so maybe you need more dopamine.

I know if you fired now, if you fire me up. Right, you know, give me a BINYA maybe a new idea. And let me let me remind listeners again that Michael Strummer's new book, The Believing Brain, is available through our Web site Point of Inquiry Dawgs is two more things I wanted to hit on. You know how we change beliefs. But even before that, let's talk maybe about the political beliefs in particular, because I found your chapter on that really interesting. We had George Lakoff on the show recently and we've had some other shows in sort of that vein.

And you were kind of criticizing George Lakoff, John Joester, NYU, those who've said that, you know, liberals and conservatives differ.

But you're also agreeing with Jonathan Height. The liberals and conservatives differ. I kind of feel like they're all saying the same thing.

I would agree with you. I think it's the sense I get of a moral judgment against conservatives by Lakoff and just that I don't get from Jonathan Height. I feel like Jonathan's stepped out of the political realm, at least while he's doing that research, although I guess he's he's says he's just a standard liberal, more or less. But Lakoff and just I get the sense that they're treating people being conservative like it's some sort of disease, like we're asking as social scientists. Why did Nazis do what they do? Let's let's try to understand the mind of the Nazi. That's kind of the sense I get when they're talking about conservatives. And it's not that I'm a conservative. I'm I'm not I'm a libertarian. So I'm fiscally conservative and socially liberal. But even even so, the labels are kind of problematic. But so I'm not that I'm offended personally. I just think it's so lopsided. And when you look at the data on scientists, academics in general, they're pretty left leaning. I mean, it's it's hugely slanted toward the left and the rest. The country is not that country is pretty much divided left and right. And according to Jonathan, right, most of the world is divided, pretty much left and right, even in European countries where they have many political parties. He says that they kind of cluster toward the left or the right. And you can easily kind of costume into two big sets, either like, you know, liberal leaning or conservative leaning. And so I tend to think I actually think that's probably even hardwired in the sense that, well, there. Then I talk about Steven Pinker and his blank slate research. And you know that that we have certain political preferences based on our temperament and by temperament, some people this is the Joester argument, except he's he's just too judgmental, I think. But that. Conservatives prefer a certain kind of world view, an orderly, hierarchical world view. But there's nothing wrong with that. That's actually a good world view to have in some instances. You know, we live in a really tribal world. And there's there's is I used from that my favorite movie, A Few Good Men were Jack Nicholson and schooling Tom Cruise on the way the world really is. You know, it's a dangerous world, a tribal world, a world with Walden. And on those walls are men with guns. And somebody has to stand opposed and sleeping in a very blanket. The freedom I provide and then question the manner in which I provide it. Yeah, that's right. You see, when when liberals when conservatives say liberals don't get it. That's the ad they're talking about, that there's a value in group cohesiveness and tribalism is a nasty word. But in fact, tribalism is what makes us human. It's how we get people to the moon and do these fantastic, amazing, huge, bigger than life projects that, you know, that no individual or even corporation could do requires a huge tribe to do it. Well, that's that's a good part of tribalism. And so I'd say let's just pull back and be less critical of which left or right is morally right or wrong, that that itself is a byproduct of tribalism. By the way, we don't just assess somebodies idea politically is wrong. We think it is evil, wrong, bad, wrong, morally wrong. And I think that gets us into trouble. So that's the point I was trying to make in that chapter.

That's fair enough. I guess what we're saying here is sort of like if you call conservatives authoritarian, you're being judgmental. If you say conservatives respect authority more than liberals, you're just saying the obvious as far. Well, OK. Yeah, that.

That's fair enough. Right. But but I mean, if you say conservatives, you know. Yeah. They like a thought there. They like authority. Well what does that mean. They like law and order. OK. As opposed to what I mean. So liberals what they don't. They like a Lucy Goosey, wishy washy, mamby pamby kind of system where criminals get away with crime. I mean, you know, they just flip it around and be judgmental on the other side.

And then the liberal calling people spineless. You're being judgmental. Yeah. If you say they're spineless, you're being judgmental. If you say that they are actually, you know, their cognitive style is more characterized by uncertainty. Yeah. Yeah.

You're not. I mean. And so I get it. But I think the core point is that, you know, these differences are real. They can explain a lot about our politics.

I think so. Absolutely.

So how do you change somebodies mind? I mean, you give a couple examples of people, including yourself, change. And it seems like it's closely tied to big life changes. It's not tied to rational arguments as much.

Yeah, it's hard to shift people, although, you know, there's pretty good research on this now, like Robert Shiller Downey's research on influence, but he's just reflecting research that's catching up with what marketing people have been doing for decades. That is shifting people's preferences. And yeah, you have to pretty much do that emotionally. Well, that's seen a Lakoff and the other guy that wrote The Political Brain Western West. Yeah. So they talk about that. You know, that like, I think it's Western that talks about Gore versus Bush. And Gore's got all his charts and graphs and his laser pointer and his data in Bush is telling jokes and talking about the evil two, Ursin. And so, you know, it's like the one is shifting people's preferences because of an emotional connection. And that's how it's done. I agree with W on that front. That's how you shift people emotionally, worldviews based on preferences and emotional, subjective preferences. I mean, you can you can tell a creationist first till you're blue in the face about the fossil record in the DNA and know that matters. They don't care about that. What they want to know is, I mean, I have to do I have to give up. God do have to give up all my religious friends and go to that place. I feel really good at every weekend. You tell me I have to give all it up because of this fossil record stuff. Forget it. You know, they're not going to shift. He has to. You have to. That's why in the why Darwin matters, I argued that conservatives should embrace Darwinism because of anything. It supports their view of human nature, that we do actually have a kind of an evil, sinful nature based on our tribalism and all that. And so they they should embrace it. No, give it up. And then in any case, science is just revealing that God's creation or some such thing. I mean, I don't believe that. But that's you know, we have to sell it that way. Otherwise, I'd you know, if you give people a choice between science and their family and friends and what feels good. They're going to they're going to reject science every time.

Well, you know, you're walking up close to a big controversy that's often on this show and on the blogs in the freethinker skeptic atheist humanist movement, which is the, quote, accommodation ism issue.

And I'll note that in the book you profile Francis Collins, who is a really excellent scientist, who is also a Christian. You profile him very sympathetically and talk about his you his views based on based on all this. Do you agree that someone like Francis Collins is going to be the person who's going to be able to move a creationist rather than someone like Richard Dawkins?

Yes, that's right. Exactly. Well, so my my perspective on that whole controversy. I'm very well aware of it. I mean, the word itself accommodationists it again. It's like accusing a liberal being a flip flopping, namby pamby, wishy washy bedwetter.

It has a moral value. The moral assessment to it. Well, you know, we live in a very pluralistic world in different approaches, work for different people. Thought that Dawkins approach, the Harris approach. You know, there's a lot of people who really like that.

Of course, the atheists that are already there like it because it feels good to have your champion stand up and kick some ass fight for your side. But but there's even people on the fence who like that. So, OK, fine, great. And let's have more of that. But there's plenty of people who don't like that. And we've heard from them, too. And they like some other approach. They like my approach or your approach or whatever. OK. So that works for them. So, you know, we live in a pluralistic, complex world. Let's just have lots of voices with lots of different approaches. I just don't find Francis Collins offensive in any way. He's a super nice guy. He's very bright. I love using his book to four Christians that I talk to and go, hey, this guy is in your tribe. He's completely on your side. Please. Everything you believe any just wrote this chapter. I always reference the chapter in human evolution in the language of God. It's one of the best summaries I've ever read of human evolution based on how we know human evolution happened based on genetics using both the fossil record, just genes. It's it's it's a perfect argument. And and so that's that's what I point them to. So but personally, I like the guy and and effort for for your own critics. You can just point out that that he's Christopher Hitchens oncologist. So Christopher likes him, even, Aaron, that the acerbity Christopher Hitchens likes Francis Collins. So come on, let's just chill out about the guy. I mean, cut. He's on our side. He likes science. You know, if we take more of Carl Sagan's approach that, you know, we're going to change the world, save the world from nuclear winter and global warming and all the other problems we have. We need the Christians and the Jews and the Muslims. We need these people. I mean, if we if you start off with alienating 90 percent of the world, it's gonna be hard to to change it. That's just my approach. The way I am by temperament. So I maybe I'm making an argument just because that's the way I prefer to do things. But I just think there's many approaches. I like Richard's books. I love his approach. It's fun to watch him and Hitchens and, you know, take these guys on and kick some butt. And it's fun. I like them. I like them all. But that's not the only way.

Well, you know, I'm I'm with you on this.

I just I think that I'm putting in the context of the psychology of belief helps us really understand the persuasion a little bit better in the deeply held beliefs that we're trying to try to.

I mean, the new atheists and stuff. There's nothing really new in it. I mean, there was plenty of us talking about that same kind of stuff in the 90s. It's just that culturally, no one really cared. It wasn't a big thing when we started Skeptic magazine back in the early 90s. It never occurred to me that we should be hammaren on religion. No one really cared that much. We did a piece now and then on it. But now, since 9/11 and the Bush administration and the excess of religion and politics and all that, you know, we have people that would like every issue of skeptic to be the special let's let's hammer on religion issue. And it's just culturally much more relevant now, I guess. And these these things go back and forth.

Well, you know, just just to wrap up, you know, all of your whole book points to you. I think we've already said there's two points to an unsettling conclusion for skeptics, rationalist reading, which is that, you know, humanity is not wired to be on our side. I mean, human nature, you call us natural born supernatural is at one point of human nature is the believe things and to believe things regardless of evidence and the twist the evidence. How do we know how do we keep going in the face of this? Why do we think we're going to somehow succeed?

Well, I am encouraged by two things. One, that in the last if we take the big picture, the last five hundred years, say, since before the Enlightenment, say since the late Middle Ages, early modern period when superstition was just rampant, there was no science at all, no controlled science, no institutes of science, or there was no hope. And it was just people guessing. We've come a long ways, you know, public education and mass reading the Internet. All this good stuff. I think there's hope in that regard that that we can get more and more people on the science page. And then, too, I use this analogy. Democracies, there's there's nothing inherently appealing to anyone with any power at all to give it up. An institute, a democracy. And yet we've been getting there since the last 200 years. You know, in nineteen hundred, there were zero liberal democracies. Even the United States was in a liberal democracy. Women couldn't vote till 1920. So now there's something like. 19 liberal democracies just in the last 30 years. So this and again, there's nothing natural about that. Anyone in power, as we've seen in the last couple of months with all the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East and so on, that anybody with power is not going to give it up. They don't want to give it up. That's our evolved nature. But but. But it can happen. It can happen from the bottom up. If people stand up and go, damn it, I'm not going to take it anymore. And so that's our job is to be. That's what they say about freedom. Right. Eternal vigilance. Well, for science and us rationalists, eternal vigilance. We have to keep fighting for it step by step. And we're getting there. I think I think we're winning. Well, we're not winning yet, but we're getting there. And so I'm encouraged.

Well, thank you for an uplifting note that you've ended on. I think that thinking about it in that broader context does help. And Michael Shermer has been great to talk with you and have you on point of inquiry.

Thanks. Good interview.

I want to thank you for listening to this episode of Point of Inquiry to get involved in a discussion about Michael Sherman's new book, The Believing Brain. Please visit our online forums by going to center for inquiry, dot net slash forums and then clicking on point of inquiry. The views expressed on point of inquiry aren't necessarily the views of the Center for Inquiry, nor of its affiliated organizations. Questions and comments on this show can be sent to feedback at point of inquiry dot org. One of inquiry is produced by Adam Isaach in AMR's, New York. And our music is composed by Emmy Award winning Michael Waylan.

This episode also featured contributions from Debbie Goddard. I'm your host, Chris Mooney.

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Michael Shermer - The Believing Brain | Point of Inquiry

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Our guest this week is Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and head of the Skeptics Society, and a longtime commentator on issues relating to science, critical thinking, and the paranormal. Chris asked Michael on to discuss his new book, which is entitled The Believing Brain: From ...

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Critical Thinking Part 1: A Valuable Argument

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Critical Thinking Part 1: A Valuable Argument

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Critical Thinking Part 1: A Valuable Argument

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The ability to identify logical fallacies in the arguments of others, and to avoid them in one’s own arguments, is both valuable and increasingly rare.

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You are here: Logical Fallacies Logical Fallacies An Encyclopedia […]

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Kevin really got me thinking about the hidden forces that run our world, and the unintended consequences we create when we rely too heavily on algorithms to make decisions for us. It's a cautionary tale, but an important one.

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Emotional Intelligence: What it is and Why it Matters

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Emotional Intelligence: What it is and Why it Matters

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Ever since the publication of Daniel Goleman’s first book on the topic in 1995, emotional intelligence has become one of the hottest buzzwords in corporate America.

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By: Cary Cherniss

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Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP) - Rutgers University

Email: cherniss@rci.rutgers.edu

Publication date: 2000, Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, New Orleans, LA, April 15, 2000

Ever since the publication of Daniel Goleman's first book on the topic in 1995, emotional intelligence has become one of the hottest buzzwords in corporate America. For instance, when the Harvard Business Review published an article on the topic two years ago, it attracted a higher percentage of readers than any other article published in that periodical in the last 40 years. When the CEO of Johnson & Johnson read that article, he was so impressed that he had copies sent out to the 400 top executives in the company worldwide.

Given that emotional intelligence is so popular in corporate America, and given that the concept is a psychological one, it is important for I/O psychologists to understand what it really means and to be aware of the research and theory on which it is based. So in my presentation today, I'd like to briefly lay out the history of the concept as an area of research and describe how it has come to be defined and measured. I also will refer to some of the research linking emotional intelligence with important work-related outcomes such as individual performance and organizational productivity.

Even though the term has been misused and abused by many popularizers, I believe it rests on a firm scientific foundation. Also, while there are aspects of the concept that are not new, some aspects are. Finally, emotional intelligence represents a way in which I/O psychologists can make particularly significant contributions to their clients in the future. So let's begin with some history.

Historical Roots of the Topic
When psychologists began to write and think about intelligence, they focused on cognitive aspects, such as memory and problem-solving. However, there were researchers who recognized early on that the non-cognitive aspects were also important. For instance, David Wechsler defined intelligence as "the aggregate or global capacity of the individual to act purposefully, to think rationally, and to deal effectively with his environment". As early as 1940 he referred to "non-intellective" as well as "intellective" elements, by which he meant affective, personal, and social factors. Furthermore, as early as 1943 Wechsler was proposing that the non-intellective abilities are essential for predicting one's ability to succeed in life. He wrote:

The main question is whether non-intellective, that is affective and conative abilities, are admissible as factors of general intelligence. (My contention) has been that such factors are not only admissible but necessary. I have tried to show that in addition to intellective there are also definite non-intellective factors that determine intelligent behavior. If the foregoing observations are correct, it follows that we cannot expect to measure total intelligence until our tests also include some measures of the non-intellective factors [Wechsler, 1943 #316, p. 103).

Wechsler was not the only researcher who saw non-cognitive aspects of intelligence to be important for adaptation and success. Robert Thorndike, to take another example, was writing about "social intelligence" in the late thirties . Unfortunately, the work of these early pioneers was largely forgotten or overlooked until 1983 when Howard Gardner began to write about "multiple intelligence." Gardner proposed that "intrapersonal" and "interpersonal" intelligences are as important as the type of intelligence typically measured by IQ and related tests.

Now let us switch our historical lens to I/O psychology. In the 1940s, under the direction of Hemphill, the Ohio State Leadership Studies suggested that "consideration" is an important aspect of effective leadership. More specifically, this research suggested that leaders who are able to establish "mutual trust, respect, and a certain warmth and rapport" with members of their group will be more effective. At about the same time, the Office of Strategic Services developed a process of assessment based on the earlier work of Murray that included the evaluation of non-cognitive, as well as cognitive, abilities. This process evolved into the "assessment center," which was first used in the private sector at AT&T in 1956. Many of the dimensions measured in assessment centers then and now involve social and emotional competencies such as communication, sensitivity, initiative, and interpersonal skills.

I could cite other strands of research and theory, but I think it is clear that by the early 1990s, there was a long tradition of research on the role of non-cognitive factors in helping people to succeed in both life and the workplace. The current work on emotional intelligence builds on this foundation.

Contemporary Interest in the Topic
When Salovey and Mayer coined the term emotional intelligence in 1990, they were aware of the previous work on non-cognitive aspects of intelligence. They described emotional intelligence as "a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one's own and others' feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one's thinking and action" . Salovey and Mayer also initiated a research program intended to develop valid measures of emotional intelligence and to explore its significance. For instance, they found in one study that when a group of people saw an upsetting film, those who scored high on emotional clarity (which is the ability to identify and give a name to a mood that is being experienced) recovered more quickly. In another study, individuals who scored higher in the ability to perceive accurately, understand, and appraise others' emotions were better able to respond flexibly to changes in their social environments and build supportive social networks.

In the early 1990's Daniel Goleman became aware of Salovey and Mayer's work, and this eventually led to his book, Emotional Intelligence. Goleman was a science writer for the New York Times, whose beat was brain and behavior research. He had been trained as a psychologist at Harvard where he worked with David McClelland, among others. McClelland was among a growing group of researchers who were becoming concerned with how little traditional tests of cognitive intelligence told us about what it takes to be successful in life.

IQ by itself is not a very good predictor of job performance. Hunter and Hunter estimated that at best IQ accounts for about 25 percent of the variance. Sternberg has pointed out that studies vary and that 10 percent may be a more realistic estimate. In some studies, IQ accounts for as little as 4 percent of the variance.

An example of this research on the limits of IQ as a predictor is the Sommerville study, a 40 year longitudinal investigation of 450 boys who grew up in Sommerville, Massachusetts. Two-thirds of the boys were from welfare families, and one-third had IQ's below 90. However, IQ had little relation to how well they did at work or in the rest of their lives. What made the biggest difference was childhood abilities such as being able to handle frustration, control emotions, and get along with other people.

Another good example is a study of 80 Ph.D.'s in science who underwent a battery of personality tests, IQ tests, and interviews in the 1950s when they were graduate students at Berkeley. Forty years later, when they were in their early seventies, they were tracked down and estimates were made of their success based on resumes, evaluations by experts in their own fields, and sources like American Men and Women of Science. It turned out that social and emotional abilities were four times more important than IQ in determining professional success and prestige.

Now it would be absurd to suggest that cognitive ability is irrelevant for success in science. One needs a relatively high level of such ability merely to get admitted to a graduate science program at a school like Berkeley. Once you are admitted, however, what matters in terms of how you do compared to your peers has less to do with IQ differences and more to do with social and emotional factors. To put it another way, if you're a scientist, you probably needed an IQ of 120 or so simply to get a doctorate and a job. But then it is more important to be able to persist in the face of difficulty and to get along well with colleagues and subordinates than it is to have an extra 10 or 15 points of IQ. The same is true in many other occupations.

We also should keep in mind that cognitive and non-cognitive abilities are very much related. In fact, there is research suggesting that emotional and social skills actually help improve cognitive functioning. For instance, in the famous "marshmallow studies" at Stanford University, four year olds were asked to stay in a room alone with a marshmallow and wait for a researcher to return. They were told that if they could wait until the researcher came back before eating the marshmallow, they could have two. Ten years later the researchers tracked down the kids who participated in the study. They found that the kids who were able to resist temptation had a total SAT score that was 210 points higher than those kids who were unable to wait.

Granted that cognitive ability seems to play a rather limited role in accounting for why some people are more successful than others, what is the evidence that emotional and social factors are important? In doing the research for his first book, Goleman became familiar with a wealth of research pointing to the importance of social and emotional abilities for personal success. Some of this research came from personality and social psychology, and some came from the burgeoning field of neuropsychology. I don't have the time or space to summarize all of this research. Let me, however, give you a few examples that deal specifically with the role that non-cognitive abilities play in success at work.

The Value of Emotional Intelligence at Work
Martin Seligman has developed a construct that he calls "learned optimism" . It refers to the causal attributions people make when confronted with failure or setbacks. Optimists tend to make specific, temporary, external causal attributions while pessimists make global, permanent, internal attributions. In research at Met Life, Seligman and his colleagues found that new salesmen who were optimists sold 37 percent more insurance in their first two years than did pessimists. When the company hired a special group of individuals who scored high on optimism but failed the normal screening, they outsold the pessimists by 21 percent in their first year and 57 percent in the second. They even outsold the average agent by 27 percent.

