The Natural Foundations of Religion

In the Natural history of religion, Hume attempts to understand the origin of our folk belief in gods and spirits. These investigations are not, however, purely descriptive. Hume demonstrates that ontological commitment to supernatural agents depends on motivated reasoning and illusions of control. These beliefs cannot, then, be reflectively endorsed. This proposal must be taken seriously because it receives support from recent work on our psychological responses to uncertainty. It also compares quite favorably with its main competitors in the cognitive science of religio

Filling the Gaps: Hume and Connectionism on the Continued Existence of Unperceived Objects

In Book I, part iv, section 2 of the Treatise, "Of scepticism with regard to the senses," Hume presents two different answers to the question of how we come to believe in the continued existence of unperceived objects. He rejects his first answer shortly after its formulation, and the remainder of the section articulates an alternative account of the development of the belief. The account that Hume adopts, however, is susceptible to a number of insurmountable objections, which motivates a reassessment of his original proposal. This paper defends a version of Hume's initial explanation of the belief in continued existence and examines some of its philosophical implications

Hume's Legacy: A Cognitive Science Perspective

Hume is an experimental philosopher who attempts to understand why we think, feel, and act as we do. But how should we evaluate the adequacy of his proposals? This chapter examines Hume’s account from the perspective of interdisciplinary work in cognitive science

A configurational approach to the dynamics of firm level knowledge

Whilst there has been exponential growth in the work on the nature of organisational knowledge, relatively little progress has been made in terms of understanding the way in which knowledge specifically impacts on the firm. The aim of this paper is to further this understanding by developing a series of configurations representing some of the potential ways that knowledge is composed in organisations, with those components being tacit, explicit, architectural, component, individual and collective knowledge