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The article focuses on sociologist Sergio Sismondo's paper on constructivism. Sismondo's paper puts into focus disagreements and differences in understanding between those who have been associated with constructivism and those who are not. In defining ontology as part of historical experience, constructivism makes a characteristic shift, it takes a philosophical question or concept and reconstructs it within the domain of empirical analysis and theory. Constructivism owns many questions to philosophy, a fact picked up very well in Sismomdo's paper. What is often less understood is that, for constructivist studies, what is important and what is not just the question, it is the shift. In other words, these studies display mentality towards philosophical concepts, and it is where they run to and how they reformulated the issue that account for their own interest. Sismondo misconstrues the thesis that the world is a consequence, rather than merely a precondition, of scientific accounts. This is the sense in which he makes it appear as if the material world were an automatic consequence of scientific knowledge.

The results from four studies are reported separately to test the idea that influential articles in psychology will be more readable than less influential ones. This idea is upheld when the papers involved are ones that have been highly rated by fellow colleagues (Studies 1 and 2) but it is not supported when the papers involved are highly-cited journal articles (Studies 3 and 4). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

REC or radical enactive (or embodied) cognition involves the claim that certain forms of mentality do not involve informational content and are instead to be equated with temporally and spatially extended physical interactions between an agent and the environment. REC also claims however that other forms of mentality do involve informational content and are scaffolded by socially and linguistically enabled practices. This seems to raise what can be called a cognitive gap question, namely, how do non-contentful behaviours give rise to contentful behaviours? In this paper, I show how REC can tackle a certain understanding of this question. I argue that if REC were to endorse claims made by the later Wittgenstein, then REC could deny that there is any (synchronous) gap in our intelligent behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imitation is an example of social learning in which an individual observes and copies another’s actions. This paper presents a new method for using imitation as a way of enhancing the learning speed of individual agents that employ a well-known reinforcement learning algorithm, namely Q-learning. Compared with other research that uses imitation with reinforcement learning, our method uses imitation of purely observed behaviours to enhance learning, with no internal state access or sharing of experiences between agents. The paper evaluates our imitation-enhanced reinforcement learning approach in both simulation and with real robots in continuous space. Both simulation and real robot experimental results show that the learning speed of the group is improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of a universal intelligence test has been recently advocated as a means to assess humans, non-human animals and machines in an integrated, uniform way. While the main motivation has been the development of machine intelligence tests, the mere concept of a universal test has many implications in the way human intelligence tests are understood, and their relation to other tests in comparative psychology and animal cognition. From this diversity of subjects in the natural and artificial kingdoms, the very possibility of constructing a universal test is still controversial. In this paper we rephrase the question of whether universal intelligence tests are possible or not into the question of how universal intelligence tests can be, in terms of subjects, interfaces and resolutions. We discuss the feasibility and difficulty of universal tests depending on several levels according to what is taken for granted: the communication milieu, the resolution, the reward system or the agent itself. We argue that such tests must be highly adaptive, i.e. that tasks, resolution, rewards and communication have to be adapted according to how the evaluated agent is reacting and performing. Even so, the most general expression of a universal test may not be feasible (and, at best, might only be theoretically semi-computable). Nonetheless, in general, we can analyze the universality in terms of some traits that lead to several levels of universality and set the quest for universal tests as a progressive rather than absolute goal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a sequence of investigations in parasitology, botany, pharmacology, psychometrics and ethnopsychology focused on Kenyan village children's knowledge of medicinal herbs. We follow this work of making and ordering of knowledge, showing that the different disciplinary perspectives on bodies, medicines, knowledges, children and cultures produced by this research all sought the foundation of knowledge in reference to objective reality, and that they aimed to make the world known in the specific form of distinct and comparable entities with individual properties and capacities. Based on subsequent ethnographic observations of healing in the same village, we outline a different, contrasting modality of knowing, which places ontology above epistemology. Medicinal knowledge and its transformational capacity are here not located within entities but between them; not in objective reality but in effects; 'to know' means 'to come together' with the implication of having an effect on one another. We use this ethnographic sketch of a different