In another study of learned optimism, Seligman tested 500 members of the freshman class at the University of Pennsylvania. He found that their scores on a test of optimism were a better predictor of actual grades during the freshman year than SAT scores or high school grades.

The ability to manage feelings and handle stress is another aspect of emotional intelligence that has been found to be important for success. A study of store managers in a retail chain found that the ability to handle stress predicted net profits, sales per square foot, sales per employee, and per dollar of inventory investment.

Emotional intelligence has as much to do with knowing when and how to express emotion as it does with controlling it. For instance, consider an experiment that was done at Yale University by Sigdal Barsade . He had a group of volunteers play the role of managers who come together in a group to allocate bonuses to their subordinates. A trained actor was planted among them. The actor always spoke first. In some groups the actor projected cheerful enthusiasm, in others relaxed warmth, in others depressed sluggishness, and in still others hostile irritability. The results indicated that the actor was able to infect the group with his emotion, and good feelings led to improved cooperation, fairness, and overall group performance. In fact, objective measures indicated that the cheerful groups were better able to distribute the money fairly and in a way that helped the organization. Similar findings come from the field. Bachman found that the most effective leaders in the US Navy were warmer, more outgoing, emotionally expressive, dramatic, and sociable.

One more example. Empathy is a particularly important aspect of emotional intelligence, and researchers have known for years that it contributes to occupational success. Rosenthal and his colleagues at Harvard discovered over two decades ago that people who were best at identifying others' emotions were more successful in their work as well as in their social lives. More recently, a survey of retail sales buyers found that apparel sales reps were valued primarily for their empathy. The buyers reported that they wanted reps who could listen well and really understand what they wanted and what their concerns were.

Thus far I have been describing research suggesting that "emotional intelligence" is important for success in work and in life. However, this notion actually is somewhat simplistic and misleading. Both Goleman and Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso have argued that by itself emotional intelligence probably is not a strong predictor of job performance. Rather, it provides the bedrock for competencies that are. Goleman has tried to represent this idea by making a distinction between emotional intelligence and emotional competence. Emotional competence refers to the personal and social skills that lead to superior performance in the world of work. "The emotional competencies are linked to and based on emotional intelligence. A certain level of emotional intelligence is necessary to learn the emotional competencies." For instance, the ability to recognize accurately what another person is feeling enables one to develop a specific competency such as Influence. Similarly, people who are better able to regulate their emotions will find it easier to develop a competency such as Initiative or Achievement drive. Ultimately it is these social and emotional competencies that we need to identify and measure if we want to be able to predict performance.

The Assessment of Emotional Intelligence and Competence
Assuming that emotional intelligence is important, the question of assessment and measurement becomes particularly pressing. What does the research suggest about the measurement of emotional intelligence and competence? In a paper published in 1998, Davies, Stankov, & Roberts concluded that there was nothing empirically new in the idea of emotional intelligence. This conclusion was based solely on a review of existing measures purporting to measure emotional intelligence at the point in time when they wrote that paper. However, most of those measures were new, and there was not yet much known about their psychometric properties. Research now is emerging that suggests emotional intelligence, and particularly the new measures that have been developed to assess it, is in fact a distinct entity. However, there still is not much research on the predictive validity of such measures, and this is a serious lack. Let me briefly summarize what we really know about the most popular ones.

The oldest instrument is Bar-On's EQ-I , which has been around for over a decade. This self-report instrument originally evolved not out of an occupational context but rather a clinical one. It was designed to assess those personal qualities that enabled some people to possess better "emotional well-being" than others. The EQ-I has been used to assess thousands of individuals, and we know quite a bit about its reliability and its convergent and discriminant validity . Less is known about its predictive validity in work situations. However, in one study the EQ-I was predictive of success for U.S. Air Force recruiters. In fact, by using the test to select recruiters, the Air Force saved nearly 3 million dollars annually . Also, there were no significant differences based on ethnic or racial group.

A second instrument is the Multifactor Emotional Intelligence Scale. The MEIS is a test of ability rather than a self-report measure. The test-taker performs a series of tasks that are designed to assess the person's ability to perceive, identify, understand, and work with emotion. There is some evidence of construct validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity, but none for predictive validity.

A third instrument is the Emotional Competence Inventory. The ECI is a 360 degree instrument. People who know the individual rate him or her on 20 competencies that Goleman's research suggests are linked to emotional intelligence. Although the ECI is in its early stages of development, about 40 percent of the items come from an older instrument, the Self-Assessment Questionnaire, that was developed by Boyatzis . These earlier items had been "validated against performance in hundreds of competency studies of managers, executives, and leaders in North America," Italy, and Brazil. However, there currently is no research supporting the predictive validity of the ECI.

Another measure that has been promoted commercially is the EQ Map. Although there is some evidence for convergent and divergent validity, the data have been reported in a rather ambiguous fashion.

One other measure deserves mention, even though it is less well-known than the others. Schutte, Malouff, Hall, Haggerty, Cooper, Golden, & Dornheim have developed a 33-item self-report measure based on Salovey and Mayer's (1990) early work. There is evidence for convergent and divergent validity. Emotional intelligence scores on this measure were positively associated with first-year college grades and supervisor ratings of student counselors working at various mental health agencies. Also, scores were higher for therapists than for therapy clients or prisoners.

Finally, it might be helpful to keep in mind that emotional intelligence comprises a large set of abilities that have been studied by psychologists for many years. Thus, another way to measure emotional intelligence or competence is through tests of specific abilities. Some of these tests seem rather strong. To name just one example, there is Seligman's SASQ, which was designed to measure learned optimism and which has been impressive in its ability to identify high performing students, salespeople, and athletes, to name just a few (Schulman, 1995).

Conclusion
So is there anything new about emotional intelligence? In some ways, emotional intelligence really is not new. In fact, it is based on a long history of research and theory in personality and social, as well as I/O, psychology. Furthermore, Goleman has never claimed otherwise. In fact, one of his main points was that the abilities associated with emotional intelligence have been studied by psychologists for many years, and there is an impressive, and growing, body of research suggesting that these abilities are important for success in many areas of life.

However, rather than arguing about whether emotional intelligence is new, I believe it is more useful and interesting to consider how important it is for effective performance at work. Although I have not had the time to cover very much of it, I hope I have shown that there now is a considerable body of research suggesting that a person's ability to perceive, identify, and manage emotion provides the basis for the kinds of social and emotional competencies that are important for success in almost any job. Furthermore, as the pace of change increases and the world of work makes ever greater demands on a person's cognitive, emotional, and physical resources, this particular set of abilities will become increasingly important. And that is good news for I/O psychologists, for they are the ones who are best situated to help clients to use emotional intelligence to improve both productivity and psychological well-being in the workplace of tomorrow.

References
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Bar-On, R. (in press). Emotional and social intelligence: Insights from the Emotional Quotient Inventory. In R. Bar-On & J. Parker (Eds.), Handbook of emotional intelligence. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Barsade, S. (1998). The ripple effect: Emotional contagion in groups (Working paper ). New Haven, CT: Yale University School of Management.

Barsade, S., & Gibson, D. E. (1998). Group emotion: A view from the top and bottom. In D. G. e. al. (Ed.), Research on managing groups and teams. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Boyatzis, R. E. (1994). Stimulating self-directed learning through the Managerial Assessment and Development Course. Journal of Management Education, 18(3), 304-323.

Boyatzis, R. E., Goleman, D., & Rhee, K. S. (in press). Clustering competence in emotional intelligence: Insights from the Emotional Competence Inventory (ECI). In R. Bar-on & J. D. Parker (Eds.), Handbook of emotional intelligence. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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Hemphill, J. K. (1959). Job description for executives. Harvard Business Review, 37(5), 55-67.

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Malouff, J., & Schutte, N. S. (1998, August). Emotional intelligence scale scores predict counselor performance. Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Society, Washington, DC.

Mayer, J. D., Caruso, D., & Salovey, P. (1998a). The multifactor emotional intelligence scale . Unpublished report available from the authors.

Mayer, J. D., Salovey, P., & Caruso, D. (1998b). Competing models of emotional intelligence. In R. J. Sternberg (Ed.), Handbook of human intelligence (2nd ed., ). New York: Cambridge University Press.

McClelland, D. C. (1973). Testing for competence rather than intelligence. American Psychologist, 28(1), 1-14.

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Orioli, E. M., Jones, T., & Trocki, K. H. (1999). EQ Map technical manual. San Francisco, CA: Q-Metrics.

Pilling, B. K., & Eroglu, S. (1994). An empirical examination of the impact of salesperson empathy and professionalism and merchandise salability on retail buyer's evaluations. Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, 14(1), 55-58.

Rosenthal, R. (1977). The PONS Test: Measuring sensitivity to nonverbal cues. In P. McReynolds (Ed.), Advances in psychological assessment. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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Salovey, P., & Mayer, J. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, cognition, and personality, 9(3), 185-211.

Salovey, P., Mayer, J. D., Goldman, S. L., Turvey, C., & Palfai, T. P. (1995). Emotional attention, clarity, and repair: Exploring emotional intelligence using the Trait Meta-Mood Scale. In J. W. Pennebaker (Ed.), Emotion, disclosure, and health (pp. 125-154). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Salovey, P., Woolery, A., & Mayer, J. D. (in press). Emotional intelligence: Conceptualization and measurement. In G. Fletcher & M. S. Clark (Eds.), The Blackwell handbook of social psychology (Vol. 2: Interpersonal Processes, ). Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers.

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Schutte, N. S., Malouff, J. M., Hall, L. E., Haggerty, D. J., Cooper, J. T., Golden, C. J., & Dornheim, L. (1998). Development and validation of a measure of emotional intelligence. Personality and Individual Differences, 25, 167-177.

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Thorndike, R. L., & Stein, S. (1937). An evaluation of the attempts to measure social intelligence. Psychological Bulletin, 34, 275-284.

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By: Cary Cherniss Download PDF Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology (GSAPP) - Rutgers University Email: cherniss@rci.rutgers.edu Publication date: 2000, Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, New Orleans, LA, April 15, 2000 Ever since the publication of Daniel Goleman's first book on the topic in 1995, emotional intelligence has become one of the hottest buzzwords in corporate America.

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Love, hate, fear, envy. We all feel emotions. We've all experienced them. We know what they are and how they affect us.

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Love, hate, fear, envy. We all feel emotions. We've all experienced them. We know what they are and how they affect us. The primary questions in philosophy is what causes them, and how can they be used. The first answers the second.

Emotions are caused by one's thoughts. They are both triggered by one's thoughts and programmed by one's thoughts. The triggering is straightforward to show. Hearing the words "rape", "murder", "death", or "genocide", etc., one experiences an emotion. Hearing the same words in an unknown language, the words would be meaningless. One wouldn't be able to make the mental connection between the sounds and the meaning of the words. The emotions that one normally feels with respect to these words would not be present. Only understanding can trigger an emotion.

A further example is that of a gunman. If someone burst into a room with a gun, the people present would probably feel fear. However, if one didn't know what a gun was, you wouldn't make the connection, and wouldn't experience the fear. The emotion is only triggered when understanding of the situation is present.

We know that understanding triggers the emotion. This doesn't explain the particular emotion, though. Why do we feel fear when we see the gunman, but joy when we see a baby walk for the first time? The answer is the same as why understanding is required to trigger the emotion. The emotion is a response to our understanding of the situation. Emotions are triggered by particular beliefs. Fear is based on a belief that one's life is in danger. Pleasure is experienced when one believes a value has been achieved. Each emotion is a particular response to a certain kind of judgment.

Emotions are automated responses. When one sees the gunman, one doesn't need to follow the full chain of thought to the judgment that causes the emotion. The emotion occurs almost immediately after the gunman is seen. This is because of an automatized judgment: the judgment that life is worth living and death is to be feared. The gunman triggers this emotion when one realized that one's life is threatened. The evaluation of whether life is good isn't made at that time. It was made before.

Since emotions are automatic responses to previous value judgments, it is possible that the response is not proper. If the original judgment was faulty, the emotion will be faulty as well. For instance, one may hate a stepfather because one believes him to be trying to steal one's mother. Later in life, the emotion may still be triggered when one sees the stepfather, even if one no longer believes the cause to be true anymore. Similarly, if the original judgment no longer applies, neither does the emotion. Finally, it is possible to trigger an emotion out of the original context. One may properly hate a man for his actions, but another man with similarities may improperly trigger that same emotion.

Because emotions are automatic responses and thus fallible, they should not be taken at face value. They should be compared to one's reasoned thoughts and if a conflict occurs, one should attempt to resolve why the conflict exists. One should try to understand why the emotion is being triggered and whether it is correct. It is possible that the emotion is correct, and the reasoning false, due to an oversight. But the two should be resolved carefully, and if the emotion is incorrect, one should attempt to change one's automatic response.

With a proper understanding of how emotions are formed, it can be seen that they serve a purpose for lightning fast value judgments which enable faster responses to time-critical situations and, as automatic responses, they can give useful insights to complicated problems. But emotions should never be taken at face value. They need to be validated with reason to insure that they are proper.

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Emotions are an automatic response that are triggered by understanding.

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One of the major missing parts in the success equation is emotional intelligence, a concept made popular by the groundbreaking book by Daniel Goleman, which is based on years of research by numerous scientists

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EQ can lead to personal and professional success. Assess yours here!

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Will gross national well-being ever rival GDP as a measure of progress?  Richard Layard and Andrew Marr debate the next phase of the happiness agenda.

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Compassion and the true meaning of empathy

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Compassion and the true meaning of empathy

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Buddhist roshi Joan Halifax works with people at the last stage of life (in hospice and on death row). She shares what she's learned about compassion in the face of death and dying, and a deep insight into the nature of empathy.

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Compassion and the true meaning of empathy

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Buddhist roshi Joan Halifax works with people at the last stage of life (in hospice and on death row). She shares what she’s learned about compassion in the face of death and dying, and a deep insight into the nature of empathy.

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Vaccine-autism claims, "Frankenfood" bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public's growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress.

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Michael Specter: The danger of science denial

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Vaccine-autism claims, "Frankenfood" bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public's growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress.

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The family history of Facebook: how social media will change the world

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The family history of Facebook: how social media will change the world

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I’m fascinated by social media. My Gen X friends can’t understand it. Most of them are too busy struggling with families and careers to spend time glued to Facebook and Twitter.

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Why Study History Through Primary Sources

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Why Study History Through Primary Sources

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It is clear that all our information in regard to past events and conditions must be derived from evidence of some kind. This evidence is called the source.

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Historians do not, as too many of my colleagues keep mindlessly repeating, "reconstruct" the past.

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Historians do not, as too many of my colleagues keep mindlessly repeating, "reconstruct" the past. What historians do is produce knowledge about the past, or, with respect to each individual, fallible historian, produce contributions to knowledge about the past. Thus the best and most concise definition of history is:

The bodies of knowledge about the past produced by historians, together with everything that is involved in the production, communication of, and teaching about that knowledge.

2. The Necessity for History

All developed countries have their National Archives (called the Public Record Office in Britain) and a historical profession, both paid for out of taxpayers' money. This is in recognition of the simple fact that knowledge of the past is essential to society. What happens in the present, and what will happen in the future, is very much governed by what happened in the past. It is obvious that knowledge of the past has not brought easy solutions to problems in, say, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, or Palestine. But without a thorough knowledge of past events and circumstances, we could not even attempt to grapple with these problems. Without knowledge of the past we would be without identity, we would be lost on an endless sea of time. The simplest answer to the questions "Why do history?" or "What is the use of history?" is: "Try to imagine what it would be like to live in a society where there was absolutely no knowledge of the past." The mind boggles. Of course, if history has this vital importance for society, then it must be as accurate as possible, it must be based on evidence and logical thought, not on specious theory or political ideology.

3. Other Justifications for History

Those who study history, for career purposes, or just for personal enjoyment, have other reasons apart from this all-embracing justification for national resources being channelled into the study of history. Many of us feel the almost poetic appeal of the past, have a passionate interest in finding out what really did happen in the past - practically all of the world's major tourist traps relate to the appeal of the past (the Tower of London, San Gimignano in Tuscany, Ephesus in Turkey). It is historians who provide the contextual knowledge that eventually works its way into the guide books, and again the need is for accuracy not specious theory. Historians also provide the contextual knowledge for great works of art and literature, thus enhancing our enjoyment of these. In addition, the study of history offers to individuals major utilitarian learning outcomes. Training in history is training in analysing, evaluating, and interpreting both secondary and primary sources. It develops an understanding that everything written pertaining to history, secondary or primary, must be approached with scepticism and caution. It develops the ability to distinguish between pieces of writing which are well-substantiated and logical, and those which simply express theory, hypothesis, or opinion. The skills and learning outcomes rising from historical study are invaluable in a contemporary world which is dominated by information and communications. The methods and skills required of the historian, and, more important, the attitudes of mind transmitted in the teaching of history, are of vital importance in assessing and filtering the messages constantly battering against us. History also provides a training in the writing up of the results of one's researches, in the form of essays, reports, dissertations. What is essential in history is clear and effective communication, well structured, and written in precise and explicit language.

4. The Subjectivity Question

Many who call themselves "historians" do, indeed, use "history" as a vehicle for expressing their own political commitment. That is sheer is self-indulgence. History is a scholarly, not a political, activity, and while, as citizens, we certainly should act upon our political views, in writing history we have an absolute obligation to try to exclude them. Most historians, like, most scientists, are motivated by the urge to find out. Much nonsense is talked about historians inevitably being "subjective"; the real point is that, being mere human beings, they are "fallible", and subject to many kinds of career and social pressures, or indeed common incompetence. Historians do disagree with each other in their interpretations, as do scientists. But history deals with human values, in a way the sciences do not, so there is more scope for differences in evaluation. Historical evidence is fragmentary, intractable, and imperfect. Individual books and articles may clash with each other; there will always be areas where uncertainty persists, but steadily agreed knowledge emerges in the form of works of synthesis and high-quality textbooks. History, like the sciences, is a co-operative enterprise. Some historians today still seem to perceive historians (usually themselves) as great literary and media figures, as individual intellectual and moral giants giving leadership to ordinary readers. Such historians - subscribers to what I call the " auteur theory" - tend to glory in their own subjectivity. By all means enjoy their literary flourishes, but always remember that the aims of a work of history are very different from those of a work of literature.

The existence of the (mistaken) notion that historians "reconstruct" the past does indicate that there is an awareness of the distinction between "history" and "the past", though this distinction is often obfuscated. Particularly is this the case with the metahistorians - A.J. Toynbee, right-wing political scientists like Francis Fukuyama, Marxists, and postmodernists - who, apart from any other uses, apply the term "history" to some great process (invented by themselves) whereby the past unfolds in a series of stages into the present and on into the future. In their own studies this process is taken as a given, and they test the history of historians against this given. No, to keep clear of all the misconceptions which abound in historical epistemology we have to make a firm distinction between history as "the bodies of knowledge about the past produced by historians", and "the past" as "everything which actually happened, whether known, or written, about by historians or not".

It follows from all of this that periodization, the dividing of the past up into the eras or periods, has no a priori existence. It is simply an analytical tool of historians. A periodization which makes sense for the West, will not make sense for Africa or Asia. A periodization which makes sense for economic history, may well not make sense for social or political history.

