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More attention has been devoted to providing evolutionary accounts of the development of beliefs, or belief-like states, than for desires or preferences. Here I articulate and defend an evolutionar...

Shadmehr and Ahmed's book is a welcome extension of optimal foraging theory and neuroeconomics, achieved by integrating both with parameters relating to effort and rate of movement. Their most persuasive and prolific data come from saccades, where times before and after decision are reasonably determinate. Skeletal movements are less likely to exhibit such tidy temporal organization.

The broad spectrum revolution brought greater dependence on skill and knowledge, and more demanding, often social, choices. We adopt Sterelny's account of how cooperative foraging paid the costs associated with longer dependency, and transformed the problem of skill learning. Scaffolded learning can facilitate cognitive control including suppression, whereas scaffolded exchange and trade, including inter-temporal exchange, can help develop resolve.

The costs of and returns from actions are varied and individually concrete dimensions, combined in heterogeneous ways. The many needs of the body also fluctuate. Making action selection efficiently track some ultimate goal, whether fitness or another utility function, itself requires representational abstraction. Therefore, predictive brains need abstract value representations.

Comprehensive accounts of resource-rational attempts to maximise utility shouldn't ignore the demands of constructing utility representations. This can be onerous when, as in humans, there are many rewarding modalities. Another thing best not ignored is the processing demands of making functional activity out of the many degrees of freedom of a body. The target article is almost silent on both.

There is an enduring tension in thinking about the architecture of systems that select behaviours, including evolved organisms. One line of reasoning supports convergence in control systems and conversion of the values of all options into a common currency, in part because this seems the best or only way of trading off costs and benefits associated with outcomes of varying types. A competing consideration supports parallelism or other forms of fragmentation, because of inefficiencies associated with integration, and suspicion towards general-purpose cognitive systems. In addition, recent neuroscience has given particular attention to the question of how partly independent ‘habit based’ and ‘planning based’ decision-systems might interact. The issues here are, at least in part, a special case of the more general integration versus parallelism tension. This tension provides a useful framework for thinking about the implementation of different kinds of sensitivity to risks of various types, the variety of mechanisms by means of which risk sensitivity might be modulated, and how risk might be traded off against other components of value or disincentive. I describe the tension, briefly survey some of the relevant empirical evidence, and conclude with tentative observations on the topic of risk.

In this paper we characterise a tension between two views about how an agent could achieve efficient action selection. On one hand, it is common in some of the cognitive and behavioural sciences to maintain that efficient action selection requires that the value of all actions or options available to an agent are represented on a unidimensional scale of values, in other words that action selection make use of a "common currency". On the other hand, early work in situated, embodied robotics and distributed control associated with Rodney Brooks maintained that "intelligence" could be achieved without the instantiation of any representations at all, and without centralised control systems. This line of thinking has exerted significant influence in situated and enactivist approaches to human cognition. If what situated roboticists count as "intelligence" includes capacity for efficient action selection, then their claim that intelligence can be achieved without representations is in tension with the views of those who argue that efficient action selection requires that a common currency be represented. We argue here that the apparent tension is genuine, develop an analysis of the tension itself, and offer a preliminary overview of the considerations relevant to navigating it.

Bas van Fraassen claims that materialism involves false consciousness. The thesis that matter is all that there is, he says, fails to rule out any kinds of theories. The false consciousness consists in taking materialism to be cognitive rather than an existential stance, or attitude, of deference to the current content of science (whatever that content is) in matters of ontology, and a favourable attitude to completeness claims about the content of science at a time. The main argument Van Fraassen provides for saying that materialism is not cognitive is an account according to which materialism has responded, so far, to changes in science by abandoning previous hallmarks of the material (or physical), and accepting new ones instead of by taking materialism to have been refuted. I argue that van Fraassen’s conclusions run far ahead of what his arguments establish. The fact of revision and revolution in the history of science, and the undoubted provisionality and incompleteness of science as we have it, do indeed tell against simply letting current science determine what the physical (or material) is for philosophical purposes. But the alternative to betting on current science need not be unconditional open-endedness. The changes that materialists have accepted so far do not, furthermore, support the false consciousness interpretation. The reason for this is not that materialists will swallow anything, but rather that the changes accepted are consistent with the truth of materialism when appropriately characterized.

