Altruism and Selfish Behavior. The Docility Model Revisited

Herbert A. Simon is widely known for his studies on rationality, artificial intelligence and for his pioneering approach to organizational studies. In one of his latest works, he presented a theory of human interaction, focused on the conflict between the selfish and the altruistic that can be seen as the essence of human relationships. The model is quite ambiguous: (1) it follows a kind of social Darwinism that (2) postulates selfish individuals’ extinction. Taking up Simon’s hypotheses on altruism, docility, and selfish behavior, we develop an alternative model of human interaction. The main objective of the paper is to show that rejecting neo-Darwinism and assuming slight complications in the model can explain more in terms of social system interactions. We assume that docility and then altruism, in a technical sense, is the basis of social interaction as it shapes the whole system. It is worth noting that, in the model, selfish individuals do not disappear.docility, altruism, social system, bounded rationality, social interactions, social Darwinism

Comprehending stories in pantomime. A pilot study with typically developing children and its implications for the narrative origin of language

This paper presents a pilot study aimed at investigating the comprehension of pantomimic stories and its possible cognitive underpinnings in typically developing children. A group of twenty-two Italian-speaking children aged between 8.02 and 10.11 years were included in the study. Participants watched short videos in which professional actors performed pantomime narratives; then answered a comprehension question and retold the stories. Analyses revealed positive correlations between the comprehension of pantomimes and age, theory of mind, and working memory. The implications of these results for a narrative model of language origin are discussed against the background of an eco-evo-devo perspective

Perspectives on Science and Culture

"Edited by Kris Rutten, Stefaan Blancke, and Ronald Soetaert, Perspectives on Science and Culture explores the intersection between scientific understanding and cultural representation from an interdisciplinary perspective. Contributors to the volume analyze representations of science and scientific discourse from the perspectives of rhetorical criticism, comparative cultural studies, narratology, educational studies, discourse analysis, naturalized epistemology, and the cognitive sciences. The main objective of the volume is to explore how particular cognitive predispositions and cultural representations both shape and distort the public debate about scientific controversies, the teaching and learning of science, and the development of science itself

Reading Mutant Narratives : The Bodily Experientiality of Contemporary Ecological Science Fiction

Reading Mutant Narratives explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-than-human modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of "mutant narratives". Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction. The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied. As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of "embodied estrangement". Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, "performative enactivism", that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-than-human aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.Reading Mutant Narratives keskittyy ekologista kriisiä käsitteleviin "mutanttikertomuksiin" ja niille tyypilliseen kokemuksellisuuteen. Mutanttikertomukset ovat tieteisfiktiivisiä kertomuksia, joissa ihmiskeskeiset ja posthumanistiset piirteet yhdistyvät ja antavat lukijalle mahdollisuuksia ekologiseen ymmärrykseen. Esimerkkeinä mutanttikertomuksista tutkimus nostaa esiin kolmen yhdysvaltalaisen tieteiskirjailijan, Greg Bearin, Paolo Bacigalupin ja Jeff VanderMeerin, teoksia. Nämä teokset asettavat ihmisen osaksi ekologisia, evolutiivisia ja teknologisia vuorovaikutussuhteita, joissa myös ihmisruumiit ja ruumiillinen kokemus muuttavat muotoaan. Väitöskirja tutkii siis, kuinka tieteisfiktiiviset kertomukset ympäristöllisestä ja kokemuksellisesta muutoksesta voivat kehittää ruumiillista kokemusta. Kertomuksentutkimukseen ja empiiriseen lukijatutkimukseen tukeutuen tutkimus lähtee oletuksesta, että sopivissa olosuhteissa kirjallisuuden lukeminen voi edesauttaa kokemuksellisia muutoksia. Tutkimus tarkastelee tieteisfiktion lukemista eletyn ruumiillisen kokemuksen tasolla. Lukukokemuksen analyysissa otetaan huomioon sekä lukijan ruumiillinen, subjektiivinen ja historiallinen tilanne että luettujen teosten kytkeytyminen romaanikerronnan ja tieteisfiktion lajityypin perinteisiin. Suuri osa nykykirjallisuudesta esittää ruumiillisen kokemuksen luonnollisena ja kätkee oman kerronnallisen vaikutusvaltansa, mutta mutanttikertomusten kerronnalliset keinot saattavat outouttaa lukijoiden ruumiillista kokemusta suhteessa sekä elettyyn ympäristöön että kirjallisuuteen itseensä. Tieteisfiktion tutkimuksen käsitteistöä uudistaen väitöskirja kutsuu tällaista lukemisen dynamiikkaa "ruumiilliseksi vieraannuttamiseksi". Lukukokemuksen analyysien avulla tutkimus esittää, kuinka kirjallisuuden lukeminen ohjaa osaltaan lukijoiden tunne- ja havaintotottumusten muotoutumista. Se tuo yhteen ruumiillis-kognitiivisia ja posthumanistisia lähestymistapoja kirjallisuudentutkimukseen ja muotoilee "performatiivis-enaktiivisen" lähilukemisen metodin, joka auttaa sanallistamaan lukukokemuksen ruumiillisia, ympäristöllisiä ja ei-inhimilliseen kurovia puolia. Ruumiillisen kokemuksellisuuden syventäminen tämän metodin avulla tuo ekologisen tieteisfiktion tiiviimmin osaksi globaalin ympäristömuutoksen kokemuksellista tilannetta