7. Primary and Secondary Sources

The only way we can have knowledge of the past is through studying the relics and traces left by past societies, the primary sources. Primary sources, as it were, form the basic "raw material" of history; they are sources which came into existence within the period being investigated. The articles and books written up later by historians, drawing upon these primary sources, converting the raw material into history, are secondary sources (pedants insist on pointing out that secondary sources may become primary sources for still later historians, but this is a matter of such triviality as scarcely to be worth bothering about). The distinction between primary and secondary sources is a critical one, though no historian has ever pretended that it offers a magic key to the nature of historical study, or that primary sources have a necromantic potency denied to secondary ones. There is always some excitement about being in contact with a genuine primary source, but one will not learn very much from a single source. Reading through an edited selection of excerpts from primary sources will have the salutary effect of bringing one in contact with the thinking and language of past generations, but it will not amount to research. If the ordinary reader, or history student, wants to learn quickly about the role and status of women during the Renaissance, or about the causes of the First World War, they will be well advised to go to the secondary authorities, a knowledge of the principles of history being useful in separating out the more reliable from the less. But if you are planning to make an original contribution to historical knowledge, you are unlikely to make much of a stir if you stick strictly to other people's work, that is, the secondary sources - to which, it should be stressed the research historian will frequently return throughout all stages of research and writing. The difference is critical in that strategy which all historians, in one way or another, devise in embarking on a new research project. It is through the secondary sources that one becomes beware of the gaps in knowledge, problems unsolved, suspect explanations. It is with the aid of the secondary sources, and all the other resources of the profession, that one begins to identify the archives in which one will commence one's researches. Primary sources, numbingly copious in some areas, are scarce and fragmentary in others. Much has to be garnered indirectly and by inference. Historians do not rely on single sources, but are always seeking corroboration, qualification, correction; the production of history is very much a matter of accumulating details, refining nuances. The technical skills of the historian lie in sorting these matters out, in understanding how and why a particular source came into existence, how relevant it is to the topic under investigation, and, obviously, the particular codes or language in accordance with which the particular source came into being as a concrete artefact. Philosophers, and others ignorant of history, get confused because they think "primary" means "more truthful", and "secondary" means "less truthful". That is not the distinction at all. A good secondary source will be as reliable as the historian can possibly make it. Primary sources are full of prejudices and errors. They were not written to serve the interests of historians coming along later: they were written to serve the interests of those who created them, going about their own business. We need to understand not just the distinction between primary and secondary sources, but also that there are different types and levels of secondary source. These range from the most highly specialised research-based work, through high-quality textbooks which incorporate some personal research as well as summarise the work of others, to the simple textbooks, and then on to the many types of popular and non-academic history.

8. Witting and Unwitting Testimony

In their work, historians have always recognised that primary sources, as well as containing many kinds of imperfection, also contain many types and many layers of evidence, even if they have tended not to make explicit statements about this. The crucial, though never absolutely rigid, distinction is between the "witting" testimony and the "unwitting". "Witting" means "deliberate" or " intentional"; " unwitting" means "unaware" or "unintentional". "Testimony" means "evidence". Thus, "witting testimony" is the deliberate or intentional message of a document or other source; the "unwitting testimony" is the unintentional evidence (about, for example, the attitudes and values of the author, or about the "culture" to which he/she belongs) that it also contains. Actually, it is the writer, creator, or creators of the document or source who is, or are, intentional or unintentional, not the testimony itself, so these phrases are examples of a figure of speech, the transferred epithet, where the adjective, which strictly speaking should be applied to a person, is transferred to what the person produced - the phrase is all the more effective for that. An understanding of the nature of unwitting testimony, often the most valuable evidence for a historian, might have guarded against the fashion for invoking anthropology and postmodernist theory: from at least the time of Frederick Maitland (1850-1896), historians have been using unwitting testimony to establish the beliefs and customs of past societies. No one is more familiar than the historian with the problems of language to be encountered in primary sources, which abound in obscure technical terms, words and phrases which have changed their meanings over the centuries, attitudes and concepts which no longer exist today, and may be scarcely expressible in the language of today.

It is fun, and it is becoming fashionable, for historians to work with novels, films, paintings, and even music. Doing this is not evidence of some superior virtue, or sensibility; in fact, most of what we know about most periods in the past will continue to come from the more conventional sources. Historians have had a habit of quoting odd lines from novels, as if these, in themselves, somehow provided some extra illumination. Worse, historians refer to characters in novels (or even films) as if they were real people. If cultural artefacts are to be used at all in serious historical writing (and I believe they should - they can be invaluable for attitudes, values, and quality of cultural life), they have to be used seriously. If one is going to refer to a novel or a film, one must provide the essential contextual information about the artefact, and its production and reception, to make the reference a genuine contribution to knowledge: one must provide a "Quintessential Summary" (nature of the artefact, authorial intentions, and so on). When the temptation comes to make use of some cultural artefact the crucial questions to ask are "Does it tell us anything we didn't know already?", and, more probingly, "Does it tell us anything we couldn't discover more readily from another source?" Novels have sometimes been used as sources for living conditions and standards, as paintings of domestic scenes have sometimes been used as sources for what people ate. But it is far better to go directly to the actual statistics of wage rates and to social investigations for the first topic, and to household accounts, statistics of retail sales and so on for the latter one. A painting of eighteenth-century French peasants consuming bread, garlic and wine may be evidence of their regular diet, but there is always the quite strong possibility that the artist might have been more concerned with infusing his painting with the religious symbolism of the Last Supper than with accurate sociological observation. It is perfectly legitimate for editors and publishers to wish to brighten up articles and books by including reproductions of various works of art. But, with rare exceptions, such art works will, at best, be no more than illustrations; at worst they may have little real relevance to what is being said in the article or book. Serious historians should only use such reproductions as genuine primary sources, explicating them in exactly the same way as they would explicate an extract from a written primary source.

10. Strategy and Structure

I have already mentioned the need for identifying a research strategy, using the secondary sources to identify the topics to be addressed and the archives to be used. The writing of history is an iterative process: frequently in writing up one's researches, one will encounter problems necessitating further research in the primary sources, or perhaps the consultation of more secondary sources. The writing of history imposes demands on historians which are very different from those of writing a novel, or, say, literary criticism or sociology. In producing an account which presents a sense of chronological change, and, perhaps, of the movement from one period to another, incorporates explanation, analysis and description, explains causes and consequences, discusses different topics and themes and different aspects of the past (economic, cultural, and so on), and which best conveys to the reader what actually was happening, what interactions there were, what changed, and what did not, it is essential to develop a structure (that is, the sequence of chapters and sections within chapters, and the way in which these are related to each other).

We expect novelists, poets, and playwrights to exploit the ambiguities and resonances of language, even, perhaps, to express directly the dictates of the unconscious, not always logical in its choice of words. Historians, on the other hand, should convey their findings as clearly and explicitly as possible. Some metaphors may be an aid to communication, others will simply contribute to confusion and obfuscation. With all the temptations to indulge in metaphor and rhetoric, cliché, sloppy phrasing and slang, getting it right is fiendishly difficult. Two essential injunctions are: "reflect" and "revise". What is it you really want to say? Is precise explication really assisted by phrases like, "webs of meaning", "cultural scripts", "discursive domains"? Revise, not to achieve elaborate literary effect, but to convey precisely what you mean to the reader. An exact, uncluttered style is essential to historical communication, it is not an extra; and if the style can be elegant (which is very different from being elaborate or rhetorical) so much the better. Sentiment is not enough in historical writing, what is needed is thought.

All human activities, including history, are culturally (or socially, the meanings in this instance are the same) influenced, but history is not "culturally constructed" or "culturally determined". Too many naïve statements have been made along the lines of "each age rewrites its history". History is not a formation dance in which everybody in one period marches in one direction, and then, in the next, marches off in a different direction. What has happened in the history of historical writing is that the scope, and the sophistication, of history have steadily extended. In the twentieth century there was some development away from political history, but political history is still very important. In fact, no one type of history is intrinsically better than another: provided the fundamental, but ever-expanding methodologies are adhered to, it all depends upon which topics and questions are being addressed. In the recent study of history greater emphasis has been given to comparative history and to cultural history: but one of the greatest strengths of history today is that nothing is ruled out. Conclusion At its very core history must be a scholarly discipline, based on thorough analysis of the evidence, and in the writing up of which language is deployed with the utmost precision. There must be constant awareness of the methods and principles of that discipline, constant attention to how it is taught, and how, at different levels, it is communicated to wider audiences.

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Historians do not, as too many of my colleagues keep mindlessly repeating, "reconstruct" the past. What historians do is produce knowledge about the past, or, with respect to each individual, fallible historian, produce contributions to knowledge about the past.

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What follows are a series of quotations about history and the historian's craft. They have been culled from a variety of sources and they appear here in totally random order. Their purpose is to incite, energize and stimulate your historical imagination.

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Is it possible for historical writing to be free from perspective?

What is a fact in history?

How can historical accounts be assessed?

How can one gauge the extent to which a history is told from a particular cultural or national perspective?

To what extent do you think that people learn from their mistakes, and to what extent do you think they keep making the same mistakes?

If you keep a diary, what determines what you choose to include and what you choose to omit?

What is the relation between the style of language used and the history written?

What distinguishes a better historical account from a worse one?

How do we decide which events are historically significant?

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Why should anyone bother learning about things that happened far away and long ago? Who cares about Cleopatra, Charlemagne, Montezuma or Confucius? And why worry about George Washington, or how democratic government and industrial society arose? Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today?

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Why should anyone bother learning about things that happened far away and long ago? Who cares about Cleopatra, Charlemagne, Montezuma or Confucius? And why worry about George Washington, or how democratic government and industrial society arose? Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today? Why add to the burden by looking at the past? Historians ought to try to answer such questions by saying what the study of history is good for, and what it cannot do. But since no one can speak for the historical profession as a whole, this essay is no more than a personal statement, commissioned by the American Historical Association in the hope of convincing all concerned that the study of history is indeed worthwhile and necessary for the education of effective citizens and worthy human beings. Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.

Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory.

Without individual memory, a person literally loses his or her identity, and would not know how to act in encounters with others. Imagine waking up one morning unable to tell total strangers from family and friends! Collective memory is similar, though its loss does not immediately paralyze everyday private activity. But ignorance of history-that is, absent or defective collective memory-does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsiders, whether the outsiders are another nation, another civilization, or some special group within national borders.

Often it is enough for experts to know about outsiders, if their advice is listened to. But democratic citizenship and effective participation in the determination of public policy require citizens to share a collective memory, organized into historical knowledge and belief. Otherwise, agreement on what ought to be done in a given situation is difficult to achieve. Agreement on some sort of comfortable falsehood will not do, for without reasonably accurate knowledge of the past, we cannot expect to accomplish intended results, simply because we will fail to foresee how others are likely to react to anything we decide on. Nasty surprises and frustrating failures are sure to multiply under such circumstances.

This value of historical knowledge obviously justifies teaching and learning about what happened in recent times, for the way things are descends from the way they were yesterday and the day before that. But in fact, institutions that govern a great deal of our everyday behavior took shape hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Having been preserved and altered across the generations to our own time, they are sure to continue into the future. The United States government is such an institution; so is the world market, armies and the Christian church. Skills like writing, and devices like bureaucracy are even older than Christianity, and concerns that bother us still can be read into the cave paintings left behind by Stone Age hunters as much as twenty thousand years ago. Only an acquaintance with the entire human adventure on earth allows us to understand these dimensions of contemporary reality.

Memory is not something fixed and forever. As time passes, remembered personal experiences take on new meanings. A bitter disappointment may come to seem a blessing in disguise; a triumph may later turn sour, while something trivial may subsequently loom large-all because of what happens later on. Collective memory is quite the same. Historians are always at work reinterpreting the past, asking new questions, searching new sources and finding new meanings in old documents in order to bring the perspective of new knowledge and experience to bear on the task of understanding the past. This means, of course, that what we know and believe about history is always changing. In other words, our collective, codified memory alters with time just as personal memories do, and for the same reasons.

. . . the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life.

When teachers of history admit that their best efforts at understanding the past are only tentative and sure to be altered in time to come, skeptics are likely to conclude that history has no right to take student time from other subjects. If what is taught today is not really true, how can it claim space in a crowded school curriculum?

But what if the world is more complicated and diverse than words can ever tell? What if human minds are incapable of finding' neat pigeon holes into which everything that happens will fit? What if we have to learn to live with uncertainty and probabilities, and act on the basis of the best guesswork we are capable of? Then, surely, the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life. Then, surely, a serious effort to understand the interplay of change and continuity in human affairs is the only adequate introduction human beings can have to the confusing flow of events that constitutes the actual, adult world.

Since that is the way the world is, it follows that study of history is essential for every young person. Systematic sciences are not enough. They discount time, and therefore oversimplify reality, especially human reality. Current events are not enough either. Destined to almost instant obsolescence, they foreshorten and thereby distort the time dimension within which human lives unfold and, thanks to memory, are conducted.

Memory, indeed, makes us human. History, our collective memory, carefully codified and critically revised, makes us social, sharing ideas and ideals with others so as to form all sorts of different human groups. Each such group acts as it does largely because of shared ideas and beliefs about the past and about what the past, as understood and interpreted by the group in question, tells about the present and probable future.

BUT, you may say: suppose we agree that some sort of knowledge of history is essential for an adult understanding of the world, what actually belongs in our classrooms? The varieties of history are enormous; facts and probabilities about the past are far too numerous for anyone to comprehend them all. Every sort of human group has its own history; so do ideas, institutions, techniques, areas, civilizations, and humanity at large. How to begin? Where to start? How bring some sort of order to the enormous variety of things known and believed about the past?

Teachers of history have always had to struggle with these questions. Early in this century, teachers and academic administrators pretty well agreed that two sorts of history courses were needed: a survey of the national history of the United States and a survey of European history. This second course was often broadened into a survey of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s. But by the 1960s and 1970s these courses were becoming outdated, left behind by the rise of new kinds social and quantitative history, especially the history of women, of Blacks, and of other formerly overlooked groups within the borders of the United States, and of peoples emerging from colonial status in the world beyond our borders. These, and still other new sorts of history, enhanced older sensibilities and corrected older biases; but, being both new and different, did not fit smoothly into existing surveys of U.S. national history and western civilization.

Clearly we need careful reflection about, and search for, enduring patterns and critical turning points in the past, for these are the historical facts that everyone needs to know ...

Teachers found it exciting to teach the new kinds of history in special courses that allowed them time to develop the subject properly. It was less satisfying and much harder to combine old with new to make an inclusive, judiciously balanced (and far less novel) introductory course for high school or college students.

But abandoning the effort to present a meaningful portrait of the entire national and civilizational past destroyed the original justification for requiring students to study history. As specialized electives multiplied, historians could not convince others that random samples from the past, reflecting each teacher's special expertise or interests, belonged in everyone's education. For if one sample was as good as another, none could claim to be essential. Competing subjects abounded, and no one could or would decide what mattered most and should take precedence. As this happened, studying history became only one among many possible ways of spending time in school.

Level I. Personal-Local History

The costs of this change are now becoming apparent, and many concerned persons agree that returning to a more structured curriculum, in which history ought to play a prominent part, is imperative. But choice of what sort of history to teach remains as difficult as ever. Clearly we need careful reflection about, and search for, enduring patterns and critical turning points in the past, for these are the historical facts that everyone needs to know, not what happens to interest a particular teacher or aspiring specialist. Whether historians will rise to the occasion and successfully bring old and new sorts of history together into an understandable whole remains to be seen. In the meanwhile, a few obvious suggestions are all that can be offered here.

Amongst all the varieties of history that specialists have so energetically and successfully explored in recent decades, three levels of generality seem likely to have the greatest importance for ordinary people. First is family, local, neighborhood history: something often transmitted orally, but worth attention in school for all that. This would seem especially important for primary school years, when children start to experience the world outside their homes. Second is national history, because that is where political power is concentrated in our time. Last is global history, because intensified communications make encounters with all the other peoples of the earth increasingly important. These levels belong to high school and college, in the years when young people start to pay attention to public affairs and prepare to assume the responsibilities of citizenship. Other pasts are certainly worth attention, but are better studied in the context of a prior acquaintance with personal-local, national, and global history. That is because these three levels are the ones that affect most powerfully what all other groups and segments of society actually do.

Can such courses be taught and fitted into the curriculum? The answer is yes, if teachers and administrators try hard to put first things first and achieve a modicum of clarity about what everyone ought to know. National history that leaves out Blacks and women and other minorities is no longer acceptable; but American history that leaves out the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is not acceptable either. What is needed is a vision of the whole, warts and all. Global history is perhaps more difficult. Certainly our traditional training sidesteps the problem of attaining a satisfactory vision of the history of humanity, since few historians even try for a global overview. Still, some have made the attempt. Moreover, every scale of history has its own appropriate patterns which, once perceived, are as definite and as easily tested by the evidence as are the meaningful patterns that emerge on any other scale. This means, I think, that careful and critical world history is attainable just as surely as is a careful and critical national history that does not omit the important and newly self-conscious groups that were previously overlooked.

Level II: National History

But consensus is slow to come, and may never be achieved. In the meanwhile, teachers and curriculum planners have a difficult task. Authoritative models for courses in national and global history are not readily available. Personal and neighborhood history, too, must be worked out independently for each classroom and locality. But questions to be asked and the range of information that can be handled by children in the primary grades is, perhaps, less difficult to agree upon than at the high school and college levels. Serious and concentrated effort is clearly called for. Only so can history and historians deserve and expect to regain the central place in the education of the young that once was theirs.

Level III: Global History

THREE points remain. First, the study of history does not lead to exact prediction of future events. Though it fosters practical wisdom, knowledge of the past does not permit anyone to know exactly what is going to happen. Looking at some selected segment from the past in order to find out what will occur "next time" can mislead the unwary, simply because the complex setting within which human beings act is never twice the same. Consequently, the lessons of history, though supremely valuable when wisely formulated, become grossly misleading when oversimplifiers try to transfer them mechanically from one age to another, or from one place to another. Anyone who claims to perform such a feat is sadly self-deceived. Practical wisdom requires us instead to expect differences as well as similarities, changes as well as continuities-always and everywhere. Predictable fixity is simply not the human way of behaving. Probabilities and possibilities-together with a few complete surprises-are what we live with and must learn to expect.

Second, as acquaintance with the past expands, delight in knowing more and more can and often does become an end in itself. History offers innumerable heroes and villains. Reading about what people did in far away times and places enlarges our sense of human capacities both for good and evil. Encountering powerful commitments to vanished ideas and ideals, like those that built the pyramids, puts our personal commitment to our own ideals into a new perspective, perhaps bitter-sweet. Discovering fears and hopes like our own in pages written by the medieval Japanese courtier, Lady Murasaki, or reading about the heroic and futile quest for immortality undertaken by the ancient Mesopotamian king, Gilgamesh, stirs a sense of shared humanity that reaches back to the beginning of civilization and across all cultural barriers.

On the other hand, studying alien religious beliefs, strange customs, diverse family patterns and vanished social structures shows how differently various human groups have tried to cope with the world around them. Broadening our humanity and extending our sensibilities by recognizing sameness and difference throughout the recorded past is therefore an important reason for studying history, and especially the history of peoples far away and long ago. For we can only know ourselves by knowing how we resemble and how we differ from others. Acquaintance with the human past is the only way to such self knowledge.

... ignorance of history--that is, absent or defective collective memory--does deprive us of the best available guide for public action .. .

Finally, for those especially attracted to it, search into odd corners and contemplation of the main outlines of history can develop into a hunt for understandings of one's own, as new ideas about connections between one thing and another spring to mind. This sort of historical research and creativity is, of course, the special province of graduate school and of the historical profession at large. Reinterpretations and modifications of received notions about what really happened result from such personal venturing; and new ideas and meanings, tested against the evidence available to other historians, feed into high school and college classrooms by providing teachers with an ever-evolving understanding of the past to set before the young.

In such interaction between research and teaching, eternal and unchanging truth does not emerge. Only inspired, informed guesses about what mattered and how things changed through time. That is all human minds can do to unravel the mystery of humanity and of human groups' encounters with one another and with the world. Not very good, perhaps; simply the best we have in the unending effort to understand ourselves and others, and what happens and will happen to us and to them, time without end.

William H. McNeill was born in Canada in 1917, received his PhD from Cornell University in 1947, and currently serves as Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor of History emeritus at the University of Chicago. He has written more than twenty books, of which the most important is The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963). His other works include Venire: The Hinge of Europe, 1097-1797 (Chicago, 1974); Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY, 1976); The Metamorphosis of Greece since 1945 (Chicago, 1978); The Human Condition: Art Historical and Ecological View (Princeton, 1980); Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force anal Society since 1000 A.D. (Chicago, 1982); and Mythistory and Other Essays (Chicago, 1986). McNeill served as AHA president in 1985, and gave his address on "Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians."