Sterelny (2003) develops an idealised natural history of folk-psychological kinds. He argues that belief-like states are natural elaborations of simpler control systems, called detection systems, which map directly from environmental cue to response. Belief-like states exhibit robust tracking (sensitivity to multiple environmental states), and response breadth (occasioning a wider range of behaviours). The development of robust tracking and response-breadth depend partly on properties of the informational environment. In a transparent environment the functional relevance of states of the world is directly detectable. Outside transparent environments, selection can favour decoupled representations.Sterelny maintains that these arguments do not generalise to desire. Unlike the external environment, the internal processes of an organism, he argues, are selected for transparency. Parts of a single organism gain nothing from deceiving one another, but gain significantly from accurate signalling of their states...

Background: Vascular surgical patients have an elevated cardiac risk following non-cardiac surgery. The decision whether to proceed with surgery is multidimensional. Patients must balance the considerations in favour of surgery with those favouring conservative treatment, which requires weighing peri-operative risk against morbidity associated with non-surgical treatment.Methods: The aim of this prospective correlational study was to determine the proportional contributions of (i) pain, (ii) impulsivity, (iii) patients’ perception of the benefits of surgery, (iv) patients’ perception of peri-operative risk and (v) the predicted peri-operative risk on acceptance of peri-operative risk by vascular surgical patients. Sixty patients were prospectively recruited by convenience sampling from the Inkosi Albert Luthuli Central Hospital vascular surgery clinic between April 2014 and June 2014. Written informed consent was obtained. Patients completed a questionnaire which documented demographics, pain assessment, impulsivity screen (Barratt Impulsiveness Scale 11), patients’ perception of surgery, predicted peri-operative risk (South African Vascular Surgical Cardiac Risk Index) and acceptance of peri-operative risk. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and linear regression (SPSS version 22).Results: The patients’ perception of the benefits of surgery (β 0.36, 95% CI 0.14–0.70, p = 0.005) was the only predictor of peri-operative risk acceptance. The associations between the other potential predictors and the outcome were insignificant.Conclusion: The perceived benefit of surgery was the most important predictor of acceptance of peri-operative risk in this cohort.Keywords: Pain, Peri-operative Risk, Shared Decision-making, Vascular Surgery

The Problem Gambling Severity Index, the scored module of the Canadian Problem Gambling Index, is a population-based survey instrument that is becoming the preferred epidemiological tool for estimating the prevalence of disordered gambling. While some validation evidence for the Problem Gambling Severity Index is available, very little is known about its psychometric characteristics in developing countries or in countries the populations of which are not highly Westernised. The aim of this study was to investigate the validity of the Problem Gambling Severity Index with a specific focus on its criterion-related and construct (concurrent) validity in a community sample of gamblers in South Africa ( n = 127). To this end, the Problem Gambling Severity Index was administered alongside the Diagnostic Interview for Gambling Severity and measures known to associate with gambling severity (impulsivity, current debt, social problems, financial loss, race, sex). Results showed that the Problem Gambling Severity Index was predictive of Diagnostic Interview for Gambling Severity diagnosis from both a categorical and dimensional point of view and demonstrated high discrimination accuracy for subjects with problem gambling. Analysis of sensitivity and specificity at different cut-points suggests that a slightly lower Problem Gambling Severity Index score may be used as a screening cut-off for problem gambling among South African gamblers. The Problem Gambling Severity Index also showed significant correlations with the Barratt Impulsiveness Scale, a widely known measure of impulsivity, and with some of the predicted behavioural variables of interest (gambling activities, money lost to gambling, current debt, interpersonal conflict). This article therefore demonstrates initial criterion and concurrent validity for the Problem Gambling Severity Index for use in South African samples.