form of knowing as a foil against which to contrast the imaginary that had shaped our previous research. Beyond the stark contrast between herbal village healing and pharmacological laboratory analysis, we expand our argument by moving from natural science to social science, from studies of plants and substances to those of humans, minds and cultures; from laboratories to ethno-psychological tests, cultural models, and eventually econometrics. We suggest that by reiterating a particular scientific imaginary, remaking humans (and non-human beings) as known things, a specific notion of man and a related political economy of knowledge is naturalized. Looking back at our involvement with this sequence of research, we realize that, contrary to our intentions, our inclusion as 'social scientists' into a multidisciplinary scientific project may have exacerbated rather than mitigated its potentially problematic effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pharmaceuticals are not permitted on to the market unless they are granted regulatory approval. The regulatory process is, therefore, crucial in whether or not a drug is widely prescribed. Regulatory agencies have developed standards of performance that pharmaceuticals are supposed to meet before entering the market. Regulation of technologies is often discussed by reference to the precautionary principle. In contrast, this paper develops the concept of the 'permissive principle' as a way of understanding the departure of regulators' practices from standards of drug efficacy to which regulatory agencies themselves subscribe. By taking a case study of antidepressant regulation in the UK and the USA, the mechanisms of permissive regulatory practices are examined. An STS methodology of both spatial (international) and temporal comparisons of regulatory practices with regulatory standards is employed to identify the nature and extent of the permissive regulation. It is found that the permissive principle was adopted by drug regulators in the UK and the USA, but more so by the former than the latter. Evidently, permissive regulation, which favours the commercial interests of the drug manufacturer, but is contrary to the interests of patients, may penetrate to the heart of regulatory science. On the other hand, permissive regulation of specific drugs should not be regarded as an inevitable result of marketing strategies and concomitant networks deployed by powerful pharmaceutical companies, because the extent of permissive regulation may vary according to the intra-institutional normative commitments of regulators to uphold their technical standards against the commercial interests of the manufacturer. Likely sociological factors that can account for such permissive regulatory practices are 'corporate bias', secrecy and excessive regulatory trust in the pharmaceutical industry in the UK, political expediency and ideological capture in the USA, combined in both countries with some regulatory deference to the clinical autonomy of the psychiatry profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the content, form and function of popularized accounts of primatological research in the field. Based on the textual analysis of 11 popular accounts published from 1964 to 2001, it demonstrates that a key element of such scientific writing is the construction and presentation of the primates themselves as knowledgeable actors within particular social, ecological and moral landscapes. It places these accounts in the context of the problem of anthropomorphism within the history of the behavioural sciences, and argues that, given the importance of avoiding anthropomorphism in primatological research, the presentation of primate research subjects as persons must serve some significant function. It suggests that while one reason for this might be the severely endangered status of many primates, another might be found in the development of particular methodological strategies for conducting field site research, strategies that may help researchers form individualized relationships with their research subjects. However, such public productions of primate personality have political consequences, consequences that the science studies community needs to consider more carefully. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an interpretive framework for understanding the cognitive or mental processes of inventors, and applies this framework to narrating how Thomas Edison developed the kinetoscope, or motion picture. A review of recent developments in the history of technology and cognitive science suggests the need for better conceptual categories for understanding and comparing how inventors approach problems. We show how Edison created a mental model of the kinetoscope from his existing phonograph, and how his assistant William K. L. Dickson (who is often credited with inventing the kinetoscope) developed his own alternative mental model. We further discuss how Edison utilized building blocks or mechanical representations from previous inventions, and what strategies or heuristics he employed, in particular, we examine how Edison divided the project between himself and Dickson. The overall result of applying our framework to this case is to provide a clearer picture of the roles played by Edison and Dickson in this invention. The paper closes with a discussion on the potential relationship between cognitive and sociological approaches to technological innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral political science has not utilized observational methods and lacks the field research tradition found in other behavioral sciences. This paper explores the potential contribution of observational methods to behavioral studies in political science and illustrates their application with data developed around oral argument in the United States Supreme Court and the first Reagan-Mondale television debate in 1984. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, personality disorders – psychiatric constructs understood as enduring dysfunctions of personality – have come into ever-greater focus for British policymakers, mental health professionals and service-users. Disputes have focussed largely on highly controversial attempts by the UK Department of Health to introduce mental health law and policy (now enshrined within the 2007 Mental Health Act of England and Wales). At the same time, clinical framings of personality disorder have dramatically shifted: once regarded as untreatable conditions, severe personality disorders are today thought of by many clinicians to be responsive to psychiatric and psychological intervention. In this article, I chart this transformation by means of a diachronic analysis of debates and institutional shifts pertaining to both attempts to change the law, and understandings of personality disorder. In so doing, I show how mental health policy and practice have mutually constituted one another, such that the aims of clinicians and policymakers have come to be closely aligned. I argue that it is precisely through these reciprocally constitutive processes that the profound reconfiguration of personality disorder from being an obdurate to a plastic condition has occurred; this demonstrates the significance of interactions between law and the health professions in shaping not only the State’s management of pathology, but also perceptions of its very nature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author draws upon an earlier article by anthropologist Stanley Brandes to recommend that when the intent and purposes of relating a life story are clearly anthropological, the work be labelled 'ethnographic autobiography'. An ethnographic autobiography is defined as a life story told to an anthropologist or used in ways that implicate a sociocultural rather than a psychological interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers use citation counts to study science. But few studies explore the meanings of those citations. Oddly enough, least explored of all are judgements by the authors who cite them. This paper describes three empirical studies of citations in psychology journals that explored the judgements. In general, highly cited scholarly works are rated as exemplars and as being of higher quality, although there were differences between older and newer works in these ratings. More interestingly, works rated as highly created had mixed fates. Creative works were judged to be higher quality exemplars; but creative works also had the lowest citation counts once quality and exemplar ratings were taken into account. It may be that some creative works fit poorly into existing conceptual or methodological structures, and so are used less. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is usually assumed that the 'social construction' metaphor has one key meaning that is well understood across social studies of science. But a look at some of the texts that were, and are, central to introducing and defining 'social construction' in science studies shows that there are widely varying uses of the metaphor: processes of construction differ with the types of objects that can be constructed. This paper identifies four prominent interpretations that have led to interesting insights and discussions. Though these different social constructions have generally been fused together in science studies, they are easily separable, and should be separated, since they are not equally tenable. In particular, 'neo-Kantian' or 'idealist' constructivism has weak arguments supporting it and, contrary to the standard rhetoric, is the leas important of these different constructivisms to most of the actual work done in social studies of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Robert Boyle's experimental programme had as its end-product the generation of indisputable matters of fact. In this paper I analyze the resources used to produce these matters of fact, paying particular attention to linguistic practices. Experimental reports rich in circumstantial detail were designed to enable readers of the text to create a mental image of an experimental scene they did not directly witness. I call this 'virtual witnessing', and its importance was as a means of enlarging the witnessing public. The notion of a 'public' for experimental science is, I argue, essential to our understanding of how facts are generated and validated. In these episodes, circumstantial reporting was a technique for creating a public and for constituting authentic knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a response to sociologist David Collingridge's article, where Collingridge clarified his stand on controlling technology in relation to the book "The Social Control of Technology." Collingridge's emphasis on the importance of the criterion of flexibility in decision-making under ignorance is valuable. But his focus on the machinery of technology sets the scene in terms of responding to technologies once they have been established and taken a physical form. If flexibility is to be established, it will be as a result of the inclusion of a range of different forces in the social processes that shape technology. It will require a recognition that technical expertise addresses only a very small part of the context of technology. Only if politicians, bureaucrats, experts and sociologists recognize that the machinery view of technology is disabling, that technical fixes always involve a great deal of adaptation in the surrounding environment and that technologies are congealed and commonly concealed political processes, can the basis be established for the development of technologies more in tune with the variety and changing composition of human needs.