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Why should anyone bother learning about things that happened far away and long ago? Who cares about Cleopatra, Charlemagne, Montezuma or Confucius? And why worry about George Washington, or how democratic government and industrial society arose? Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today?

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WorldmapperRediscover the world as you’ve never seen it before

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WorldmapperRediscover the world as you’ve never seen it before

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Worldmapper is a collection of world maps called cartograms, where territories are resized on each map according to the subject of interest. Our range of maps is continuously extended and updated. Explore the world as you’ve never seen it before!

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Worldmapper | rediscover the world as you’ve never seen it before

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Mapping our place in the world: The atlas for the 21st century. Worldmapper is a collection of world maps where countries are resized according to a broad range of global issues. Our cartograms are unique visualisations that show the world as you’ve never seen it before. Explore them all!

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A brief history of religion in art - TED-Ed

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A brief history of religion in art - TED-Ed

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Before we began putting art into museums, art mostly served as the visual counterpart to religious stories. Are these theological paintings, sculptures, textiles and illuminations from centuries ago still relevant to us? Jeremiah Dickey describes the evolution of art in the public eye and explains how the modern viewer can see the history of art as an ongoing global conversation.

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A brief history of religion in art - TED-Ed

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Can a religious believer be a serious journalist? Richard Dawkins and the unbearable smugness of tweeting

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Can a religious believer be a serious journalist? Richard Dawkins and the unbearable smugness of tweeting

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For some time I've been expecting to see a particular secularist conceit expressed in a particular way - and over the weekend, Richard Dawkins finally came through.

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God From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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God From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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This article is about the concept of a supreme "God" in the context of monotheism.

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In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. In polytheistic thought, a god is "a spirit or being believed to control some part of the universe or life and often worshipped for doing so, or something that represents this spirit or being". Belief in the existence of at least one god is called theism.

Views regarding God vary considerably. Many notable theologians and philosophers have developed arguments for and against the existence of God. Atheism rejects the belief in any deity. Agnosticism is the belief that the existence of God is unknown or unknowable. Some theists view knowledge concerning God as derived from faith. God is often conceived as the greatest entity in existence. God is often believed to be the cause of all things and so is seen as the creator and sustainer and the ruler of the universe. God is often thought of as incorporeal and independent of the material creation while pantheism holds God is the universe itself. God is sometimes seen as the most benevolent, while deism holds that God is not involved in humanity apart from creation.

Some traditions attach spiritual significance to the relationship with God and see God as the source of all moral obligation, with acts such as worship and prayer. God is sometimes described without reference to gender, while others use terminology that is gender-specific. God is referred to by different names depending on the language and cultural tradition with titles also used to refer to different attributes.

Etymology and usage

The Mesha Stele bears the earliest known reference (840 BCE) to the Israelite God Yahweh.

The earliest written form of the Germanic word God comes from the 6th-century Christian Codex Argenteus. The English word itself is derived from the Proto-Germanic *ǥuđan. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European form was likely based on the root , which meant either "to call" or "to invoke". The Germanic words for God were originally neuter, but during the process of the Christianization of the Germanic peoples from their indigenous Germanic paganism, the words became a masculine syntactic form. In the English language, capitalization is used when the word is used as a proper noun, as well as for other names by which a god is known. Consequently, the capitalized form of god is not used for multiple gods or when used to refer to the generic idea of a deity.

The English word God and its counterparts in other languages are normally used for any and all conceptions and, in spite of significant differences between religions, the term remains an English translation common to all.

means God in Hebrew, but in Judaism and in Christianity, God is also given a personal name, the tetragrammaton YHWH, in origin possibly the name of an Edomite or Midianite deity, Yahweh. In many English translations of the Bible, when the word LORD is in all capitals, it signifies that the word represents the tetragrammaton. Jah or Yah is an abbreviation of Jahweh/Yahweh, and often sees usage by Jews and Christians in the interjection " Hallelujah", meaning "Praise Jah", which is used to give God glory. In Judaism some of the Hebrew titles of God are considered holy names.

( Arabic: الله) is the Arabic term with no plural used by Muslims and Arabic speaking Christians and Jews meaning "The God", while ( Arabic: إِلَٰه plural `āliha آلِهَة) is the term used for a deity or a god in general. Muslims also use a multitude of other titles for God.

In Hinduism, Brahman is often considered a monistic concept of God. God may also be given a proper name in monotheistic currents of Hinduism which emphasize the personal nature of God, with early references to his name as Krishna- Vasudeva in Bhagavata or later Vishnu and Hari. Sang Hyang Widhi Wasa is the term used in Balinese Hinduism.

In Chinese religion, Shangdi is conceived as the progenitor (first ancestor) of the universe, intrinsic to it and constantly bringing order to it.

Ahura Mazda is the name for God used in Zoroastrianism. "Mazda", or rather the Avestan stem-form Mazdā-, nominative Mazdå, reflects Proto-Iranian *Mazdāh (female). It is generally taken to be the proper name of the spirit, and like its Sanskrit cognate medhā, means "intelligence" or "wisdom". Both the Avestan and Sanskrit words reflect Proto-Indo-Iranian *mazdhā-, from Proto-Indo-European mn̩sdʰeh 1, literally meaning "placing () one's mind (*mn̩-s)", hence "wise". Meanwhile 101 other names are also in use.

Waheguru () is a term most often used in Sikhism to refer to God. It means "Wonderful Teacher" in the Punjabi language. Vāhi (a Middle Persian borrowing) means "wonderful" and () is a term denoting "teacher". Waheguru is also described by some as an experience of ecstasy which is beyond all description. The most common usage of the word "Waheguru" is in the greeting Sikhs use with each other - Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh "Wonderful Lord's Khalsa, Victory is to the Wonderful Lord."

Baha, the "greatest" name for God in the Baháʼí Faith, is Arabic for "All-Glorious".

Other names for God include Aten in ancient Egyptian Atenism where Aten was proclaimed to be the one "true" supreme being and creator of the universe, Chukwu in Igbo, and Hayyi Rabbi in Mandaeism.

General conceptions

Thomas Aquinas summed up five main arguments as proofs for God's existence (painting by Carlo Crivelli, 1476).

Ontological arguments refer to any argument for the existence of God that is based on a priori reasoning. Notable ontological arguments were formulated by Anselm and René Descartes. Cosmological arguments, such as those described below, use concepts around the origin of the universe to argue for the existence of God.

The Teleological argument, also called the ''argument from design'', uses the complexity within the universe as a proof of the existence of God. It is countered that the fine tuning required for a stable universe with life on earth is illusionary as humans are only able to observe the small part of this universe that succeeded in making such observation possible, called the anthropic principle, and so would not learn of, for example, life on other planets or of universes that did not occur because of different laws of physics. Non-theists have argued that complex processes that have natural explanations yet to be discovered are referred to the supernatural, called god of the gaps. Other theists, such as John Henry Newman who believed theistic evolution was acceptable, have also argued against versions of the teleological argument and held that it is limiting of God to view him having to only intervene specially in some instances rather than having complex processes designed to create order.

The Argument from beauty states that this universe happens to contain special beauty in it and that there would be no particular reason for this over aesthetically neutrality other than God. This has been countered by pointing to the existence of ugliness in the universe. This has also been countered by arguing that beauty has no objective reality and so the Universe could be seen as ugly or that humans have made what is more beautiful than nature.

The Argument from morality argues for the existence of God given the assumption of the objective existence of morals. While prominent non-theistic philosophers such as the atheist J. L. Mackie agreed that the argument is valid, they disagreed with its premises. David Hume argued that there is no basis to believe in objective moral truths while biologist E. O. Wilson theorized that the feelings of morality are a by product of natural selection in humans and would not exist independent of the mind. Philosopher Michael Lou Martin argued that a subjective account for morality can be acceptable. Similar to the argument from morality is the argument from conscience which argues for the existence of God given the existence of a conscience that informs of right and wrong, even against prevailing moral codes. Philosopher John Locke instead argued that conscience is a social construct and thus could lead to contradicting morals.

Atheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. Agnosticism is the view that the truth values of certain claims-especially metaphysical and religious claims such as whether God, the divine or the supernatural exist-are unknown and perhaps unknowable. Theism generally holds that God exists objectively and independently of human thought and is sometimes used to refer to any belief in God or gods.

Some view the existence of God as an empirical question. Richard Dawkins states that "a universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference." Carl Sagan argued that the doctrine of a Creator of the Universe was difficult to prove or disprove and that the only conceivable scientific discovery that could disprove the existence of a Creator (not necessarily a God) would be the discovery that the universe is infinitely old. Some theologians, such as Alister McGrath, argue that the existence of God is not a question that can be answered using the scientific method.

Agnostic Stephen Jay Gould argued that science and religion are not in conflict and proposed an approach dividing the world of philosophy into what he called " non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA). In this view, questions of the supernatural, such as those relating to the existence and nature of God, are non- empirical and are the proper domain of theology. The methods of science should then be used to answer any empirical question about the natural world, and theology should be used to answer questions about ultimate meaning and moral value. In this view, the perceived lack of any empirical footprint from the magisterium of the supernatural onto natural events makes science the sole player in the natural world. Stephen Hawking and co-author Leonard Mlodinow state in their 2010 book, The Grand Design, that it is reasonable to ask who or what created the universe, but if the answer is God, then the question has merely been deflected to that of who created God. Both authors claim however, that it is possible to answer these questions purely within the realm of science, and without invoking divine beings.

Trinitarians believe that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct persons sharing a single nature or essense.

A deity, or "god" (with lowercase g), refers to a supernatural being. Monotheism is the belief that there is only one deity, referred to as ''God'' (with uppercase g). Comparing or equating other entities to God is viewed as idolatry in monotheism, and is often strongly condemned. Judaism includes some of the oldest monotheistic traditions in the world. Islam's most fundamental concept is meaning "oneness" or "uniqueness". The first pillar of Islam is an oath that forms the basis of the religion and which non-Muslims wishing to convert must recite, declares that "I testify that there is no deity except God."

In Christianity, the doctrine of the Trinity describes God as one God in Father, Son ( Jesus), and Holy Spirit. In the past centuries, this fundamental mystery of the Christian faith was also summarized by the Latin formula Sancta Trinitas, Unus Deus (Holy Trinity, Unique God), reported in the Litanias Lauretanas. God in Hinduism is viewed differently by diverse strands of the religion with most Hindus having faith in a supreme reality ( Brahman) who can be manifested in numerous chosen deities. Thus, the religion is sometimes characterized as Polymorphic Monotheism. Henotheism is the belief and worship of a single god at a time while accepting the validity of worshiping other deities. Monolatry is the belief in a single deity worthy of worship while accepting the existence of other dieties.

Transcendence

Transcendence is the aspect of God's nature that is completely independent of the material universe and its physical laws. Many supposed characteristics of God are described in human terms. Anselm thought that God did not feel emotions such as anger or love, but appeared to do so through our imperfect understanding. The incongruity of judging "being" against something that might not exist, led many medieval philosophers approach to knowledge of God through negative attributes, called Negative theology. For example, one should not say that God is wise, but can say that God is not ignorant (i.e. in some way God has some properties of knowledge). Christian theologian Alister McGrath writes that one has to understand a "personal god" as an analogy. "To say that God is like a person is to affirm the divine ability and willingness to relate to others. This does not imply that God is human, or located at a specific point in the universe."

Pantheism holds that God is the universe and the universe is God and denies that God transcends the Universe. For pantheist philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the whole of the natural universe is made of one substance, God, or its equivalent, Nature. Pantheism is sometimes objected to as not providing any meaningful explanation of God with the German philosopher Schopenhauer stating "Pantheism is only a euphemism for atheism". Pandeism holds that God was a separate entity but then became the Universe. Panentheism holds that God contains, but is not identical to, the Universe.

God Blessing the Seventh Day, 1805 watercolor painting by William Blake

God is often viewed as the cause of all that exists. For Pythagoreans, Monad variously referred to divinity, the first being or an indivisible origin. The philosophy of Plato and Plotinus refers to " The One" which is the first principle of reality that is ''beyond'' being and is both the source of the Universe and the teleological purpose of all things. Aristotle theorized a first uncaused cause for all motion in the universe and viewed it as perfectly beautiful, immaterial, unchanging and indivisible. Aseity is the property of not depending on any cause other than itself for its existence. Avicenna held that there must be a necessarily existent guaranteed to exist by its essence - it cannot ''not'' exist - and that humans identify this as God. Secondary causation refers to God creating the laws of the Universe which then can change themselves within the framework of those laws. In addition to the initial creation, occasionalism refers to the idea that the Universe would not by default continue to exist from one instant to the next and so would need to rely on God as a sustainer. While divine providence refers to any intervention by God, it is usually used to refer to "special providence" where there is an extraordinary intervention by God, such as miracles.

Benevolence

Deism holds that God exists but does not intervene in the world beyond what was necessary to create it, such as answering prayers or producing miracles. Deists sometimes attribute this to God having no interest in or not being aware of humanity. Pandeists would hold that God does not intervene because God is the Universe.

Of those theists who hold that God has an interest in humanity, most hold that God is omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent. This belief raises questions about God's responsibility for evil and suffering in the world. Dystheism, which is related to theodicy, is a form of theism which holds that God is either not wholly good or is fully malevolent as a consequence of the problem of evil.

Omniscience and omnipotence

Omnipotence (all-powerful) is an attribute often ascribed to God. The omnipotence paradox is most often framed with the example "Could God create a stone so heavy that even he could not lift it?" as God could either be unable to create that stone or lift that stone and so could not be omnipotent. This is often countered with variations of the argument that omnipotence, like any other attribute ascribed to God, only applies as far as it is noble enough to befit God and thus God cannot lie, or do what is contradictory as that would entail opposing himself.

Omniscience (all-knowing) is an attribute often ascribed to God. This implies that God knows how free agents will choose to act. If God does know this, either their free will might be illusory or foreknowledge does not imply predestination, and if God does not know it, God may not be omniscient. Open Theism limits God's omniscience by contending that, due to the nature of time, God's omniscience does not mean the deity can predict the future and process theology holds that God does not have immutability, so is affected by his creation.

Other concepts

Classical theists (such as ancient Greco-Medieval philosophers, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, many Jews and Muslims, and some Protestants) speak of God as a divinely simple ' nothing' that is completely transcendent (totally independent of all else), and having attributes such as immutability, impassibility, and timelessness. Theologians of theistic personalism (the view held by Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, William Lane Craig, and most modern evangelicals) argue that God is most generally the ground of all being, immanent in and transcendent over the whole world of reality, with immanence and transcendence being the contrapletes of personality.

God has also been conceived as being incorporeal (immaterial), a personal being, the source of all moral obligation, and the "greatest conceivable existent". These attributes were all supported to varying degrees by the early Jewish, Christian and Muslim theologian philosophers, including Maimonides, Augustine of Hippo, and Al-Ghazali, respectively.

Non-theistic views

Religious traditions

Jainism has generally rejected creationism, holding that soul substances ( Jīva) are uncreated and that time is beginningless.

Some interpretations and traditions of Buddhism can be conceived as being non-theistic. Buddhism has generally rejected the specific monotheistic view of a Creator God. The Buddha criticizes the theory of creationism in the early Buddhist texts. Also, major Indian Buddhist philosophers, such as Nagarjuna, Vasubandhu, Dharmakirti and Buddhaghosa, consistently critiqued Creator God views put forth by Hindu thinkers. However, as a non-theistic religion, Buddhism leaves the existence of a supreme deity ambiguous. There are significant numbers of Buddhists who believe in God, and there are equally large numbers who deny God's existence or are unsure.

Taoic religions such as Confucianism and Taoism are silent on the existence of creator gods. However, keeping with the tradition of ancestor veneration in China, adherents worship the spirits of people such as Confucius and Lao Tzu in a similar manner to God.

Anthropology

Some atheists have argued that a single, omniscient God who is imagined to have created the universe and is particularly attentive to the lives of humans has been imagined and embellished over generations.

Pascal Boyer argues that while there is a wide array of supernatural concepts found around the world, in general, supernatural beings tend to behave much like people. The construction of gods and spirits like persons is one of the best known traits of religion. He cites examples from Greek mythology, which is, in his opinion, more like a modern soap opera than other religious systems.

Bertrand du Castel and Timothy Jurgensen demonstrate through formalization that Boyer's explanatory model matches physics' epistemology in positing not directly observable entities as intermediaries.

Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie contends that people project human features onto non-human aspects of the world because it makes those aspects more familiar. Sigmund Freud also suggested that god concepts are projections of one's father.

Likewise, Émile Durkheim was one of the earliest to suggest that gods represent an extension of human social life to include supernatural beings. In line with this reasoning, psychologist Matt Rossano contends that when humans began living in larger groups, they may have created gods as a means of enforcing morality. In small groups, morality can be enforced by social forces such as gossip or reputation. However, it is much harder to enforce morality using social forces in much larger groups. Rossano indicates that by including ever-watchful gods and spirits, humans discovered an effective strategy for restraining selfishness and building more cooperative groups.

Neuroscience and psychology

Sam Harris has interpreted some findings in neuroscience to argue that God is an imaginary entity only, with no basis in reality.

Johns Hopkins researchers studying the effects of the "spirit molecule" DMT, which is both an endogenous molecule in the human brain and the active molecule in the psychedelic ayahuasca, found that a large majority of respondents said DMT brought them into contact with a "conscious, intelligent, benevolent, and sacred entity," and describe interactions that oozed joy, trust, love, and kindness. More than half of those who had previously self-identified as atheists described some type of belief in a higher power or God after the experience.

About a quarter of those afflicted by temporal lobe seizures experience what is described as a religious experience and may become preoccupied by thoughts of God even if they were not previously. Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran hypothesizes that seizures in the temporal lobe, which is closely connected to the emotional center of the brain, the limbic system, may lead to those afflicted to view even banal objects with heightened meaning.

Psychologists studying feelings of awe found that participants feeling awe after watching scenes of natural wonders become more likely to believe in a supernatural being and to see events as the result of design, even when given randomly generated numbers.

Relationship with humanity

Praying Hands by Albrecht Dürer

Theistic religious traditions often require worship of God and sometimes hold that the purpose of existence is to worship God. To address the issue of an all-powerful being demanding to be worshipped, it is held that God does not need or benefit from worship but that worship is for the benefit of the worshipper. Gandhi expressed the view that God does not need his supplication and that "Prayer is not an asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is a daily admission of one's weakness". Invoking God in prayer plays a significant role among many believers. Depending on the tradition, God can be viewed as a personal God who is only to be invoked directly while other traditions allow praying to intermediaries, such as saints, to intercede on their behalf. Prayer often also includes supplication such as asking forgiveness. God is often believed to be forgiving. For example, a hadith states God would replace a sinless people with one who sinned but still asked repentance. Sacrifice for the sake of God is another act of devotion that includes fasting and almsgiving. Remembrance of God in daily life include mentioning interjections thanking God when feeling gratitude or phrases of adoration, such as repeating chants while performing other activities.

Transtheistic religious traditions may believe in the existence of deities but deny any spiritual significance to them. The term has been used to describe certain strands of Buddhism, Jainism and Stoicism.

Among religions that do attach spirituality to the relationship with God disagree as how to best worship God and what is God's plan for mankind. There are different approaches to reconciling the contradictory claims of monotheistic religions. One view is taken by exclusivists, who believe they are the chosen people or have exclusive access to absolute truth, generally through revelation or encounter with the Divine, which adherents of other religions do not. Another view is religious pluralism. A pluralist typically believes that his religion is the right one, but does not deny the partial truth of other religions. The view that all theists actually worship the same god, whether they know it or not, is especially emphasized in the Baháʼí Faith, Hinduism and Sikhism. The Baháʼí Faith preaches that divine manifestations include great prophets and teachers of many of the major religious traditions such as Krishna, Buddha, Jesus, Zoroaster, Muhammad, Bahá'ú'lláh and also preaches the unity of all religions and focuses on these multiple epiphanies as necessary for meeting the needs of humanity at different points in history and for different cultures, and as part of a scheme of progressive revelation and education of humanity. An example of a pluralist view in Christianity is supersessionism, i.e., the belief that one's religion is the fulfillment of previous religions. A third approach is relativistic inclusivism, where everybody is seen as equally right; an example being universalism: the doctrine that salvation is eventually available for everyone. A fourth approach is syncretism, mixing different elements from different religions. An example of syncretism is the New Age movement.