Poor South Africans are significantly poorer and have lower employment rates than the subjects of most published research on gambling prevalence and problem gambling. Some existing work suggests relationships between gambling activity (including severity of risk for problem gambling), income, employment status and casino proximity. The objective of the study reported here is to establish the prevalence of gambling, including at risk and pathological gambling, and the profile of gambling activities in two samples of poor South African adults living in a rural and a peri-urban community. A total of 300 (150 male, 150 female) adults in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in communities selected using census data, completed the Problem Gambling Severity Index and a survey of socioeconomic and household information, and of gambling knowledge and activity. It was found that gambling was common, and-except for lottery participation-mostly informal or unlicensed. Significant differences between rural and peri-urban populations were found. Peri-urban subjects were slightly less poor, and gambled more and on a different and wider range of activities. Problem and at risk gamblers were disproportionately represented among the more urbanised. Casino proximity appeared largely irrelevant to gambling activity.

David Benatar has argued that the coming into existence of a sentient being is always a harm, and consequently that people who have children always do wrong. The most natural objection maintains that in many lives (at least) while there is some pain, there are also goods (including pleasures) that can outweigh the suffering. From Benatar’s perspective this move, while possibly useful in assessing the lives of those who actually exist, is not an effective defence of procreation. In the case of people who do not yet exist, he maintains that there is a crucial asymmetry arising from the putative fact that the absence of pain is good even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone, whereas absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom that absence is a deprivation. For the potentially existing, he concludes, preventing the pain of existence is justified, but not so facilitating enjoyment of its pleasures. I argue that the asymmetry is insufficiently motivated. I also sketch two additional lines of argument against the asymmetry. First, it may not include all relevant factors. Second, plausible duties to prevent pain require possible sufferers, but do not apply straightforwardly when extended to include preventing the sufferers themselves.

There has been lively recent debate over the value of appeals to intuitions in philosophy. Some, especially ‘experimental philosophers’, have argued that such appeals can carry little or no evidential weight, and that standard analytic philosophy is consequently methodologically bankrupt. Various defences of intuitions, and analytic philosophy, have also been offered. In this paper I review the case against intuitions, in particular the claims that intuitions vary with culture, and are built by natural selection, and argue that much of their force depends on assuming that the required sense of intuition is of a kind of human universal. In opposition to this view I argue that there is reason to regard intuitions of professional philosophers as parochial developmental achievements (so that cultural variation among non-professionals is irrelevant) and also the product of a training process that warrants ascribing some evidential weight to them. The argument made here is not anti-naturalistic, nor does it grant intuitions any special or trumping evidential status. Unlike some defences of analytic philosophy it does not depend on denying that philosophers appeal to intuitions at all.

The Semantics of Science is, we are told, about ‘the assumptions about language that scientists make in their work’ (SS, pp. vii–viii). Here, then, is a book purportedly about the work of science on the one hand, and what presuppositions about language scientists make as they do their work on the other. It turns out that this early announcement does not mean that Harris discusses the activities of scientists as they design and conduct experiments, work in laboratories and the field, keep records, collect, analyse and interpret data, and interact in a multitude of other ways as they divide epistemic labour. More specifically Harris claims to consider two questions: ‘What does science require of language?’ and ‘What does language require of science?’ Harris’s engagement with these questions is an exercise in developing integrationism, his own approach to the field of linguistics. Actually, that characterisation is too narrow – it would be better to say that integrationism is an approach to all of human intellectual endeavour, since the argument Harris makes also ranges over issues in areas including epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of mathematics, and because this book complements recent ones on language and art (Harris, 2003) and language and history (Harris, 2004). The present book comprises nine chapters and two appendices. I will present a brief overview here, postponing discussion of some of the terminology occurring in the overview for later. The architecture of the book is unsurprising, given that here as always Harris maintains that Western thought has been consistently dominated by a ‘language myth’ and that integrationism alone can dispel the fog. The first chapter apparently shows Aristotle articulating and endorsing a ‘reocentric semantics’. A range of later thinkers, especially in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries are discussed in Chapter 2, showing the development of science as a ‘supercategory’. Chapter 3 concerns the early years of the Royal Society, and conflict between experimentalists and those they were displacing, including alchemists, especially conflict regarding the way to write about experiments. Chapter 4 argues that