Almost 30% of pregnant women attending public health clinics in South Africa are HIV positive; which represents approximately 280,000 women each year. South Africa has the largest antiretroviral therapy programme in the world, with over 2.7 million people on treatment in 2013. Since its belated and controversial beginning, the Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission programme has achieved a substantial reduction in vertical transmission. South Africa is justifiably proud of this success. However, the history of Prevention of Mother-to-Child Transmission (PMTCT) and antiretroviral therapy programmes in South Africa has been fraught with delays and political intervention. South Africa could have started both PMTCT and antiretroviral therapy programmes in 2000. Instead, the AIDS denialist views of the government allowed the HIV epidemic to spiral out of control. Roll-out of a national PMTCT programme began in 2002, but only after the government was forced to do so by a Constitutional Court ruling. Now, a decade later, HIV treatment and prevention programmes have been completely transformed. This article will discuss the evolution of the HIV epidemic in South Africa, and give a historical overview of the struggle to establish a national PMTCT, and the impact of delaying PMTCT and treatment programmes on infant and maternal health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Socio-psychological barriers play a major role in the continuation of intractable conflicts. They are responsible for the socio-psychological closure that resists and prevents the entertainment of alternative information that could potentially facilitate the acceptance of ideas advancing peacemaking processes. In an attempt to validate a process model that depicts the functioning of the socio-psychological barriers to conflict resolution, an empirical study was conducted among a nationwide representative sample of Jews in Israel, within the context of the Middle Eastern conflict. The reported study utilized a large scale survey, based on a nationwide representative sample of Israeli Jews who were asked to respond to a questionnaire which included the model’s selected variables. As hypothesized, the results showed a path leading from general worldviews (e.g. General values, Right Wing Authoritarianism, Implicit theories about groups) to openness to new information and readiness to compromise through the mediation of the conflict-related societal beliefs (e.g. victimhood, delegitimization). These results indicate that closure to new information that may shed new light on both the rival and the conflict emerges as a crucial factor in the maintenance of society members’ non-compromising views. The theoretical as well as the applied implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides an answer to the question: What is the function of cognition? By answering this question it becomes possible to investigate what are the simplest cognitive systems. It addresses the question by treating cognition as a solution to a design problem. It defines a nested sequence of design problems: (1) How can a system persist? (2) How can a system affect its environment to improve its persistence? (3) How can a system utilize better information from the environment to select better actions? And, (4) How can a system reduce its inherent informational limitations to achieve more successful behavior? This provides a corresponding nested sequence of system classes: (1) autonomous systems, (2) (re)active autonomous systems, (3) informationally controlled autonomous systems (autonomous agents), and (4) cognitive systems.This article provides the following characterization of cognition: The cognitive system is the set of mechanisms of an autonomous agent that (1) allow increase of the correlation and integration between the environment and the information system of the agent, so that (2) the agent can improve the selection of actions and thereby produce more successful behavior.Finally, it shows that common cognitive capacities satisfy the characterization: learning, memory, representation, decision making, reasoning, attention, and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Previous research has identified economic and political factors that can contribute to the outbreak and the duration of armed conflicts. However, the psychological factors that may play a role in conflict escalation and duration have received less attention. Adopting a psychological perspective, the present study aims to investigate the role of death awareness in the context of an armed conflict. To this aim, basic assumptions derived from Terror Management Theory (TMT) were examined in an African civil war context. According to TMT, people manage awareness of inevitable death by increased striving for self-esteem and increased adherence to their cultural values. Students from the University of Abidjan (Ivory Coast), located in the pro-governmental part of the country, were randomly assigned to a mortality salience or a control condition and completed measures of self-esteem and government/army support. As expected, reminding participants of their possible death during the ongoing conflict exacerbated self-esteem, as well as support for the actions of the government and its army, compared to a control condition. Given that mortality is chronically salient in the context of a civil war, these effects can lead to conflict intensification by increasing not only each side’s support for their leaders, but also the value that members of confronted sides attribute to themselves. The findings are discussed in terms of the role of mortality salience in conflict escalation and the importance of carefully dealing with the past in post-conflict societies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary literature distinguishes two ways to defend the claim that cognition is a matter of representations: first, cognition involves representation-hungry tasks; second, cognition involves a complex form of informational covariation between subcomponents of a system with an adaptive function. Each of these conceptions involves a different notion of