Epistemology

Fideism is the position that in certain topics, notably theology such as in reformed epistemology, faith is superior than reason in arriving at truths. Some theists argue that there is value to the risk in having faith and that if the arguments for God's existence were as rational as the laws of physics then there would be no risk. Such theists often argue that the heart is attracted to beauty, truth and goodness and so would be best for dictating about God, as illustrated through Blaise Pascal who said, "The heart has its reasons that reason does not know." A hadith attributes a quote to God as "I am what my slave thinks of me". Inherent intuition about God is referred to in Islam as or "innate nature". In Confucian tradition, Confucius and Mencius promoted that the only justification for right conduct, called the Way, is what is dictated by Heaven, a more or less anthropomorphic higher power, and is implanted in humans and thus there is only one universal foundation for the Way.

Revelation

Revelation refers to some form of message communicated by God. This is usually proposed to occur through the use of prophets or angels. Al-Maturidi argued for the need for revelation because even though humans are intellectually capable of realizing God, human desire can divert the intellect and because certain knowledge cannot be known except when specially given to prophets, such as the specifications of acts of worship. It is argued that there is also that which overlaps between what is revealed and what can be derived. According to Islam, one of the earliest revelations to ever be revealed was "If you feel no shame, then do as you wish." The term General revelation is used to refer to knowledge revealed about God outside of direct or special revelation such as scriptures. Notably, this includes studying nature, sometimes seen as the Book of Nature. An idiom in Arabic states, "The Qur'an is a Universe that speaks. The Universe is a silent Qur'an".

On matters of theology, some such as Richard Swinburne, take an evidentialist position, where a belief is only justified if it has a reason behind it, as opposed to holding it as a foundational belief. Traditionalist theology holds that one should not opinionate beyond revelation to understand God's nature and frown upon rationalizations such as speculative theology. Notably, for anthropomorphic descriptions such as the "Hand of God" and attributes of God, they neither nullify such texts nor accept a literal hand but leave any ambiguity to God, called , without asking how. Physico-theology provides arguments for theological topics based on reason.

Specific characteristics

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, "the Bible has been the principal source of the conceptions of God". That the Bible "includes many different images, concepts, and ways of thinking about" God has resulted in perpetual "disagreements about how God is to be conceived and understood". Throughout the Hebrew and Christian Bibles there are titles for God, who revealed his personal name as YHWH (often vocalized as Yahweh or Jehovah). One of them is . Another one is , translated "God Almighty". A third notable title is , which means "The High God". Also noted in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles is the name " I Am that I Am".

God is described and referred in the Quran and hadith by certain names or attributes, the most common being , meaning "Most Compassionate" and Al-Rahim, meaning "Most Merciful". Many of these names are also used in the scriptures of the Baháʼí Faith.

Vaishnavism, a tradition in Hinduism, has a list of titles and names of Krishna.

The gender of God may be viewed as either a literal or an allegorical aspect of a deity who, in classical western philosophy, transcends bodily form. Polytheistic religions commonly attribute to each of the gods a gender, allowing each to interact with any of the others, and perhaps with humans, sexually. In most monotheistic religions, God has no counterpart with which to relate sexually. Thus, in classical western philosophy the gender of this one-and-only deity is most likely to be an analogical statement of how humans and God address, and relate to, each other. Namely, God is seen as begetter of the world and revelation which corresponds to the active (as opposed to the receptive) role in sexual intercourse.

Biblical sources usually refer to God using male or paternal words and symbolism, except Genesis 1:26-27, Psalm 123:2-3, and Luke 15:8-10 (female); Hosea 11:3-4, Deuteronomy 32:18, Isaiah 66:13, Isaiah 49:15, Isaiah 42:14, Psalm 131:2 (a mother); Deuteronomy 32:11-12 (a mother eagle); and Matthew 23:37 and Luke 13:34 (a mother hen).

In Zoroastrianism, during the early Parthian Empire, Ahura Mazda was visually represented for worship. This practice ended during the beginning of the Sasanian Empire. Zoroastrian iconoclasm, which can be traced to the end of the Parthian period and the beginning of the Sassanid, eventually put an end to the use of all images of Ahura Mazda in worship. However, Ahura Mazda continued to be symbolized by a dignified male figure, standing or on horseback, which is found in Sassanian investiture.

Deities from Near Eastern cultures are often thought of as anthropomorphic entities who have a human like body which is, however, not equal to a human body. Such bodies were often thought to be radiant or fiery, of superhuman size or extreme beauty. The ancient deity of the Israelites ( Yahweh) too was imagined as a transcendent but still anthropomorphic deity. Humans could not see him, because of their impurity in contrast to Yahweh's holiness, Yahweh being described as radiating fire and light which could kill a human if looking at him. Further, more religious or spiritual people tend to have less anthropomorphic depictions of God. In Judaism, the Torah often ascribes human features to God, however, many other passages describe God as formless and otherworldly. Judaism is aniconic, meaning it overly lacks material, physical representations of both the natural and supernatural worlds. Furthermore, the worship of idols is strictly forbidden. The traditional view, elaborated by figures such as Maimonides, reckons that God is wholly incomprehensible and therefore impossible to envision, resulting in a historical tradition of "divine incorporeality". As such, attempting to describe God's "appearance" in practical terms is considered disrespectful to the deity and thus is taboo, and arguably heretical.[citation needed ]

Gnostic cosmogony often depicts the creator god of the Old Testament as an evil lesser deity or Demiurge, while the higher benevolent god or Monad is thought of as something beyond comprehension having immeasurable light and not in time or among things that exist, but rather is greater than them in a sense. All people are said to have a piece of God or divine spark within them which has fallen from the immaterial world into the corrupt material world and is trapped unless gnosis is attained.

Use of the symbolic Hand of God in the Ascension from the Drogo Sacramentary, c. 850

Early Christians believed that the words of the Gospel of John 1:18: "No man has seen God at any time" and numerous other statements were meant to apply not only to God, but to all attempts at the depiction of God. However, later depictions of God are found. Some, like the Hand of God, are depiction borrowed from Jewish art. Prior to the 10th century no attempt was made to use a human to symbolize God the Father in Western art. Yet, Western art eventually required some way to illustrate the presence of the Father, so through successive representations a set of artistic styles for symbolizing the Father using a man gradually emerged around the 10th century AD. A rationale for the use of a human is the belief that God created the soul of man in the image of his own (thus allowing humans to transcend the other animals). It appears that when early artists designed to represent God the Father, fear and awe restrained them from a usage of the whole human figure. Typically only a small part would be used as the image, usually the hand, or sometimes the face, but rarely a whole human. In many images, the figure of the Son supplants the Father, so a smaller portion of the person of the Father is depicted. By the 12th century depictions of God the Father had started to appear in French illuminated manuscripts, which as a less public form could often be more adventurous in their iconography, and in stained glass church windows in England. Initially the head or bust was usually shown in some form of frame of clouds in the top of the picture space, where the Hand of God had formerly appeared; the Baptism of Christ on the famous baptismal font in Liège of Rainer of Huy is an example from 1118 (a Hand of God is used in another scene). Gradually the amount of the human symbol shown can increase to a half-length figure, then a full-length, usually enthroned, as in Giotto's fresco of c. 1305 in Padua. In the 14th century the Naples Bible carried a depiction of God the Father in the Burning bush. By the early 15th century, the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry had a considerable number of symbols, including an elderly but tall and elegant full-length figure walking in the Garden of Eden, which show a considerable diversity of apparent ages and dress. The "Gates of Paradise" of the Florence Baptistry by Lorenzo Ghiberti, begun in 1425 use a similar tall full-length symbol for the Father. The Rohan Book of Hours of about 1430 also included depictions of God the Father in half-length human form, which were now becoming standard, and the Hand of God becoming rarer. At the same period other works, like the large Genesis altarpiece by the Hamburg painter Meister Bertram, continued to use the old depiction of Christ as in Genesis scenes. In the 15th century there was a brief fashion for depicting all three persons of the Trinity as similar or identical figures with the usual appearance of Christ. In a Trinitarian Pietà, God the Father is often symbolized using a man wearing a papal dress and a papal crown, supporting the dead Christ in his arms. In 1667 the 43rd chapter of the Great Moscow Council specifically included a ban on a number of symbolic depictions of God the Father and the Holy Spirit, which then also resulted in a range of other icons being placed on the forbidden list, mostly affecting Western-style depictions which had been gaining ground in Orthodox icons. The Council also declared that the person of the Trinity who was the "Ancient of Days" was Christ, as Logos, not God the Father. However some icons continued to be produced in Russia, as well as Greece, Romania, and other Orthodox countries.

In Islam, Muslims believe that God ( Allah) is beyond all comprehension, and does not resemble any of his creations in any way. Muslims tend to use the least anthropomorphism among monotheists. They are not iconodules and have religious calligraphy of titles of God instead of pictures.

References

Footnotes

Citations

Bibliography

Boyce, Mary (1983), "Ahura Mazdā", Encyclopaedia Iranica, vol. 1, New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 684-687

Bunnin, Nicholas; Yu, Jiyuan (2008). The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy. Blackwells. ISBN 978-0470997215.

Pickover, Cliff, The Paradox of God and the Science of Omniscience, Palgrave/St Martin's Press, 2001. ISBN 1403964572

Collins, Francis, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Free Press, 2006. ISBN 0743286391

Miles, Jack, God: A Biography, Vintage, 1996. ISBN 0679743685

Armstrong, Karen, A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Ballantine Books, 1994. ISBN 0434024562

Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1 (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1951). ISBN 0226803376

Halverson, J. (2010). Theology and Creed in Sunni Islam: The Muslim Brotherhood, Ash'arism, and Political Sunnism. Springer. ISBN 978-0230106581.

Hastings, James Rodney (1925-2003) [1908-1926]. Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. John A. Selbie (Volume 4 of 24 (Behistun (continued) to Bunyan.) ed.). Edinburgh, Scotland: Kessinger Publishing, LLC. p. 476. ISBN 978-0766136731. The encyclopedia will contain articles on all the religions of the world and on all the great systems of ethics. It will aim at containing articles on every religious belief or custom, and on every ethical movement, every philosophical idea, every moral practice.

External links

Archived 19 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine

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In monotheistic thought, God is usually viewed as the supreme being, creator, and principal object of faith. In polytheistic thought, a god is "a spirit or being believed to control some part of the universe or life and often worshipped for doing so, or something that represents this spirit or being".

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Just the facts on the world's religions

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Can a tumor ever be a source of good? Neurologist Dr. Orrin Devinsky thinks so. He recalls the true story of a man, his tumor, and a euphoric reaction to safety pins. Next, Mark Salzman reads from his novel Lying Awake. When a nun develops a brain tumor, she finds the spiritual communion with God she's been seeking. But what will happen when she’s forced to choose between physical health and religious enlightenment? It turns out Dr. Devinsky sees many real patients like this fictional nun, patients who miss their deadly tumors once they're gone.

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Illustration for TIME by John Ritter

If the entire human species were a single individual, that person would long ago have been declared mad. The insanity would not lie in the anger and darkness of the human mind—though it can be a black and raging place indeed. And it certainly wouldn't lie in the transcendent goodness of that mind—one so sublime, we fold it into a larger "soul." The madness would lie instead in the fact that both of those qualities, the savage and the splendid, can exist in one creature, one person, often in one instant.

We're a species that is capable of almost dumbfounding kindness. We nurse one another, romance one another, weep for one another. Ever since science taught us how, we willingly tear the very organs from our bodies and give them to one another. And at the same time, we slaughter one another. The past 15 years of human history are the temporal equivalent of those subatomic particles that are created in accelerators and vanish in a trillionth of a second, but in that fleeting instant, we've visited untold horrors on ourselves—in Mogadishu, Rwanda, Chechnya, Darfur, Beslan, Baghdad, Pakistan, London, Madrid, Lebanon, Israel, New York City, Abu Ghraib, Oklahoma City, an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania—all of the crimes committed by the highest, wisest, most principled species the planet has produced. That we're also the lowest, cruelest, most blood-drenched species is our shame—and our paradox.

The deeper that science drills into the substrata of behavior, the harder it becomes to preserve the vanity that we are unique among Earth's creatures. We're the only species with language, we told ourselves—until gorillas and chimps mastered sign language. We're the only one that uses tools then—but that's if you don't count otters smashing mollusks with rocks or apes stripping leaves from twigs and using them to fish for termites.

What does, or ought to, separate us then is our highly developed sense of morality, a primal understanding of good and bad, of right and wrong, of what it means to suffer not only our own pain—something anything with a rudimentary nervous system can do—but also the pain of others. That quality is the distilled essence of what it means to be human. Why it's an essence that so often spoils, no one can say.

Morality may be a hard concept to grasp, but we acquire it fast. A preschooler will learn that it's not all right to eat in the classroom, because the teacher says it's not. If the rule is lifted and eating is approved, the child will happily comply. But if the same teacher says it's also O.K. to push another student off a chair, the child hesitates. "He'll respond, 'No, the teacher shouldn't say that,'" says psychologist Michael Schulman, co-author of Bringing Up a Moral Child. In both cases, somebody taught the child a rule, but the rule against pushing has a stickiness about it, one that resists coming unstuck even if someone in authority countenances it. That's the difference between a matter of morality and one of mere social convention, and Schulman and others believe kids feel it innately.

Of course, the fact is, that child will sometimes hit and won't feel particularly bad about it either—unless he's caught. The same is true for people who steal or despots who slaughter. "Moral judgment is pretty consistent from person to person," says Marc Hauser, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of Moral Minds. "Moral behavior, however, is scattered all over the chart." The rules we know, even the ones we intuitively feel, are by no means the rules we always follow.

Where do those intuitions come from? And why are we so inconsistent about following where they lead us? Scientists can't yet answer those questions, but that hasn't stopped them from looking. Brain scans are providing clues. Animal studies are providing more. Investigations of tribal behavior are providing still more. None of this research may make us behave better, not right away at least. But all of it can help us understand ourselves—a small step up from savagery perhaps, but an important one.

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If the entire human species were a single individual, that person would long ago have been declared mad. The insanity would not lie in the anger and darkness of the human mind-though it can be a...

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What will future generations condemn us for?

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What will future generations condemn us for?

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Washington Post Article

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Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics.

Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking?

Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today.

Is there a way to guess which ones? After all, not every disputed institution or practice is destined to be discredited. And it can be hard to distinguish in real time between movements, such as abolition, that will come to represent moral common sense and those, such as prohibition, that will come to seem quaint or misguided. Recall the book-burners of Boston's old Watch and Ward Society or the organizations for the suppression of vice, with their crusades against claret, contraceptives and sexually candid novels.

Still, a look at the past suggests three signs that a particular practice is destined for future condemnation.

First, people have already heard the arguments against the practice. The case against slavery didn't emerge in a blinding moment of moral clarity, for instance; it had been around for centuries.

Second, defenders of the custom tend not to offer moral counterarguments but instead invoke tradition, human nature or necessity. (As in, "We've always had slaves, and how could we grow cotton without them?")

And third, supporters engage in what one might call strategic ignorance, avoiding truths that might force them to face the evils in which they're complicit. Those who ate the sugar or wore the cotton that the slaves grew simply didn't think about what made those goods possible. That's why abolitionists sought to direct attention toward the conditions of the Middle Passage, through detailed illustrations of slave ships and horrifying stories of the suffering below decks.

With these signs in mind, here are four contenders for future moral condemnation.

We already know that the massive waste of life in our prisons is morally troubling; those who defend the conditions of incarceration usually do so in non-moral terms (citing costs or the administrative difficulty of reforms); and we're inclined to avert our eyes from the details. Check, check and check.

Roughly 1 percent of adults in this country are incarcerated. We have 4 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prisoners. No other nation has as large a proportion of its population in prison; even China's rate is less than half of ours. What's more, the majority of our prisoners are non-violent offenders, many of them detained on drug charges. (Whether a country that was truly free would criminalize recreational drug use is a related question worth pondering.)

And the full extent of the punishment prisoners face isn't detailed in any judge's sentence. More than 100,000 inmates suffer sexual abuse, including rape, each year; some contract HIV as a result. Our country holds at least 25,000 prisoners in isolation in so-called supermax facilities, under conditions that many psychologists say amount to torture.

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What will future generations condemn us for?

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Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Amer...

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How do we know what is right or wrong?

In what sense can ethics be regarded as a system of knowledge?

How are the conflicts between different ethical systems resolved ?

To what extent might lack of knowledge be an an excuse for unethical conduct?

Do people act against their own interests?

Why be moral?

Does the rightness or wrongness of an action depend on the situation?

If everyone has a right to life, who exactly has a duty to keep alive the thousands of people that starve to death every day?

Does the rightness  or wrongness of an action depend on the situation?

Are all moral opinions equally valid?

To what extent might possession of knowledge carry with it moral obligations?

What is the relationship between ethics and religions?

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Is It OK That I Haven’t Told My Parents I Was Fired?

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Is It OK That I Haven’t Told My Parents I Was Fired?

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Last year I was abruptly let go from my job. I ramped up my side business, which was fine except that now the pandemic has caused an immediate decline — and potential future decrease — in business because my clients cannot quickly adapt to technology to allow for work to continue.

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Is It OK That I Haven’t Told My Parents I Was Fired? (Published 2020)

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The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on why it can be hard to tell family you’ve lost your job, whether to collect unemployment benefits and more.

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The moral roots of liberals and conservatives - Jonathan Haidt

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The moral roots of liberals and conservatives - Jonathan Haidt

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Psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies the five moral values that form the basis of our political

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The moral roots of liberals and conservatives - Jonathan Haidt

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How should we live?  What is right behavior?  Does an ethical life bring personal happiness?

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How should we live? What is right behavior? Does an ethical life bring personal happiness?

Ethics Overview

(from Greek is one of four branches of philosophy, the others being Definitions : Ethics ethikos) metaphysics (What is the nature of existence and being?), right epistemology (what can we know and how do we know it?) and finally wrong , and to guide us in how we should behave. logic. The study of ethics is undertaken in an attempt to clarify values, to define, that which is from that which is
What is the difference between ethics (what is) and morality (what ought to be)?
Morality and ethics are very closely related. Morality tends to be described as a spiritual aspect: the system of rules for the superego. Ethics, on the other hand, is the real life execution of such ideals and virtues. Others would argue that ethics refers only to professional codified behavior while morality applies to life outside the workplace. Some examples of professional behaviors or codes that raise epistemological problems of knowing are as follows:

Press: In meeting the public's right to know, to what limitations or freedoms should the press be subject? Should they be compelled to reveal their sources ?

Science : what should be (if any) the boundaries of science?

Art : Should art be morally uplifting or does it have nothing to do with morality? When does art become pornography or violence? Should it ever be censored?
Three Moral Theories:
: 1. Consequences Utilitarianism - J ohn Stuart Mill. Do the most good for the most people.

2. Duty : Deontological theories - Immanuel Kant .

It is possible for an act to be morally right even if it doesn't produce the greatest balance of good or evil.

i.e. According to Kant, in his categorical imperative, one should never lie under any circumstance.

Ross : There are times when to respect the autonomy of others one must lie

Locke : You have a right to tell the truth but also a right to privacy.

3. Virtue : Teleological theories - Aristotle.virtue ethics ethical systems that focus primarily on what sort of person one should be.

Questions to Consider:

What is the relationship between ethics and happiness?

Can morality be relative (over time, culture, or situation) or must it be absolute?

Can morality be taught?

How do we (or can we) "test" for the rightness or wrongness of an action in an empirical, scientific manner?

Are intelligent people more moral than unintelligent people?

" After two thousand years of Mass
We've got as far as poison gas"
Tho mas Hardy 1924

General Introduction to Ethics: What does it Matter ?

What is the Point of gaining Moral Knowledge?