We discuss Russell’s 1913 essay arguing for the irrelevance of the idea of causation to science and its elimination from metaphysics as a precursor to contemporary philosophical naturalism. We show how Russell’s application raises issues now receiving much attention in debates about the adequacy of such naturalism, in particular, problems related to the relationship between folk and scientific conceptual influences on metaphysics, and to the unification of a scientifically inspired worldview. In showing how to recover an approximation to Russell’s conclusion while explaining scientists’ continuing appeal to causal ideas (without violating naturalism by philosophically correcting scientists) we illustrate a general naturalist strategy for handling problems around the unification of sciences that assume different levels of na¨´ e with respect to folk conceptual frameworks. We do this despite rejecting one of the premises of Russell’s argument, a version of reductionism that was scientifically plausible in 1913 but is not so now. 1 Russell’s Naturalistic Rejection of Causation 2 Psychology, Folk Notions and Intuitions 3 Causes in Science 4 Letting Science Hold Trumps

Causal exclusion arguments, especially as championed by Kim, have recently made life uncomfortable for would-be non-reductive physicalists. Non-reductive physicalism was itself, in turn, partly a response to earlier arguments against reductionism. The philosophy of science, though, distinguishes more forms of reduction than philosophy of mind generally cares to. In this paper I review four major families of reductionist thesis, and give reasons for keeping them more carefully separate than usual. South African Journal of Philosophy Vol. 25(2) 2006: 159-171

A wave of recent work in metaphysics seeks to undermine the anti-reductionist, functionalist consensus of the past few decades in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. That consensus apparently legitimated a focus on what systems do, without necessarily and always requiring attention to the details of how systems are constituted. The new metaphysical challenge contends that many states and processes referred to by functionalist cognitive scientists are epiphenomenal. It further contends that the problem lies in functionalism itself, and that, to save the causal significance of mind, it is necessary to re-embrace reductionism.We argue that the prescribed return to reductionism would be disastrous for the cognitive and behavioral sciences, requiring the dismantling of most existing achievements and placing intolerable restrictions on further work. However, this argument fails to answer the metaphysical challenge on its own terms. We meet that challenge by going on to argue that the new metaphysical skepticism about functionalist cognitive science depends on reifying two distinct notions of causality (one primarily scientific, the other metaphysical), then equivocating between them. When the different notions of causality are properly distinguished, it is clear that functionalism is in no serious philosophical trouble, and that we need not choose between reducing minds or finding them causally impotent. The metaphysical challenge to functionalism relies, in particular, on a naïve and inaccurate conception of the practice of physics, and the relationship between physics and metaphysics.

Clark and Chalmers [Analysis 58 (1998) 7] defend the hypothesis of an `extended mind', maintaining that beliefs and other paradigmatic mental states can be implemented outside the central nervous system or body. Aspects of the problem of `language acquisition' are considered in the light of the extended mind hypothesis. Rather than `language' as typically understood, the object of study is something called `utterance-activity', a term of art intended to refer to the full range of kinetic and prosodic features of the on-line behaviour of interacting humans. It is argued that utterance-activity is plausibly regarded as jointly controlled by the embodied activity of interacting people, and that it contributes to the control of their behaviour. By means of specific examples it is suggested that this complex joint control facilitates easier learning of at least some features of language. This in turn suggests a striking form of the extended mind, in which infants' cognitive powers are augmented by those of the people with whom they interact.

It is argued that the account of Savage-Rumbaugh's ape language research in Savage-Rumbaugh, Shanker and Taylor (1998. Apes, Language and the Human Mind. Oxford University Press, Oxford) is profitably read in the terms of the theoretical perspective developed in Clark (1997. Being There, Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA). The former work details some striking results concerning chimpanzee and bonobo subjects, trained to make use of keyboards containing ‘lexigram’ symbols. The authors, though, make heavy going of a critique of what they take to be standard approaches to understanding language and cognition in animals, and fail to offer a worthwhile theoretical position from which to make sense of their own data. It is suggested that the achievements of Savage-Rumbaugh's non-human subjects suggest that language ability need not be explained by reference to specialised brain capacities. The contribution made by Clark's work is to show the range of ways in which cognition exploits bodily and environmental resources. This model of ‘distributed’ cognition helps makes sense of the lexigram activity of Savage-Rumbaugh's subjects, and points to a re-evaluation of the language behaviour of humans.