representation, and promotes a particular view of the architecture of cognition. But despite the differences, each of them aims to support the claim that cognition is a matter of representations on architectural constraints. The objectives of this article are twofold: first, it is argued that architectural constraints do not entail either of those two ways to defend the claim that cognition is a matter of representations; second, it is claimed that both notions of representation share an objectionable common element—namely, the idea of a model that grounds the representational reading—that must be abandoned, in favor of a more economical explanation in terms of causal relations, in order to get a clear view of cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Within the cognitive sciences, cognition tends to be interpreted from an anthropocentric perspective, involving a stringent set of human capabilities. Instead, we suggest that cognition is better explicated as a much more general biological phenomenon, allowing the lower bound of cognition to extend much further down the phylogenetic scale. We argue that elementary forms of cognition can already be witnessed in prokaryotes possessing a functional sensorimotor analogue of the nervous system. Building on a case-study of the Escherichia coli bacterium and its sensorimotor system, the TCST- system, we home in on the characteristics of minimal cognition, and distinguish it from more basic forms of ontogenetic adaptation. In our view, minimal cognition requires an embodiment consisting of a sensorimotor coupling mechanism that subsumes an autopoietic organization; this forms the basis of the growing consensus that the core of cognition revolves around sensorimotor coupling. We discuss the relevance of our interpretation of minimal cognition for the study of cognition in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does environmental structure influence the dynamics of adaptive behavior and its underlying mechanisms? By analyzing the neural controller of a simulated head/eye system, we show that a specific measure-"neural complexity"—can be selectively sensitive to neural dynamics underlying rich adaptive behavior. Evolutionary algorithms were used to generate neural network controllers able to support target fixation in environmental and phenotypic conditions of qualitatively different complexity. Networks that evolved in rich conditions showed higher behavioral flexibility and robustness, and higher neural complexity, than networks that evolved in simple conditions. The magnitude of neural complexity, which reflects a balance between dynamical integration and dynamical segregation, depended on properties of both the environment and the head/eye phenotype. These results show that neurally complex dynamics can accompany adaptive behavior in rich environmental and phenotypic conditions; they are consistent with the proposal that neural complexity may represent a com- mon property of the functional organization of adaptive neural systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compares the 1914 World War I and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Psychological mechanisms of conflict escalation; Perceived implicit intentions at the outbreak of the U.S. civil war; Perceived power imagery in British and German newspapers in 1914.

Examines the debates surrounding the clinical diagnosis 'traumatic neurosis' in the context of interactions between psychiatrists and female switchboard operators. Medical attention received by the women for their nervous and hysterical disorders at the turn of the 20th century; Revision of U.S. accident insurance laws in 1926 to disqualify traumatic neurosis as a compensatable condition.

Introductory textbooks in biology, physiology and statistics present material to the student without origins or qualifications. That is, they present autonomous facts, creating the reality of science. Psychology textbooks do not do this when they present psychology. Instead, they give evidence and they qualify and hedge the claims made. Psychology texts write autonomous facts of biology and statistics, just as biology and statistics texts do, but move away from autonomous fact-writing when material is recognized as psychological. The boundaries between disciplines are created in the modalities of the statements in the textbooks. The 'factstatus of material on the activities of neurons in colour vision and feature detectors changes when this material is written as physiology in physiology textbooks and when it is written as psychology in psychology textbooks. Statistics, biology and physiology are presented as 'certainty sciences' both in the home discipline textbooks and in psychology textbooks, but acceptance of material as psychological leads to the presentation of uncertainty. 'Certainty writing' in psychology is not simply a reflection of a users' 'certainty trough', but of textbook writing practices within the certainty sciences themselves. The failure of psychology textbooks to present autonomous facts of psychology is not an indication that no well fabricated knowledge exists in psychology, but rather that psychology habits of textbook writing involve both relevance and evidence. Maintaining relevance to everyday experience but distinguishing the claims of science from the claims of the everyday produces a form of textbook writing which does not present certainty, but which presents evidence instead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of International Political Science Review is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of International Political Science Review is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The author reflects on the dynamical systems approach to cognition. He expounds on the view that cognitive activity must be understood as a result of interactions occurring within a set of coupled sub-systems belonging both to the agent and the environment. However, he explains that it is potentially misleading and often counter-productive to define features observable in the system's behavior functionally as a property of the agent's internal dynamics.