Free will :

We make choices about what we do. To make a choice between two morally different courses of action we must be capable of thinking good thoughts and bad thoughts and imagining what their outcomes would be. We, as humans, are not robots or saints. If there is a "saint," it is one who has bad thoughts but rejects them and acts on "good" ones. The moral sense seems to be (as far as we know) exclusively human. Those figures from the pages of crime or history whom we judge as lacking any moral sense are often described as inhuman.

It is debatable whether animals have formal courts or act on remorse or shame. Perhaps they have not risen to that level of consciousness or conscience. Perhaps they are beyond that.

Two Moral senses, thought and action:

There are thoughts and desires we hold in our heads. Thus, I might believe giving money to a charity is a good thing. The act of actually giving money however is different. Belief in the first sense does not automatically mean I will act on that belief. To many people our moral sense consists of what we do rather than what we think we would do. We are honest, kind, and generous because we know such things are right; therefore, we do not steal, lie, cheat, bully, or boast because we know such things are wrong.

From where does our moral sense originate ?

underpins all our thought processes including those involved in our moral senses. If you agree with this, you must logically ask, " What do we mean when we say something is Language good?" Frequently this word contains emotional connotations, which would suggest that moral judgment stems in part from intuition and desire. Good deeds may be motivated by either self-interest or sympathy, two forces which may benefit ourselves or others and sometimes both. Sympathy for others lies at the foundation of providing a strong public moral code and a strong society.

The problem with this account is that it diminishes the role of reason to a position that is subservient to emotions. Further, do we really have an inborn sympathy for others? If we do, do we all have the same amount? Logically, can we be held responsible if we have been born with only a marginal propensity towards moral action and behave badly most of the time?

In some cases emotion and reason merge. It would make no sense to give to charity unless within your reason you deemed it beneficial to all of society or to that person. Even when you question the ultimate end use of your money, you still might hold to a right action, which applies to everyone, irrespective of circumstances. Your reason teaches you to respect (emotion) the reasoning and emotions of others. What would be the consequences on this planet if we did not?

Dilemmas: There does not always exist such a neat parallel. If I unfairly punish a student in the certain knowledge that I will improve life generally this does not stop me from feeling bad about being unfair. This is unlike reasoning where a false (or inadequate) solution is easily, carelessly, discounted.

Consider the case of Hamlet.

Moral Truth

Can there be more than one set of moral truths? There are values that are true only for our culture. If we accept this idea we have no right to judge others. Thus, being outraged against slave-torturers of adolescents in Modern Africa or of witch-burners in Old Salem is inappropriate. The problem with such an argument is that it is illogical.

Is there something which is universally right or wrong, irrespective of time, culture, or circumstance?

The aim of Moral Knowledge

What is the point in behaving well? A sense of honor; pleasure, fulfillment of the will, fitness with reason are the consequences of good action. Bad action brings about shame, pain, self-abasement, and contradiction of reason. The one aim of behaving well that has derived the most support is the aim of happiness. Happiness is an end in itself. There are those who argue that life is all its richness is only achieved through fulfillment of the will and through striving for excellence through conflict. This is not without interest. It is your choice and a very important one.

Still confused? Try the following tests before deciding on action:

Sources of Individual Moral Choice and Action

Authority: "It's against the rules." Superiors in intellect , strength, fire-power, money, know what is best. You must decide if their judgment is superior or simply convenient.

" My Holy Book says it is wrong" Now a moral code comes from a supernatural power. The problem comes when you differ with someone from another faith.

Personal Knowledge : "I know it is wrong." We are appealing to our intuitive self and our emotions. What if the person feels that a bad action is good?

Personal Reaction : "It does not please me when I think of it and so it is wrong." This seems rational, but again what if the person derives pleasure from the pain of others?

Knowledge from the Majority : "Most people agree that it is wrong." Fact or opinion?

This may have withstood the test of time but it may also be sheep mentality and lazy thinking.

Self-interest: "How would you like it if this were done to you?" One hopes that human beings are capable of this, but if the aim of life is excellence and excellence means exerting ones will, then this is problematic.

Consider the consequences : We don't always suffer the consequences immediately or perceptibly.

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How should we live? What is right behavior? Does an ethical life bring personal happiness? Ethics Overview (from Greek is one of four branches of philosophy, the others being Definitions : Ethics ethikos ) metaphysics (What is the nature of existence and being?), right epistemology (what can we know and how do we know it?)

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THE BEST SITES FOR DISCUSSING THE MORALITY OF TORTURE

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THE BEST SITES FOR DISCUSSING THE MORALITY OF TORTURE

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This list is a little different from most of my other ones, since many of these materials will need to be modified by teachers to be made accessible to English Language Learners

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I was originally going to publish this "The Best..." list in June and time it with the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture on June 26th - sponsored by the United Nations.

However, the furor accompanying last week's release by the Obama administration detailing the "brutal interrogation techniques" (a description that many news organizations have used, including The New York Times) used by the United States on terrorist suspects has prompted me to create this list sooner.

This list is a little different from most of my other ones, since many of these materials will need to be modified by teachers to be made accessible to English Language Learners (however, several are usable without modification). It was difficult to find good resources that would be accessible to ELL's. I decided to make this list, though, because I think this public attention offers a great learning opportunity for all students, including my own. Plus, I figured I could use some of these resources in the International Baccalaureate Theory of Knowledge class that I'll be teaching next school year.

Some of the videos show graphic content that would not be appropriate for younger students.

Here are my picks for The Best Sites For Learning & Discussing The Morality of Torture (not in order of preference):

The New York Times has a short and surprising accessible article reporting on President Obama's speech at the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters today explaining why he released the memos describing the interrogation techniques and why the United States will not use torture.

This infographic also shows how waterboarding is done.

PBS has a lesson plan related to Abu Graib and an online video called The Torture Question.

Breaking News English has a lesson on torture that provides audio support for the text.

The same lesson has a follow-up online exercise.

English Club has a good introduction to a lesson on torture that can be used in the classroom.

Live Science has an interesting article titled Torture Has A Long History...Of Not Working.

The New York Times Learning Network (which is on The Best Places To Find Free (And Good) Lesson Plans On The Internet list) just published a good classroom lesson plan on torture, which can be modified for ELL's. It's called The Torture Question. The article Torture Versus War goes along with it.

The New York Times has a video interview with a former U.S. interrogator that is very interesting, though challenging for ELLs.

June the 26th is International Day in Support of Torture Victims is a lesson plan specifically for English Language Learners.

As always, feedback is welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous "The Best..." lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.

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The Best Sites For Discussing The Morality Of Torture

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I was originally going to publish this "The Best..." list in June and time it with the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture on June 26th - sponsored by the Unite...

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The World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, an alliance of more than 150 NGOs, bar associations, local authorities and unions, was created in Rome on 13 May 2002

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Human Rights Watch investigates and reports on abuses happening in all corners of the world. We are roughly 450 people of 70-plus nationalities who are country experts, lawyers, journalists, and others who work to protect the most at risk, from vulnerable minorities and civilians in wartime, to refugees and children in need.

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Cristian González Cabrera Senior Researcher, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program

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Human Rights Watch | Defending Human Rights Worldwide

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Human Rights Watch defends the rights of people in 100 countries worldwide, spotlighting abuses and bringing perpetrators to justice

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Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can — and should — be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.

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Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions

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Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life.

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IB Maths Resources from Intermathematics

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Scroll down this page to find over 300 examples of maths IA exploration topics and ideas for IB mathematics students doing their internal assessment (IA) coursework. Topics include Algebra and Number (proof), Geometry, Calculus, Statistics and Probability, Physics, and links with other subjects. Suitable for Applications and Interpretations students (SL and HL) and also Analysis and Approaches students (SL and HL).

Essential resources for IB students:

Make sure to also visit my page on Paper 3s to download 13 different Paper 3s (which would also make excellent coursework starting points) complete with full markschemes. All free!

Also make sure to visit my page for Exploration Guides to download 3 specific guides to support the whole coursework process for IB students. Also all free!

Essential resources for IB teachers:

If you are a teacher then please also visit my new site: intermathematics.com. My new site has been designed specifically for teachers of mathematics at international schools. The content now includes over 3000 pages of pdf content for the entire SL and HL Analysis syllabus and also the SL and HL Applications syllabus. Some of the content includes:

Original pdf worksheets (with full worked solutions) designed to cover all the syllabus topics. These make great homework sheets or in class worksheets - and are each designed to last between 40 minutes and 1 hour.

Original Paper 3 investigations (with full worked solutions) to develop investigative techniques and support both the exploration and the Paper 3 examination.

A large number of enrichment activities such as treasure hunts, quizzes, investigations, Desmos explorations, Python coding and more - to engage IB learners in the course.

Maths IA - Maths Exploration Topics
A list with over 300 examples of maths IA exploration topics and ideas for IB mathematics students doing their internal assessment (IA) coursework. Suitable for Applications and Interpretations students (SL and HL) and also Analysis and Approaches students (SL and HL).
Algebra and number
1) Modular arithmetic - This technique is used throughout Number Theory. For example, Mod 3 means the remainder when dividing by 3.

2) Goldbach's conjecture: "Every even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes." One of the great unsolved problems in mathematics.

3) Probabilistic number theory

4) Applications of complex numbers: The stunning graphics of Mandelbrot and Julia Sets are generated by complex numbers.

5) Diophantine equations: These are polynomials which have integer solutions. Fermat's Last Theorem is one of the most famous such equations.

6) Continued fractions: These are fractions which continue to infinity. The great Indian mathematician Ramanujan discovered some amazing examples of these.

7) Patterns in Pascal's triangle: There are a large number of patterns to discover - including the Fibonacci sequence.

8) Finding prime numbers: The search for prime numbers and the twin prime conjecture are some of the most important problems in mathematics. There is a $1 million prize for solving the Riemann Hypothesis and $250,000 available for anyone who discovers a new, really big prime number.

9) Random numbers

10) Pythagorean triples: A great introduction into number theory - investigating the solutions of Pythagoras' Theorem which are integers (eg. 3,4,5 triangle).

11) Mersenne primes: These are primes that can be written as 2^n -1.

12) Magic squares and cubes: Investigate magic tricks that use mathematics. Why do magic squares work?

13) Loci and complex numbers

14) Egyptian fractions: Egyptian fractions can only have a numerator of 1 - which leads to some interesting patterns. 2/3 could be written as 1/6 + 1/2. Can all fractions with a numerator of 2 be written as 2 Egyptian fractions?

15) Complex numbers and transformations

16) Euler's identity: An equation that has been voted the most beautiful equation of all time, Euler's identity links together 5 of the most important numbers in mathematics.

17) Chinese remainder theorem. This is a puzzle that was posed over 1500 years ago by a Chinese mathematician. It involves understanding the modulo operation.

18) Fermat's last theorem: A problem that puzzled mathematicians for centuries - and one that has only recently been solved.

19) Natural logarithms of complex numbers

20) Twin primes problem: The question as to whether there are patterns in the primes has fascinated mathematicians for centuries. The twin prime conjecture states that there are infinitely many consecutive primes ( eg. 5 and 7 are consecutive primes). There has been a recent breakthrough in this problem.

21) Hypercomplex numbers

22) Diophantine application: Cole numbers

23) Perfect Numbers: Perfect numbers are the sum of their factors (apart from the last factor). ie 6 is a perfect number because 1 + 2 + 3 = 6.

24) Euclidean algorithm for GCF

25) Palindrome numbers: Palindrome numbers are the same backwards as forwards.

26) Fermat's little theorem: If p is a prime number then a^p - a is a multiple of p.

27) Prime number sieves

28) Recurrence expressions for phi (golden ratio): Phi appears with remarkable consistency in nature and appears to shape our understanding of beauty and symmetry.

29) The Riemann Hypothesis - one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics - worth $1million to anyone who solves it (not for the faint hearted!)

30) Time travel to the future: Investigate how traveling close to the speed of light allows people to travel "forward" in time relative to someone on Earth. Why does the twin paradox work?

31) Graham's Number - a number so big that thinking about it could literally collapse your brain into a black hole.

32) RSA code - the most important code in the world? How all our digital communications are kept safe through the properties of primes.

33) The Chinese Remainder Theorem: This is a method developed by a Chinese mathematician Sun Zi over 1500 years ago to solve a numerical puzzle. An interesting insight into the mathematical field of Number Theory.

34) Cesaro Summation: Does 1 - 1 + 1 - 1 ... = 1/2?. A post which looks at the maths behind this particularly troublesome series.

35) Fermat's Theorem on the sum of 2 squares - An example of how to use mathematical proof to solve problems in number theory.

36) Can we prove that 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 .... = -1/12 ? How strange things happen when we start to manipulate divergent series.

37) Mathematical proof and paradox - a good opportunity to explore some methods of proof and to show how logical errors occur.

38) Friendly numbers, Solitary numbers, perfect numbers. Investigate what makes a number happy or sad, or sociable! Can you find the loop of infinite sadness?

39) Zeno's Paradox - Achilles and the Tortoise - A look at the classic paradox from ancient Greece - the philosopher "proved" a runner could never catch a tortoise - no matter how fast he ran.

40) Stellar Numbers - This is an excellent example of a pattern sequence investigation. Choose your own pattern investigation for the exploration.

41) Arithmetic number puzzle - It could be interesting to do an exploration where you solve number problems - like this one.

42) Normal Numbers - and random number generators - what is a normal number - and how are they connected to random number generators?

43) Narcissistic Numbers - what makes a number narcissistic - and how can we find them all?

44) Modelling Chaos - how we can use grahical software to understand the behavior of sequences

45) The Mordell Equation. What is the Mordell equation and how does it help us solve mathematical problems in number theory?

46) Ramanujan's Taxi Cab and the Sum of 2 Cubes. Explore this famous number theory puzzle.

47) Hollow cubes and hypercubes investigation. Explore number theory in higher dimensions!

48) When do 2 squares equal 2 cubes? A classic problem in number theory which can be solved through computational power.

49) Rational approximations to irrational numbers. How accurately can be approximate irrationals?

50) Square triangular numbers. When do we have a square number which is also a triangular number?

51) Complex numbers as matrices - Euler's identity. We can use a matrix representation of complex numbers to test whether Euler's identity still holds.

52) Have you got a Super Brain? How many different ways can we use to solve a number theory problem?
Geometry
1a) Non-Euclidean geometries: This allows us to "break" the rules of conventional geometry - for example, angles in a triangle no longer add up to 180 degrees. In some geometries triangles add up to more than 180 degrees, in others less than 180 degrees.

1b) The shape of the universe - non-Euclidean Geometry is at the heart of Einstein's theories on General Relativity and essential to understanding the shape and behavior of the universe.

2) Hexaflexagons: These are origami style shapes that through folding can reveal extra faces.

3) Minimal surfaces and soap bubbles: Soap bubbles assume the minimum possible surface area to contain a given volume.

4) Tesseract - a 4D cube: How we can use maths to imagine higher dimensions.

5) Stacking cannon balls: An investigation into the patterns formed from stacking canon balls in different ways.

6) Mandelbrot set and fractal shapes: Explore the world of infinitely generated pictures and fractional dimensions.

7) Sierpinksi triangle: a fractal design that continues forever.

8) Squaring the circle: This is a puzzle from ancient times - which was to find out whether a square could be created that had the same area as a given circle. It is now used as a saying to represent something impossible.

9) Polyominoes: These are shapes made from squares. The challenge is to see how many different shapes can be made with a given number of squares - and how can they fit together?

10) Tangrams: Investigate how many different ways different size shapes can be fitted together.

11) Understanding the fourth dimension: How we can use mathematics to imagine (and test for) extra dimensions.

12) The Riemann Sphere - an exploration of some non-Euclidean geometry. Straight lines are not straight, parallel lines meet and angles in a triangle don't add up to 180 degrees.

13) Graphically understanding complex roots - have you ever wondered what the complex root of a quadratic actually means graphically? Find out!

14) Circular inversion - what does it mean to reflect in a circle? A great introduction to some of the ideas behind non-euclidean geometry.

15) Julia Sets and Mandelbrot Sets - We can use complex numbers to create beautiful patterns of infinitely repeating fractals. Find out how!

16) Graphing polygons investigation. Can we find a function that plots a square? Are there functions which plot any polygons? Use computer graphing to investigate.

17) Graphing Stewie from Family Guy. How to use graphic software to make art from equations.

18) Hyperbolic geometry - how we can map the infinite hyperbolic plane onto the unit circle, and how this inspired the art of Escher.

19) Elliptical Curves - how this class of curves have importance in solving Fermat's Last Theorem and in cryptography.

20) The Coastline Paradox - how we can measure the lengths of coastlines, and uses the idea of fractals to arrive at fractional dimensions.

21) Projective geometry - the development of geometric proofs based on points at infinity.

22) The Folium of Descartes. This is a nice way to link some maths history with studying an interesting function.

23) Measuring the Distance to the Stars. Maths is closely connected with astronomy - see how we can work out the distance to the stars.

24) A geometric proof for the arithmetic and geometric mean. Proof doesn't always have to be algebraic. Here is a geometric proof.

25) Euler's 9 Point Circle. This is a lovely construction using just compasses and a ruler.

26) Plotting the Mandelbrot Set - using Geogebra to graphically generate the Mandelbrot Set.

27) Volume optimization of a cuboid - how to use calculus and graphical solutions to optimize the volume of a cuboid.

28) Ford Circles - how to generate Ford circles and their links with fractions.

29) Classical Geometry Puzzle: Finding the Radius. This is a nice geometry puzzle solved using a variety of methods.

30) Can you solve Oxford University's Interview Question?. Try to plot the locus of a sliding ladder.

31) The Shoelace Algorithm to find areas of polygons. How can we find the area of any polygon?

32) Soap Bubbles, Wormholes and Catenoids. What is the geometric shape of soap bubbles?

33) Can you solve an Oxford entrance question? This problem asks you to explore a sliding ladder.

34) The Tusi circle - how to create a circle rolling inside another circle using parametric equations.

35) Sphere packing - how to fit spheres into a package to minimize waste.

36) Sierpinski triangle - an infinitely repeating fractal pattern generated by code.

37) Generating e through probability and hypercubes. This amazing result can generate e through considering hyper-dimensional shapes.

38) Find the average distance between 2 points on a square. If any points are chosen at random in a square what is the expected distance between them?

39) Finding the average distance between 2 points on a hypercube. Can we extend our investigation above to a multi-dimensional cube?

40) Finding focus with Archimedes. The Greeks used a very different approach to understanding quadratics - and as a result had a deeper understanding of their physical properties linked to light and reflection.

41) Chaos and strange Attractors: Henon's map. Gain a deeper understanding of chaos theory with this investigation.
Calculus/analysis and functions
1) The harmonic series: Investigate the relationship between fractions and music, or investigate whether this series converges.

2) Torus - solid of revolution: A torus is a donut shape which introduces some interesting topological ideas.

3) Projectile motion: Studying the motion of projectiles like cannon balls is an essential part of the mathematics of war. You can also model everything from Angry Birds to stunt bike jumping. A good use of your calculus skills.

4) Why e is base of natural logarithm function: A chance to investigate the amazing number e.

5) Fourier Transforms - the most important tool in mathematics? Fourier transforms have an essential part to play in modern life - and are one of the keys to understanding the world around us. This mathematical equation has been described as the most important in all of physics. Find out more! (This topic is only suitable for IB HL students).

6) Batman and Superman maths - how to use Wolfram Alpha to plot graphs of the Batman and Superman logo

7) Explore the Si(x) function - a special function in calculus that can't be integrated into an elementary function.

8) The Remarkable Dirac Delta Function. This is a function which is used in Quantum mechanics - it describes a peak of zero width but with area 1.

9) Optimization of area - an investigation. This is an nice example of how you can investigation optimization of the area of different polygons.

10) Envelope of projectile motion. This investigates a generalized version of projectile motion - discover what shape is created.

11) Projectile Motion Investigation II. This takes the usual projectile motion ideas and generalises them to investigate equations of ellipses formed.

12) Projectile Motion III: Varying gravity. What would projectile motion look like on different planets?

13) The Tusi couple - A circle rolling inside a circle. This is a lovely result which uses parametric functions to create a beautiful example of mathematical art.