A recurring claim in a number of behavioural, cognitive and neuro-scientific literatures is that there is, or must be, a unidimensional ‘common currency’ in which the values of different available options are represented. There is striking variety in the quantities or properties that have been proposed as determinants of the ordering in motivational strength. Among those seriously suggested are pain and pleasure, biological fitness, reward and reinforcement, and utility among economists, who have regimented the notion of utility in a variety of ways, some of them incompatible. This topic deserves philosophical attention for at least the following reasons. (1) Repeated invocation of the ‘common currency’ idiom isn’t merely terminological coincidence because most of the claims are competing explanations either of manifest pattern in choices, or of order in the processes producing choice. (2) We can’t suppose that the different currency claims within each area are compatible, because there are significant obstacles to identifying pairs of members of either the ‘pattern’ or ‘process’ group. (3) There are, finally, seriously opposed positions about the relationships (generally, and in specific cases including that of humans) between the pattern facts and the process facts. There are philosophical positions both favouring and opposing a common currency. But direct consideration of the abstract relationships between claims about common currencies across scientific settings, and the arguments for and against these claims, is relatively rare. There is, though, much of philosophical interest to be found here. South African Journal of Philosophy 2014, 33(2): 211–221

Cartwright attempts to argue from an analysis of the composition of forces, and more generally the composition of laws, to the conclusion that laws must be regarded as false. A response to Cartwright is developed which contends that properly understood composition poses no threat to the truth of laws, even though agreeing with Cartwright that laws do not satisfy the facticity requirement. My analysis draws especially on the work of Creary, Bhaskar, Mill, and points towards a general rejection of Cartwright's view that laws, especially fundamental laws, should be seen as false.

This paper concerns the question of how to specify what is to count as physical for the purposes of debates concerning either physicalism or the completeness of physics. I argue that what is needed from an account of the physical depends primarily on the particular issue at stake, and that the demand for a general a priori specification of the physical is misplaced. A number of attempts to say what should be counted as physical are defended from recent attacks by Chris Daly, and a specific proposal due to David Papineau developed and extended. I argue that this approach is more than suitable for the debates for which it is intended.

The status of fundamental laws is an important issue when deciding between the three broad ontological options of fundamentalism (of which the thesis that physics is complete is typically a subtype), emergentism, and disorder or promiscuous realism. Cartwright's assault on fundamental laws which argues that such laws do not, and cannot, typically state the facts, and hence cannot be used to support belief in a fundamental ontological order, is discussed in this context. A case is made in defence of a moderate form of fundamentalism, which leaves open the possibility of emergentism, but sets itself against the view that our best ontology is disordered. The argument, taking its cue from Bhaskar, relies on a consideration of the epistemic status of experiments, and the question of the possible generality of knowledge gained in unusual or controlled environments.

It is argued against Allan that Bhaskar's transcendental realism is not self-defeatingly relativist, that his analysis of experiment is supportable and that his philosophical ontology can be defended without returning to a correspondence notion of truth.