A Rhetorical Genealogy of Bacterial Psychology

This dissertation traces the historical trajectory of an idea: that we can learn about human perception and sensation by studying how microorganisms make decisions. Alfred Binet—experimental psychologist and master hypnotist—first put forward this idea in The Psychic Life of Microorganisms (1888). To investigate how Binet’s claim came to life eighty years later, I focus on research that I call “bacterial psychology.” This research studies microbial relations to, and influence upon, humans. To engage this research I approach rhetorical theory in two primary ways. First, I practice rhetoric of science in the traditional sense when I analyze scientists’ metaphors about microbes, which lean towards anthropomorphism. I engage rhetorical theory differently when I suggest we can use microbiome research to enhance theories of the body, to see suasive agency at the material and bodily level. In doing this, I step outside the established bounds of rhetoric of science—but with the intention of broadening the field and fostering dialogue between rhetoric and microbiome research. As the biological sciences explore the terra incognita of our non-discursive interactions, the exigence increases for humanities scholars to join conversations that are redefining the human. Our bodies and minds are being framed as distributed and composed of a multiplicity of agents, challenging assumptions about autonomy, individuality, and genetic determinism. Additionally, I argue that understanding ourselves as enmeshed with our environs enables us to be more responsive, and responsible, to our environs and to each other. To this end I synthesize research on microbial ecology with philosophies and worldviews that faded as the sciences developed, such as indigenous ecological knowledge, ancient Buddhism, and panpsychism—the idea that mind is derived from feeling and exists even in primitive life forms. In cross-pollinating these ideas with rhetorical theory and microbial ecology, I contribute to conversations in animal studies, ecological, and cultural rhetorics that question the locus of self. I conclude by synthesizing rhetorical theory on group identification, hypnosis, and suggestibility with microbiome research that echoes Binet’s suggestion—that microbes make decisions and we can learn about ourselves by studying them

A thumb on the scale : biological determinism and the essays of Stephen Jay Gould

Biological determinism is a field of scientific theory that attributes human behavior, relationships, and social structures predominantly to hereditary and biological rather than cultural and environmental influences. In almost twenty-five years of published essays, the Harvard evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, has sounded an alarm that biological determinism-through its scientific rationalization of slavery, eugenic sterilization, Nazi atrocity, and more subtle forms of injustice perennially poses a real and dangerous threat to humanity. This thesis explores the career-long anti-hereditarian thread permeating Gould\u27s published works on evolutionary history and the history of science. Gould\u27s assertions regarding the cultural embeddedness of science are emphasized-as well as his view that the human species\u27 role within the big picture of geological time and space is often dangerously misinterpreted. His alternative view, biological potentialism, is presented and defended

Attaining Scientific Literacy through a Rhetoric of Science Composition Pedagogy

For the past sixty years, acquiring scientific literacy has proven to be a daunting task in education, especially for undergraduate nonscience majors. Although some education scholars have recognized the importance and use of arguments to teach science, these pedagogical practices often are aimed at primary school children rather than college students or involve reporting science experiments rather than actually studying or constructing arguments about issues related to science.However, in this dissertation, I contend that educators often neglect a more available tool that not only examines arguments concerning scientific issues but also demonstrates the very heart of scientific literacy: critical thinking. In this project, I argue that a rhetoric of science course that teaches undergraduate nonscience majors to assess and engage the rhetorical components of scientific arguments provides a more pedagogically sound means of helping these students attain scientific literacy than the course designs in popular Introduction to Biology textbooks and their related course syllabi. In order to support this claim, I define and focus on the relationship of five main terms throughout this project as they pertain to the teaching of scientific literacy: science, scientific literacy, critical thinking, argumentation, and rhetoric. Science is a rhetorical practice through argumentation, and as I explain, argumentation fulfills the process of critical thinking, utilizing the analysis, evaluation, and creation of arguments. Applying an Aristotelian understanding of the term, rhetoric involves both the employment and discernment of the means of persuasion. From these terms, I establish that the attainment of scientific literacy is a rhetorical endeavor that necessitates the use of rhetoric of science, which is the analysis, evaluation, and creation of scientific arguments through composition.Examining three major Introduction to Biology textbooks and nine related course syllabi, I demonstrate that these courses generally emphasize learning facts rather than how to think critically about issues pertaining to science, and any writing required in these courses do not include composing arguments concerning issues related to science. In contrast, I demonstrate how a rhetoric of science that uses rhetorical criticism can be used to help nonscience majors attain scientific literacy as I define the term