14) Galileo's Inclined Planes. How did Galileo achieve his breakthrough understanding of gravity? Follow in the footsteps of a genius!
Statistics and modelling 1 [topics could be studied in-depth]
1) Traffic flow: How maths can model traffic on the roads.

2) Logistic function and constrained growth

3) Benford's Law - using statistics to catch criminals by making use of a surprising distribution.

4) Bad maths in court - how a misuse of statistics in the courtroom can lead to devastating miscarriages of justice.

5) The mathematics of cons - how con artists use pyramid schemes to get rich quick.

6) Impact Earth - what would happen if an asteroid or meteorite hit the Earth?

7) Black Swan events - how usefully can mathematics predict small probability high impact events?

8) Modelling happiness - how understanding utility value can make you happier.

9) Does finger length predict mathematical ability? Investigate the surprising correlation between finger ratios and all sorts of abilities and traits.

10) Modelling epidemics/spread of a virus

11) The Monty Hall problem - this video will show why statistics often lead you to unintuitive results.

12) Monte Carlo simulations

13) Lotteries

14) Bayes' theorem: How understanding probability is essential to our legal system.

15) Birthday paradox: The birthday paradox shows how intuitive ideas on probability can often be wrong. How many people need to be in a room for it to be at least 50% likely that two people will share the same birthday? Find out!

16) Are we living in a computer simulation? Look at the Bayesian logic behind the argument that we are living in a computer simulation.

17) Does sacking a football manager affect results? A chance to look at some statistics with surprising results.

18) Which times tables do students find most difficult? A good example of how to conduct a statistical investigation in mathematics.

19) Introduction to Modelling. This is a fantastic 70 page booklet explaining different modelling methods from Moody's Mega Maths Challenge.

20) Modelling infectious diseases - how we can use mathematics to predict how diseases like measles will spread through a population

21) Using Chi Squared to crack codes - Chi squared can be used to crack Vigenere codes which for hundreds of years were thought to be unbreakable. Unleash your inner spy!

22) Modelling Zombies - How do zombies spread? What is your best way of surviving the zombie apocalypse? Surprisingly maths can help!

23) Modelling music with sine waves - how we can understand different notes by sine waves of different frequencies. Listen to the sounds that different sine waves make.

24) Are you psychic? Use the binomial distribution to test your ESP abilities.

25) Reaction times - are you above or below average? Model your data using a normal distribution.

26) Modelling volcanoes - look at how the Poisson distribution can predict volcanic eruptions, and perhaps explore some more advanced statistical tests.

27) Could Trump win the next election? How the normal distribution is used to predict elections.

28) How to avoid a Troll - an example of a problem solving based investigation

29) The Gini Coefficient - How to model economic inequality

30) Maths of Global Warming - Modeling Climate Change - Using Desmos to model the change in atmospheric Carbon Dioxide.

31) Modelling radioactive decay - the mathematics behind radioactivity decay, used extensively in science.

32) Circular Motion: Modelling a Ferris wheel. Use Tracker software to create a Sine wave.

33) Spotting Asset Bubbles. How to use modeling to predict booms and busts.

34) The Rise of Bitcoin. Is Bitcoin going to keep rising or crash?

35) Fun with Functions!. Some nice examples of using polar coordinates to create interesting designs.

36) Predicting the UK election using linear regression. The use of regression in polling predictions.

37) Modelling a Nuclear War. What would happen to the climate in the event of a nuclear war?

38) Modelling a football season. We can use a Poisson model and some Excel expertise to predict the outcome of sports matches - a technique used by gambling firms.

39) Modeling hours of daylight - using Desmos to plot the changing hours of daylight in different countries.

40) Modelling the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19). Using the SIR model to understand epidemics.

41) Finding the volume of a rugby ball (or American football). Use modeling and volume of revolutions.

42) The Martingale system paradox. Explore a curious betting system still used in currency trading today.
Statistics and modelling 2 [more simplistic topics: correlation, normal, Chi squared]
1) Is there a correlation between hours of sleep and exam grades? Studies have shown that a good night's sleep raises academic attainment.

2) Is there a correlation between height and weight? (pdf). The NHS use a chart to decide what someone should weigh depending on their height. Does this mean that height is a good indicator of weight?

3) Is there a correlation between arm span and foot height? This is also a potential opportunity to discuss the Golden Ratio in nature.

4) Is there a correlation between smoking and lung capacity?

5) Is there a correlation between GDP and life expectancy? Run the Gapminder graph to show the changing relationship between GDP and life expectancy over the past few decades.

7) Is there a correlation between numbers of yellow cards a game and league position?
Use the Guardian Stats data to find out if teams which commit the most fouls also do the best in the league.

8) Is there a correlation between Olympic 100m sprint times and Olympic 15000m times?
Use the Olympic database to find out if the 1500m times have got faster in the same way the 100m times have got quicker over the past few decades.

9) Is there a correlation between time taken getting to school and the distance a student lives from school?

10) Does eating breakfast affect your grades?

11) Is there a correlation between stock prices of different companies? Use Google Finance to collect data on company share prices.

12) Is there a correlation between blood alcohol laws and traffic accidents?

13) Is there a correlation between height and basketball ability? Look at some stats for NBA players to find out.

14) Is there a correlation between stress and blood pressure?

15) Is there a correlation between Premier League wages and league positions?

16) Are a sample of student heights normally distributed? We know that adult population heights are normally distributed - what about student heights?

17) Are a sample of flower heights normally distributed?

18) Are a sample of student weights normally distributed?

19) Are the IB maths test scores normally distributed? (pdf). IB test scores are designed to fit a bell curve. Investigate how the scores from different IB subjects compare.

20) Are the weights of "1kg" bags of sugar normally distributed?

21) Does gender affect hours playing sport? A UK study showed that primary school girls play much less sport than boys.

22) Investigation into the distribution of word lengths in different languages. The English language has an average word length of 5.1 words. How does that compare with other languages?

23) Do bilingual students have a greater memory recall than non-bilingual students?
Studies have shown that bilingual students have better "working memory" - does this include memory recall?
Games and game theory
1) The prisoner's dilemma: The use of game theory in psychology and economics.

2) Sudoku

3) Gambler's fallacy: A good chance to investigate misconceptions in probability and probabilities in gambling. Why does the house always win?

4) Bluffing in Poker: How probability and game theory can be used to explore the the best strategies for bluffing in poker.

5) Knight's tour in chess: This chess puzzle asks how many moves a knight must make to visit all squares on a chess board.

6) Billiards and snooker

7) Zero sum games

8) How to "Solve" Noughts and Crossess (Tic Tac Toe) - using game theory. This topics provides a fascinating introduction to both combinatorial Game Theory and Group Theory.

9) Maths and football - Do managerial sackings really lead to an improvement in results? We can analyse the data to find out. Also look at the finances behind Premier league teams

10) Is there a correlation between Premier League wages and league position? Also look at how the Championship compares to the Premier League.

11) The One Time Pad - an uncrackable code? Explore the maths behind code making and breaking.

12) How to win at Rock Paper Scissors. Look at some of the maths (and psychology behind winning this game.

13) The Watson Selection Task - a puzzle which tests logical reasoning. Are maths students better than history students?
Topology and networks
1) Knots

2) Steiner problem

3) Chinese postman problem - This is a problem from graph theory - how can a postman deliver letters to every house on his streets in the shortest time possible?

4) Travelling salesman problem

5) Königsberg bridge problem: The use of networks to solve problems. This particular problem was solved by Euler.

6) Handshake problem: With n people in a room, how many handshakes are required so that everyone shakes hands with everyone else?

7) Möbius strip: An amazing shape which is a loop with only 1 side and 1 edge.

8) Klein bottle

9) Logic and sets

10) Codes and ciphers: ISBN codes and credit card codes are just some examples of how codes are essential to modern life. Maths can be used to both make these codes and break them.

11) Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the tortoise: How can a running Achilles ever catch the tortoise if in the time taken to halve the distance, the tortoise has moved yet further away?

12) Four colour map theorem - a puzzle that requires that a map can be coloured in so that every neighbouring country is in a different colour. What is the minimum number of colours needed for any map?

13) Telephone Numbers - these are numbers with special properties which grow very large very quickly. This topic links to graph theory.

14) The Poincare Conjecture and Grigori Perelman - Learn about the reclusive Russian mathematician who turned down $1 million for solving one of the world's most difficult maths problems.
Mathematics and Physics
1) The Monkey and the Hunter - How to Shoot a Monkey - Using Newtonian mathematics to decide where to aim when shooting a monkey in a tree.

2) How to Design a Parachute - looking at the physics behind parachute design to ensure a safe landing!

3) Galileo: Throwing cannonballs off The Leaning Tower of Pisa - Recreating Galileo's classic experiment, and using maths to understand the surprising result.

4) Rocket Science and Lagrange Points - how clever mathematics is used to keep satellites in just the right place.

5) Fourier Transforms - the most important tool in mathematics? - An essential component of JPEG, DNA analysis, WIFI signals, MRI scans, guitar amps - find out about the maths behind these essential technologies.

6) Bullet projectile motion experiment - using Tracker software to model the motion of a bullet.

7) Quantum Mechanics - a statistical universe? Look at the inherent probabilistic nature of the universe with some quantum mechanics.

8) Log Graphs to Plot Planetary Patterns. The planets follow a surprising pattern when measuring their distances.

9) Modeling with springs and weights. Some classic physics - which generates some nice mathematical graphs.

10) Is Intergalactic space travel possible? Using the physics of travel near the speed of light to see how we could travel to other stars.
Maths and computing
1) The Van Eck Sequence - The Van Eck Sequence is a sequence that we still don't fully understand - we can use programing to help!

2) Solving maths problems using computers - computers are really useful in solving mathematical problems. Here are some examples solved using Python.

3) Stacking cannonballs - solving maths with code - how to stack cannonballs in different configurations.

4) What's so special about 277777788888899? - Playing around with multiplicative persistence - can you break the world record?

5) Project Euler: Coding to Solve Maths Problems. A nice starting point for students good at coding - who want to put these skills to the test mathematically.

6) Square Triangular Numbers. Can we use a mixture of pure maths and computing to solve this problem?

7) When do 2 squares equal 2 cubes? Can we use a mixture of pure maths and computing to solve this problem?

8) Hollow Cubes and Hypercubes investigation. More computing led investigations

9) Coding Hailstone Numbers. How can we use computers to gain a deeper understanding of sequences?
Further ideas:
1) Radiocarbon dating - understanding radioactive decay allows scientists and historians to accurately work out something's age - whether it be from thousands or even millions of years ago.

2) Gravity, orbits and escape velocity - Escape velocity is the speed required to break free from a body's gravitational pull. Essential knowledge for future astronauts.

3) Mathematical methods in economics - maths is essential in both business and economics - explore some economics based maths problems.

4) Genetics - Look at the mathematics behind genetic inheritance and natural selection.

5) Elliptical orbits - Planets and comets have elliptical orbits as they are influenced by the gravitational pull of other bodies in space. Investigate some rocket science!

6) Logarithmic scales - Decibel, Richter, etc. are examples of log scales - investigate how these scales are used and what they mean.

7) Fibonacci sequence and spirals in nature - There are lots of examples of the Fibonacci sequence in real life - from pine cones to petals to modelling populations and the stock market.

8) Change in a person's BMI over time - There are lots of examples of BMI stats investigations online - see if you can think of an interesting twist.

9) Designing bridges - Mathematics is essential for engineers such as bridge builders - investigate how to design structures that carry weight without collapse.

10) Mathematical card tricks - investigate some maths magic.

11) Flatland by Edwin Abbott - This famous book helps understand how to imagine extra dimension. You can watch a short video on it here

12) Towers of Hanoi puzzle - This famous puzzle requires logic and patience. Can you find the pattern behind it?

13) Different number systems - Learn how to add, subtract, multiply and divide in Binary. Investigate how binary is used - link to codes and computing.

14) Methods for solving differential equations - Differential equations are amazingly powerful at modelling real life - from population growth to to pendulum motion. Investigate how to solve them.

15) Modelling epidemics/spread of a virus - what is the mathematics behind understanding how epidemics occur? Look at how infectious Ebola really is.

16) Hyperbolic functions - These are linked to the normal trigonometric functions but with notable differences. They are useful for modelling more complex shapes.

17) Medical data mining - Explore the use and misuse of statistics in medicine and science.

18) Waging war with maths: Hollow squares. How mathematical formations were used to fight wars.

19) The Barnsley Fern: Mathematical Art - how can we use iterative processes to create mathematical art?

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Maths IA - 300 Maths Exploration Topics: Scroll down this page to find over 300 examples of maths IA exploration topics and ideas for IB mathematics students doing their internal assessment (IA) co...

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Articles, excerpts and reader-submitted analyses related to the abacus.

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An introduction to the chinese abacus, a brief history of counting devices showing the evolution of the abacus through time and various articles about ancient computers.

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Exploring the concepts, ideas, and results of mathematics is a fascinating topic. On the one hand some breakthroughs in mathematical thought we will study came as accidents, and on the other hand as consequences of attempts to solve some great open problem.

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By combining art and math, this talk provides compelling information for anyone interested in either field. I learned so much about coral reefs, crochet work, hyperbolic geometry — and how two seemingly divergent disciplines can merge to form something beautiful.

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Margaret Wertheim: The beautiful math of coral

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Margaret Wertheim leads a project to re-create the creatures of the coral reefs using a crochet technique invented by a mathematician -- celebrating the amazements of the reef, and deep-diving into the hyperbolic geometry underlying coral creation.

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Determining what is real and what is fake has long been a problem for art curators. It is estimated that 20 percent of the worldwide art market is made up of forgeries.

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Determining what is real and what is fake has long been a problem for art curators. It is estimated that 20 percent of the worldwide art market is made up of forgeries. But art lover and Dartmouth College mathematics department Chairman Daniel Rockmore has developed a technique that is helping to determine the difference between excellent copy and the real McCoy.

"I joke a lot that I am a mathematician by mistake," says Rockmore. "It was something that I had an aptitude at, but I've always had lots of interests."

One thing Rockmore is particularly interested in is art. And a few years ago, his professional skills and personal interest collided.
The Juncture Of Math And Art
In 2001, through a friend, Rockmore met Nadine Orenstein, a curator of prints and drawings at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. At the time, Orenstein was working on an exhibition of the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, a Flemish painter from the 16th century. She invited Rockmore to the museum to see the show.

The exhibition featured both drawings by Bruegel and several that had long been attributed to him, but that historians later suspected were drawn by others. "Our exhibition was really the first time we were getting together in one place all of the drawings by Bruegel and the ones that were no longer considered to be by him," says Orenstein.

Rockmore says it was at this exhibit that he realized how his mathematical training could intersect with his love of art. "Nadine was explaining to me the various pen strokes that seem to be characteristic of the way Bruegel works, the way he creates a scene," says Rockmore.

He realized that if he had digital images of the drawings, he could use his math skills to design a computer program that would analyze the pen strokes and characterize which were Bruegel-like and which weren't. So he and some colleagues got hold of the digital images, and wrote the program.
An Art Historian's Tool
By 2004 they had a program that was pretty good at identifying real Bruegels. And now, as Rockmore reports in a recent edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the program has been further improved through the use of a different kind of statistical sampling technique.

The program determines whether a particular drawing is consistent with an artist's style. Until now, Rockmore has only tested his program on Bruegel drawings, but he says there is no reason it could not be used for other artists.

While it can identify suspicious works, it cannot definitively prove that they are fake.

But, says Orenstein, it "might kind of put a little light bulb in the head of the scholar and say, 'Oh, here's something we need to further investigate.' "
A Way To Better Understand Art
In the end, Rockmore doesn't see his work as leading to a way to track down forgers but rather as a tool to deconstruct art - a way of describing what it means to be Picasso-like or Bruegel-like.

"You get deeper questions about the creation of art, and our experience of art," he says. "But it's probably more fun to report on whether or not that's a fake Bruegel."

Although reporting on the science of how we experience art is fun too.

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Professor Daniel Rockmore is an art lover - and the chairman of the math department at Dartmouth College. He has united his two interests, art and math, to develop a program that analyzes pen strokes. The program gives art historians a new tool for detecting art forgeries, which are estimated to make up 20 percent of the worldwide art market.

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Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?

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Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?

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Philosopher Julian Baggini fears that, as we learn more and more about the universe, scientists are becoming increasingly determined to stamp their mark on other disciplines. Here, he challenges theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss over 'mission creep' among his peers

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Julian Baggini No one who has understood even a fraction of what science has told us about the universe can fail to be in awe of both the cosmos and of science. When physics is compared with the humanities and social sciences, it is easy for the scientists to feel smug and the rest of us to feel somewhat envious. Philosophers in particular can suffer from lab-coat envy. If only our achievements were so clear and indisputable! How wonderful it would be to be free from the duty of constantly justifying the value of your discipline.

However - and I'm sure you could see a "but" coming - I do wonder whether science hasn't suffered from a little mission creep of late. Not content with having achieved so much, some scientists want to take over the domain of other disciplines.

I don't feel proprietorial about the problems of philosophy. History has taught us that many philosophical issues can grow up, leave home and live elsewhere. Science was once natural philosophy and psychology sat alongside metaphysics. But there are some issues of human existence that just aren't scientific. I cannot see how mere facts could ever settle the issue of what is morally right or wrong, for example.

Some of the things you have said and written suggest that you share some of science's imperialist ambitions. So tell me, how far do you think science can and should offer answers to the questions that are still considered the domain of philosophy?

Lawrence Krauss Thanks for the kind words about science and your generous attitude. As for your "but" and your sense of my imperialist ambitions, I don't see it as imperialism at all. It's merely distinguishing between questions that are answerable and those that aren't. To first approximation, all the answerable ones end up moving into the domain of empirical knowledge, aka science.

Getting to your question of morality, for example, science provides the basis for moral decisions, which are sensible only if they are based on reason, which is itself based on empirical evidence. Without some knowledge of the consequences of actions, which must be based on empirical evidence, then I think "reason" alone is impotent. If I don't know what my actions will produce, then I cannot make a sensible decision about whether they are moral or not. Ultimately, I think our understanding of neurobiology and evolutionary biology and psychology will reduce our understanding of morality to some well-defined biological constructs.

The chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home. This is particularly relevant in physics and cosmology. Vague philosophical debates about cause and effect, and something and nothing, for example - which I have had to deal with since my new book appeared - are very good examples of this. One can debate until one is blue in the face what the meaning of "non-existence" is, but while that may be an interesting philosophical question, it is really quite impotent, I would argue. It doesn't give any insight into how things actually might arise and evolve, which is really what interests me.

JB I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I agree that many traditional questions of metaphysics are now best approached by scientists and you do a brilliant job of arguing that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is one of them. But we are missing something if we say, as you do, that the "chief philosophical questions that do grow up are those that leave home". I think you say this because you endorse a principle that the key distinction is between empirical questions that are answerable and non-empirical ones that aren't.

My contention is that the chief philosophical questions are those that grow up without leaving home, important questions that remain unanswered when all the facts are in. Moral questions are the prime example. No factual discovery could ever settle a question of right or wrong. But that does not mean that moral questions are empty questions or pseudo-questions. We can think better about them and can even have more informed debates by learning new facts. What we conclude about animal ethics, for example, has changed as we have learned more about non-human cognition.

What is disparagingly called scientism insists that, if a question isn't amenable to scientific solution, it is not a serious question at all. I would reply that it is an ineliminable feature of human life that we are confronted with many issues that are not scientifically tractable, but we can grapple with them, understand them as best we can and we can do this with some rigour and seriousness of mind.

It sounds to me as though you might not accept this and endorse the scientistic point of view. Is that right?

LK In fact, I've got more sympathy with your position than you might expect. I do think philosophical discussions can inform decision-making in many important ways, by allowing reflections on facts, but that ultimately the only source of facts is via empirical exploration. And I agree with you that there are many features of human life for which decisions are required on issues that are not scientifically tractable. Human affairs and human beings are far too messy for reason alone, and even empirical evidence, to guide us at all stages. I have said I think Lewis Carroll was correct when suggesting, via Alice, the need to believe several impossible things before breakfast. We all do it every day in order to get out of bed - perhaps that we like our jobs, or our spouses, or ourselves for that matter.