Clark's synthesis of much recent work on sensory and motor systems in the brain is at once radical and curiously traditional. It is radical, among other things, concerning what representations are, how they are constructed, and what sensory and motor representations have in common. But it is traditionally cognitivist in viewing the main task of brains as being that of representing the world. What this traditional orientation tends to neglect is the role of the brain as a system for selecting among available actions. This phenomenon has an ultimate aspect regarding the external standards relevant to assessing actions. Various behavioral ecological schemes for ranking actions in terms of their contribution to quantities such as fitness, and economic models of revealed preference, are the leading theoretical players here. The phenomenon also has a proximal aspect, which concerns the specific biological mechanisms, including neural ones, by means of which the values of different available actions might be represented, and selections between them made. On this topic the recent explosion of neuroeconomic research on decision processes in the brain is urgently relevant. Natural agents have limited means of action, and those means have alternative – sometimes mutually exclusive – uses. That is to say the predicament of natural agents is fundamentally an economic one, even if it is not necessary that selection converge on a system for responding to the predicament in which economic variables are explicitly represented. Furthermore there is considerable evidence from behavioral ecology and other fields that many vertebrate behaviors in natural settings are economically efficient. Neither the ultimate nor the proximal aspects of the problem of selecting between behaviors play a significant role in Clark's account. Natural selection, fitness, and biological descendents are not mentioned at all, and cognate concepts like adaptiveness feature in diluted form. There's similarly little mention of decision and choice as theoretically understood in economics including neuroeconomics, none of incentives, and reward and utility appear only in the course of musing over whether it is possible that cognitive neuroscience could do without reference to either (section 5.1). Clark does make some important points about action-centric representations, but even here does not consider the problem of action selection. Of course, no survey can cover anything that anyone thinks is relevant, and it's very easy to complain about things that are left out. Clark's lack of engagement with neuroeconomics means missing a specific opportunity to make his general case even more compelling, because what is emerging in that field complements his case about sensory and motor systems in deep ways. In his section (3.2) Clark apparently takes seriously the concern that an agent with the sort of brain that he's been describing would be expected to “seek a nice dark room and stay in it”. Clark disposes of the worry by pointing out that creatures with real biological needs should “expect” to follow exploratory strategies, and that these expectations themselves should recruit both perception and action. This is part of a reasonable and interesting response, but action selection under those conditions (as with most others) would still require some way of dealing with specific questions, such as where and how to forage, and how to trade off foraging with other expected behaviors such as predator avoidance and reproduction. A related move appears later, in section (5.1) when he considers an austere vision of cognition that does without reference to goals and rewards, in favor of comprehensive analysis in terms of expectations. Clark correctly holds back from endorsing this possibility, but for relatively generic reasons to the effect that even if some description is in principle replaceable, it may be convenient to continue using it. This misses the main chance. Recent work on the neural implementation of decision in various vertebrates including humans has produced a body of results highly congenial to the unifying vision Clark supports. Consider saccadic movements in rhesus monkeys. A key component in the neural implementation of these movements is the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), which comprises a topographic map integrating locations in the visual field and aspects of the muscular plans that would effect the centering of gaze on those locations. It, along with a network of other maps with varying topographies in the frontal eye fields, superior colliculus and related areas, provides a striking illustration of what Clark calls an “action-centric” representation. In addition, as studies including Platt and Glimcher (1999) and Dorris and Glimcher (2004) have shown, some activity in LIP neurons of rhesus monkeys on visually identical trials varies in precise ways with the relative expected rewards (or relative subjective value) from saccades to the represented location. These representations are not merely “action-centric” insofar as they combine answers to the questions “where is it?” with “how do I gaze at it?” They also include identifiable activity corresponding to the answer to “what's it probably worth for me to look at it?” There's more. The expected relative reward values attached to saccadic and other movements are not sui generis. They are predictions, and ones that get updated in the light of ongoing experience. Among the key findings on this topic is that dopamine neurons do not – as previously supposed – directly encode hedonic value (because if they did they would respond in the same to expected and unexpected rewards of equivalent hedonic worth). Rather it turns out that they encode some aspects of the difference between experienced and expected reward (Montague et al., 1997, see also Bayer and Glimcher, 2005). While many details about the operation of this system, and its interaction with other neural systems, have yet to be determined, it is nonetheless clear that crucial features of the neural systems for attaching values to sensory events and actions operate by means of prediction error. In this respect they suggest a way of expanding the scope of Clark's claim about the importance of minimizing prediction error as a general goal of neural systems.

The target article falls short of explaining the phenomena, including motivational conflict, that it sets out to. The two main reasons for this are: (1) It is unclear in what sense goals are “selfish”; (2) We need an account of how selfish goals motivate people. If selfish goals are not in the replication business, then what is in it for them? And if they do not offer people something that they want, how do they ever influence what people do?

Transparency is a fundamental concept in the target article by Bentley et al. But the text gives cryptic, inconclusive and sometimes conflicting suggestions as to what transparency consists of. Consequently, it is insufficiently clear what the north–south axis of the map of collective behaviour actually represents, or how to order behaviours by transparency.

The image of the addict in popular culture combines victimhood and moral failure; we sympathize with addicts in films and novels because of their suffering and their hard-won knowledge. And yet actual scientific knowledge about addiction tends to undermine this cultural construct. In What Is Addiction?, leading addiction researchers from neuroscience, psychology, genetics, philosophy, economics, and other fields survey the latest findings in addiction science. They discuss such questions as whether addiction is one kind of condition, or several; if addiction is neurophysiological, psychological, or social, or incorporates aspects of all of these; to what extent addicts are responsible for their problems, and how this affects health and regulatory policies; and whether addiction is determined by inheritance or environment or both. The chapter authors discuss the possibility of a unifying basis for different addictions (considering both substance addiction and pathological gambling), offering both neurally and neuroscientifically grounded accounts as well as discussions of the social context of addiction. There can be no definitive answer yet to the question posed by the title of this book; but these essays demonstrate a sweeping advance over the simplistic conception embedded in popular culture. Contents â?¢ The Contribution of Executive Dysfunction â?¢ Neurobiology of Pathological Gambling â?¢ Alcoholism as an Exemplar â?¢ Addiction as a Breakdown in the Machinery of Decision Making â?¢ Economic Models of Pathological Gambling â?¢ A Latent Property of the Dynamics of Choice â?¢ Addiction and Altruism â?¢ Hyperbolic Discounting versus Conditioning and Cognitive Framing â?¢ Measuring Dispositions to Bundle Choices â?¢ Anticipatory Processing as a Transdisciplinary Bridge in Addiction â?¢ Impulsivity and Its Association with Treatment Development for Pathological Gambling and Substance Use Disorders â?¢ Medical Models of Addiction â?¢ Addiction and the Diagnostic Criteria for Pathological Gambling â?¢ Irrational Action and Addiction â?¢ Defining Addiction and Identifying the Public Interest in Liberal Democracies

According to various theorists and empirical scholars of behavior and decision, including economists, utility theorists, behavioral ecologists, behavioral economists and researchers in the new field of neuroeconomics the value (typically understood as utility) of competing choices must be represented on a common scale in order for them to count as competing at all, and in order for orderly comparison to lead to actual choices. For some neuroeconomists this means that expected (cardinal) utilities are neurally represented by firing rates of cells in specific brain regions. In this paper some important statements of the ‘common currency’ argument are reviewed and critically examined. A rational reconstruction of the key argument is then subject to criticism informed by a variety of empirical and theoretical considerations. In a strong form it does not survive the criticism, and this fact points the way to a re-examination of the sense in which complex living systems, including people, are agents in any straightforward sense.

This inaugural lecture was delivered at the Howard College Campus of UKZN on 2 April 2008. In it I do three things. First I sketch some arguments in favour of a naturalist conception of philosophy. The conclusions that I'm after are that philosophy is not an autonomous enterprise, so that it had better be continuous with scientific enquiry if it is to get anywhere. A supplementary claim I defend briefly is that the natural and social sciences should be viewed as more integrated than they usually are. Second, I offer some reasons for rejecting all identifiable forms of social constructivism about knowledge. Finally, I say something about what 'African Scholarship' might mean, given the preceding considerations. There I briefly defend the claim that there is no epistemically interesting sense in which there is such a thing as African knowledge.

The explanatory power of economic theory is tested by the phenomenon of irrational consumption, examples of which include such addictive behaviors as disordered and pathological gambling. Midbrain Mutiny examines different economic models of disordered gambling, using the frameworks of neuroeconomics (which analyzes decision making in the brain) and picoeconomics (which analyzes patterns of consumption behavior), and drawing on empirical evidence about behavior and the brain. The book describes addiction in neuroeconomic terms as chronic disruption of the balance between the midbrain dopamine system and the prefrontal and frontal serotonergic system, and reviews recent evidence from trials testing the effectiveness of antiaddiction drugs. The authors argue that the best way to understand disordered and addictive gambling is with a hybrid picoeconomic-neuroeconomic model.