Where I might disagree is the extent to which this remains time-invariant. What is not scientifically tractable today may be so tomorrow. We don't know where the insights will come from, but that is what makes the voyage of discovery so interesting. And I do think factual discoveries can resolve even moral questions.

Take homosexuality, for example. Iron age scriptures might argue that homosexuality is "wrong", but scientific discoveries about the frequency of homosexual behaviour in a variety of species tell us that it is completely natural in a rather fixed fraction of populations and that it has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts. This surely tells us that it is biologically based, not harmful and not innately "wrong". In fact, I think you actually accede to this point about the impact of science when you argue that our research into non-human cognition has altered our view of ethics.

I admit I am pleased to have read that you agree that "why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question best addressed by scientists. But, in this regard, as I have argued that "why" questions are really "how" questions, would you also agree that all "why" questions have no meaning, as they presume "purpose" that may not exist?

JB It would certainly be foolish to rule out in advance the possibility that what now appears to be a non-factual question might one day be answered by science. But it's also important to be properly sceptical about how far we anticipate science being able to go. If not, then we might be too quick to turn over important philosophical issues to scientists prematurely.

Your example of homosexuality is a case in point. I agree that the main reasons for thinking it is wrong are linked with outmoded ways of thought. But the way you put it, it is because science shows us that homosexual behaviour "is completely natural", "has no apparent negative evolutionary impacts", is "biologically based" and "not harmful" that we can conclude it is "not innately 'wrong'". But this mixes up ethical and scientific forms of justification. Homosexuality is morally acceptable, but not for scientific reasons. Right and wrong are not simply matters of evolutionary impacts and what is natural. There have been claims, for example, that rape is both natural and has evolutionary advantages. But the people who made those claims were also at great pains to stress this did not make them right - efforts that critics sadly ignored. Similar claims have been made for infidelity. What science tells us about the naturalness of certain sexual behaviours informs ethical reflection, but does not determine its conclusions. We need to be clear on this. It's one thing to accept that one day these issues might be better addressed by scientists than philosophers, quite another to hand them over prematurely.

LK Once again, there are only subtle disagreements. We have an intellect and can therefore override various other biological tendencies in the name of social harmony. However, I think that science can either modify or determine our moral convictions. The fact that infidelity, for example, is a fact of biology must, for any thinking person, modify any "absolute" condemnation of it. Moreover, that many moral convictions vary from society to society means that they are learned and, therefore, the province of psychology. Others are more universal and are, therefore, hard-wired - a matter of neurobiology. A retreat to moral judgment too often assumes some sort of illusionary belief in free will which I think is naive.

I want to change the subject. I admit I am pleased that you agree that "why is there something rather than nothing" is a question best addressed by scientists. But I claim more generally that the only meaningful "why" questions are really "how" questions. Do you agree?

Let me give an example to put things in context. Astronomer Johannes Kepler claimed in 1595 to answer an important "why" question: why are there six planets? The answer, he believed, lay in the five Platonic solids whose faces can be composed of regular polygons - triangles, squares, etc - and which could be circumscribed by spheres whose size would increase as the number of faces increased. If these spheres then separated the orbits of the planets, he conjectured, perhaps their relative distances from the sun and their number could be understood as revealing, in a deep sense, the mind of God.

"Why" was then meaningful because its answer revealed purpose to the universe. Now, we understand the question is meaningless. We not only know there are not six planets, but moreover that our solar system is not unique, nor necessarily typical. The important question then becomes: "How does our solar system have the number of planets distributed as it does?" The answer to this question might shed light on the likelihood of finding life elsewhere in the universe, for example. Not only has "why" become "how" but "why" no longer has any useful meaning, given that it presumes purpose for which there is no evidence.

JB I don't know whether it's a virtue or a vice, but in philosophy there is nothing "only" about subtle disagreements! But given we've got as close as we're probably going to on ethics, let's turn to the difference between "how" and "why" questions.

Again, I agree with a lot here. I am unpersuaded, for example, by the argument that there is never any conflict between religion and science because the latter deals with "how" questions and the former "why" ones. The two cannot be so easily disentangled. If a Christian argues that God explains why there was a big bang, then that inevitably says something about God's role in how the universe came into being, too. But I would not go so far as to say that all "why" questions can only be properly understood as "how" ones. The clearest example here is of human action, for which adequate explanations can rarely do without "why" questions. We do things for reasons.

Some very hard-nosed philosophers and scientists describe this as a convenient fiction, an illusion. They claim the real explanation for human action lies at the level of "how", specifically, how brains receive information, process it and then produce action.

But if we want to know why someone made a sacrifice for a person close to them, a purely neurological answer would not be a complete one. The full truth would require saying that there was a "why" at work, too: love. Love is indeed at root the product of the firings of neurons and release of hormones. How the biochemical and psychological points of view fit together is clearly puzzling, and, as your aside on free will suggests, our naive assumptions about human freedom are almost certainly false. But we have no reason to think that one day science will make it unnecessary for us to ask "why" questions about human action to which things such as love will be the answer. Or is that romantic tosh? Is there no reason why you're bothering to have this conversation, that you are doing it simply because your brain works the way it does?

LK Well, I am certainly enjoying the conversation, which is apparently "why" I am doing it. However, I know that my enjoyment derives from hard-wired processes that make it enjoyable for humans to tangle linguistically and philosophically. I guess I would have to turn your question around and ask why (if you will excuse the "why" question!) you think that things such as love will never be reducible to the firing of neurons and biochemical reactions? For that not to be the case, there would have to be something beyond the purely "physical" that governs our consciousness. I guess I see nothing that suggests this is the case. Certainly, we already understand many aspects of sacrifice in terms of evolutionary biology. Sacrifice is, in many cases, good for survival of a group or kin. It makes evolutionary sense for some people, in this case to act altruistically, if propagation of genes is driving action in a basic sense. It is not a large leap of the imagination to expect that we will one day be able to break down those social actions, studied on a macro scale, to biological reactions at a micro scale.

In a purely practical sense, this may be computationally too difficult to do in the near future, and maybe it will always be so, but everything I know about the universe makes me timid to use the word always. What isn't ruled out by the laws of physics is, in some sense, inevitable. So, right now, I cannot imagine that I could computationally determine the motion of all the particles in the room in which I am breathing air, so that I have to take average quantities and do statistics in order to compute physical behaviour. But, one day, who knows?

JB Who knows? Indeed. Which is why philosophy needs to accept it may one day be made redundant. But science also has to accept there may be limits to its reach.

I don't think there is more stuff in the universe than the stuff of physical science. But I am sceptical that human behaviour could ever be explained by physics or biology alone. Although we are literally made of the same stuff as stars, that stuff has organised itself so complexly that things such as consciousness have emerged that cannot be fully understood only by examining the bedrock of bosons and fermions. At least, I think they can't. I'm happy for physicists to have a go. But, until they succeed, I think they should refrain from making any claims that the only real questions are scientific questions and the rest is noise. If that were true, wouldn't this conversation just be noise too?

LK We can end in essential agreement then. I suspect many people think many of my conversations are just noise, but, in any case, we won't really know the answer to whether science can yield a complete picture of reality, good at all levels, unless we try. You and I agree fundamentally that physical reality is all there is, but we merely have different levels of optimism about how effectively and how completely we can understand it via the methods of science. I continue to be surprised by the progress that is possible by continuing to ask questions of nature and let her answer through experiment. Stars are easier to understand than people, I expect, but that is what makes the enterprise so exciting. The mysteries are what make life worth living and I would be sad if the day comes when we can no longer find answerable questions that have yet to be answered, and puzzles that can be solved. What surprises me is how we have become victims of our own success, at least in certain areas. When it comes to the universe as a whole, we may be frighteningly close to the limits of empirical inquiry as a guide to understanding. After that, we will have to rely on good ideas alone, and that is always much harder and less reliable.
The Ego Trick A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence M Krauss is published by Simon & Schuster. by Julian Baggini is published by Granta.

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Philosophy v science: which can answer the big questions of life?

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Philosopher Julian Baggini challenges physicist Lawrence Krauss over 'mission creep' in the scientific community

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The series puts a new spin on science by remixing lectures, documentaries, and movies into music videos celebrating the most mind-blowing knowledge we have.  The videos have been used in classrooms around the world as a means to get people interested in science.

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Symphony of Science is a view of our universe through the prism of music.

The series puts a new spin on science by remixing lectures, documentaries, and movies into music videos celebrating the most mind-blowing knowledge we have. The videos have been used in classrooms around the world as a means to get people interested in science.

Since its launch in Fall 2009, Symphony of Science has been featured on CNN, NPR, Wired, Adult Swim, and more, attracting over 50 million views online. The first single, A Glorious Dawn, found release on Jack White's Third Man Records label as a special 7" vinyl single.

"Really quite beautiful and amazing in both its sincerity and aims."

- Carrie Brownstein

The series is the brain child of melodysheep, a musician and filmmaker living in the Pacific Northwest. His work spans from television and music production, having done extensive work with Disney, National Geographic, PBS, and many other collaborators. A TED guest and Webby Award winner, he strives to evoke a sense of awe with his work by celebrating the musicality of life, nature, and pop culture.

In 2016, "A Glorious Dawn" became the first record ever played in space.

"Only when creative people take ownership of cosmic discovery will society accept science as the cultural activity that it is. And so I applaud all such efforts of artists."

- Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Delve into a wide range of chemical concepts and processes with this collection of over 200 step-by-step practicals

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Everything you need to teach and to learn chemistry!

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Everything you need to teach and to learn chemistry!

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Here you will find exemplary digital resources, tools, and online services; your 24:7 aid for teaching and learning chemistry. A collaborative, community-driven effort, ChemEd DL is the place for sharing your work and benefitting from what others have done.

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Thomas Kuhn: Paradigms and what is Science?

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Thomas Kuhn: Paradigms and what is Science?

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Thomas Kuhn: Paradigms and what is Science?

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Thomas Kuhn and "the Structure of Scientific Revolutions"

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Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria "talk" to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry — and our understanding of ourselves.

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Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria “talk” to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry -- and our understanding of ourselves.

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The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth

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The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth

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J.B.S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary biology theory, was reportedly asked what it would take for him to lose faith in the theory of evolution and is said to have replied, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian.”

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J.B.S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary biology theory, was reportedly asked what it would take for him to lose faith in the theory of evolution and is said to have replied, "Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian." Since the so-called "Cambrian explosion" of 500 million years ago marks the earliest appearance in the fossil record of complex animals, finding mammal fossils that predate them would falsify the theory.

But would it really?

The Haldane story, though apocryphal, is one of many in the scientific folklore that suggest that falsification is the defining characteristic of science. As expressed by astrophysicist Mario Livio in his book Brilliant Blunders: "[E]ver since the seminal work of philosopher of science Karl Popper, for a scientific theory to be worthy of its name, it has to be falsifiable by experiments or observations. This requirement has become the foundation of the 'scientific method.'"

But the field known as science studies (comprising the history, philosophy and sociology of science) has shown that falsification cannot work even in principle. This is because an experimental result is not a simple fact obtained directly from nature. Identifying and dating Haldane's bone involves using many other theories from diverse fields, including physics, chemistry and geology. Similarly, a theoretical prediction is never the product of a single theory but also requires using many other theories. When a "theoretical" prediction disagrees with "experimental" data, what this tells us is that that there is a disagreement between two sets of theories, so we cannot say that any particular theory is falsified.

Fortunately, falsification-or any other philosophy of science-is notnecessary for the actual practice of science. The physicist Paul Dirac was right when he said, "Philosophy will never lead to important discoveries. It is just a way of talking about discoveries which have already been made." Actual scientific history reveals that scientists break all the rules all the time, including falsification. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn noted, Newton's laws were retained despite the fact that they were contradicted for decades by the motions of the perihelion of Mercury and the perigee of the moon. It is the single-minded focus on finding what works that gives science its strength, not any philosophy. Albert Einstein said that scientists are not, and should not be, driven by any single perspective but should be willing to go wherever experiment dictates and adopt whatever works.

Unfortunately, some scientists have disparaged the entire field of science studies, claiming that it was undermining public confidence in science by denying that scientific theories were objectively true. This is a mistake since science studies play vital roles in two areas. The first is that it gives scientists a much richer understanding of their discipline. As Einstein said: "So many people today-and even professional scientists-seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering. This independence created by philosophical insight is-in my opinion-the mark of distinction between a mere artisan or specialist and a real seeker after truth." The actual story of how science evolves results in inspiring more confidence in science, not less.

The second is that this knowledge equips people to better argue against antiscience forces that use the same strategy over and over again, whether it is about the dangers of tobacco, climate change, vaccinations or evolution. Their goal is to exploit the slivers of doubt and discrepant results that always exist in science in order to challenge the consensus views of scientific experts. They fund and report their own results that go counter to the scientific consensus in this or that narrow area and then argue that they have falsified the consensus. In their book Merchants of Doubt, historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway say that for these groups "[t]he goal was to fight science with science-or at least with the gaps and uncertainties in existing science, and with scientific research that could be used to deflect attention from the main event."

Science studies provide supporters of science with better arguments to combat these critics, by showing that the strength of scientific conclusions arises because credible experts use comprehensive bodies of evidence to arrive at consensus judgments about whether a theory should be retained or rejected in favor of a new one. These consensus judgments are what have enabled the astounding levels of success that have revolutionized our lives for the better. It is the preponderance of evidence that is relevant in making such judgments, not one or even a few results.

So, when anti-vaxxers or anti-evolutionists or climate change deniers point to this or that result to argue that they have falsified the scientific consensus, they are making a meaningless statement. What they need to do is produce a preponderance of evidence in support of their case, and they have not done so.

Falsification is appealing because it tells a simple and optimistic story of scientific progress, that by steadily eliminating false theories we can eventually arrive at true ones. As Sherlock Holmes put it, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Such simple but incorrect narratives abound in science folklore and textbooks. Richard Feynman in his book QED, right after "explaining" how the theory of quantum electrodynamics came about, said, "What I have just outlined is what I call a "physicist's history of physics," which is never correct. What I am telling you is a sort of conventionalized myth-story that the physicists tell to their students, and those students tell to their students, and is not necessarily related to the actual historical development which I do not really know!"

But if you propagate a "myth-story" enough times and it gets passed on from generation to generation, it can congeal into a fact, and falsification is one such myth-story.

It is time we abandoned it.

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The Idea That a Scientific Theory Can Be ‘Falsified’ Is a Myth

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Is empathy a purely human quality? In this segment, Jad and Robert explore the inner workings of the spindle cell, those long neurons that might connect thoughts to feelings, with the help of Dr. Patrick Hof and Jonah Lehrer. Then they talk to Dr. Clive Wynne again to get a different take on how to connect with an animal.

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10 Ways Young Generations Are Better Than Their Parents

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10 Ways Young Generations Are Better Than Their Parents

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Young people get a bad rap. Current generations are often portrayed as unmotivated and irresponsible compared to the hard-working, sensible generations that came before them.

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Young people get a bad rap. Current generations are often portrayed as unmotivated and irresponsible compared to the hard-working, sensible generations that came before them. However, it turns out that a lot of these stereotypes aren't true, and the trends run in the opposite direction.

10 Youth Violence Is Actually On The Decline

Hot on the tail of the release of Grand Theft Auto V, violence among young people is a hot-button issue. Rap music, video games, and movies are all becoming increasingly violent, leading many to believe that a generation of unfeeling thugs is inevitable.

The CDC keeps a record of youth violence rates among those aged 10-24. In 2011, over 700,000 cases were reported, which sounds high, but the rate has actually dropped to 7.5 cases per 100,000 kids from 15.2 in 1994. Youth violence has declined far more rapidly than the general decrease in violence seen across all age groups.

9Teen Pregnancy Is Down

Along with violence, sex in the media is blamed for creating a generation of immorality and lust. Teens today are sexualized from a young age. Programs like MTV's 16 and Pregnant alongside high-profile cases of teen pregnancy such as Bristol Palin suggest that it's a rising problem.

However, the numbers tell a different story. Teen pregnancy rates are at a record low and have been dropping for two decades. Hispanic teens' rates have dropped by 34 percent since 2007, and the rate is 24 percent for black teenage girls. Sex education programs and access to contraceptives are credited with the success.

8Teen Drug Use Is Down

A lot of parents worry about drugs-understandably so. Drugs can cause a lot of damage, and no one wants to hear their teenager has been getting high. Parents also worry about underage drinking, with peer pressure now more of a factor than ever.

But the statistics contradict that stereotype. Drinking and marijuana use is down among teenagers. Surprisingly, the group using more illicit substances than ever is the 50-64 age group. Parents of teenagers worried about substance abuse should probably be looking at their own generation.

7 IQ Scores Are Going Up

While teenagers have always thought they knew everything, current generations are part of a continuing trend of increasing IQ scores over the last 100 years. James Flynn, who first observed the trend, says it's due to the world becoming increasingly complex. People are becoming better and better at analyzing the world, rather than thinking in terms of what's useful to their survival. As technology and access to information continues to increase, it's possible that IQ scores will as well.

6 Teen Driving Accidents Have Declined

Teen drivers have been getting safer and safer over the past several decades. Across the US, teen driving deaths dropped from 42 per 100,000 to 25 per 100,000 between 1980 and 1998. Michigan and North Carolina both reported a reduction of over 25 percent in teen crashes between 1997 and 1999, while Florida's fatal accident rate simultaneously dropped 9 percent. In total, since 1975, deaths have dropped by 40 percent among teen male drivers, and 9 percent among females. And it's not just because cars are getting safer, either. In fact, some research has shown that people are generally comfortable with a certain level of risk and that when cars have more safety features, drivers will actually increase their risks to compensate for it.

5 They Are Earning More

Despite the recession, it appears the majority of young people are earning more than their parents did at the same age. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 84 percent of young adults had a higher income than their parents did, with an even greater improvement among those at the bottom of the income scale.

The research hints at greater social mobility than at any point in the past. There are areas of concern-black people were less likely to have surpassed their parents income. They clocked in at at two-thirds, as opposed to to almost 90 percent of Caucasians.

4 Kids Are More Eco-Aware

With the impending threats of global warming and depletion of resources, looking after the environment is more important than ever. Children know this and are turning into a generation of eco-warriors, policing their parents into using less energy and producing less waste.

While some parents might be annoyed, the trend seems to be accelerating in the direction of kids being more eco-conscious. The introduction of school programs and green awards in organizations like the Girl Scouts suggests that the next generation will be more dedicated to saving the planet than any before.

3 Teenagers Are More Generous And Tolerant

Selfishness is the bugbear of the millennial generation. Civic-mindedness and community have gone out of the window, and teenagers don't want to help anyone but themselves. Except that teenagers today are more likely to volunteer than at any point in history. Participation in political demonstrations is also at an all-time high, even more than it was during the revolutionary '60s.

On top of that, younger generations are more racially tolerant, less sexist, and significantly less homophobic than their parents and grandparents were.

2 Play Has Become More Imaginative

With the increase in everything from TV to videogames, children are spending less time playing. That's inevitably causing them to lose the ability to entertain themselves using only their imagination, the way their parents and grandparents were forced to, right? Apparently not.

Researchers from Cleveland did an analysis and found that elementary school children in 2008 were more imaginative than children of the same age were in 1985, despite spending less time playing. The kids also found playing make-believe more comforting, suggesting that electronics aren't killing children's imaginations after all.

1 Millenials Get Along With Their Parents

Those born since the 1980s seem to get along with their parents better than earlier generations. Research by Pew suggests that the ability of young adults to engage with their parents over disagreements has improved since the culture clashes in the later half of the 20th century. Even taste in music, a point which generations are renowned to disagree over, is more similar than before, with large percentages of 20-somethings liking the same music their parents listened to.

You can read some of Alan's non-list writing at skepticalnumber.com or email him at [email protected] .

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10 Ways Young Generations Are Better Than Their Parents - Listverse

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Young people get a bad rap. Current generations are often portrayed as unmotivated and irresponsible compared to the hard-working, sensible generations