Deterministic Worldview Research Articles

The cognitive origin and cultural evolution of taboos in human societies

AbstractWhy do human societies have so many taboos, defined here as culturally prohibited activities? In this article, I offer a naturalistic account of the origin and transmission of taboos from an evolutionary anthropological perspective. Drawing from the extensive literature in cognitive science and cultural evolution, I argue that taboos may arise from our tendency to retrospectively attribute causes to misfortunes due to a deterministic worldview, and the imperfect transmission of taboos often leads to the loss of their original utilitarian rationale, making them resemble mere cultural conventions. While this account does not explain all cultural prohibitions in human societies, it provides valuable insights into the psychological and social mechanisms by which many taboos are generated in a bottom‐up fashion. Towards the end of the article, I offer a few implications on the proposed account of taboos and specify some testable predictions that merit further studies.

“A Good and Noble Nature”: Naturalism, Populism, and Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column

“A Good and Noble Nature”Naturalism, Populism, and Ignatius Donnelly’s Caesar’s Column Andrew Carlyle Urban (bio) At the heart of American literary naturalism lies a paradox. On the one hand, the literary naturalists of the late nineteenth century were among those most influenced by the philosophical naturalism that had come to define the spirit of their age. This philosophical naturalism conceived of the world as “a mechanistic reality that functions in terms of causality” and that consists of “matter in motion subject to physical laws” (Lehan, “Naturalism” 15). Nature, in this view, is a closed, deterministic system of matter encompassing the whole of reality without remainder. Any observable phenomena therefore must be explicable in terms of material causes immanent to the order of nature. Human nature is not exempt from this enclosure within the natural order, and so human behavior too is construed as an effect of material (predominantly biological and environmental) causes. Philosophical naturalism thus amounts to a denial of transcendence, of anything— whether it be God, the soul, free will, or morality— having its origin outside of nature’s network of material causes and effects. It thereby issues a “bleak challenge to any theory that posits the uniqueness of human nature and human endeavor” (Link, “Defining” 72). Its interrogation of human freedom and moral agency call into question humanity’s sense of its own distinctiveness, its tendency to set itself apart from nature and to exempt itself from its laws. Humanity is not appreciably different from any other animal species because it is wholly enclosed within nature’s mechanistic order.1 On the other hand, as irrevocably committed as the American literary naturalists were to a deterministic worldview, they could not but look upon its implications with horror. As Charles Child Walcutt has argued, they saw that the philosophical naturalism to which they were committed is unable to “satisfy man’s doubts or answer his emotional needs,” nor can [End Page 137] it satisfy his longing for “wonder and passion and fear” (10). These doubts, needs, and longings had been satisfied, Walcutt attests, by the “medieval idea of man” as “a fallen creature in a dualistic universe,” a creature “pointed towards the eternal, towards salvation and God” and “torn in the eternal battle between good and evil”— an idea “which lived on, indeed, through the nineteenth century” (4). American naturalist authors such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London wrote in an attempt to grapple with the challenge posed to this view of human nature by philosophical naturalism. Hence a “belief in free will and ethical responsibility, in a universe of rewards and punishments, in a world dominated by purpose and meaning, hovers like a ghost over almost every variety of naturalism in fiction” (Walcutt 18). American literary naturalism, then, is less an unequivocal endorsement of the materialistic and deterministic spirit of the late nineteenth century than an attempt to salvage some sense of moral freedom and transcendent value in the face of its dehumanizing implications.2 This essay reads the 1889 novel Caesar’s Column, written by the Populist politician Ignatius Donnelly, as a significant instance of this paradox of American literary naturalism. Critics have most often read Caesar’s Column as a work of utopian literature (Balasopoulos; Pfaelzer; Axelrad; Saxton), as an apocalyptic dystopia (Pfaelzer; Ueda; Saxton; Jaher), or as a Populist tract (Brass; Pfaelzer; Baker). Most recently, Alex J. Beringer has seen the novel as an expression of “the conspiratorial imagination” (35). But Donnelly’s novel has yet to be studied as a naturalist work. Like more widely known works of American literary naturalism, Caesar’s Column addresses itself to the conflict between philosophical naturalism and human freedom and value— but it does so earlier and more explicitly. In addition, Donnelly’s involvement in Populist politics will help us to see the seldom recognized affinities between American literary naturalism and the Populist movement. As both a Populist politician and a naturalist author, Donnelly is a uniquely positioned figure whose work can help us reach a deeper understanding of the kinship between the literary and political reactions to the historical transformations American society was undergoing at the end of the nineteenth...

Mary Shelley’s ‘Romantic Spinozism’

ABSTRACTMary Shelley (1797–1851) developed a ‘Romantic Spinozism’ from 1817 to 1848. This was a deterministic worldview that adopted an ethical attitude of love toward the world as it is, must be, and will be. Resisting the psychological despair and political inertia of fatalism, her ‘Romantic Spinozism’ affirmed the forward-looking responsibility of people to love their neighbors and sustain the world, including future generations, even in the face of seeming apocalypse. This history of Shelley’s reception of Spinoza begins with the fragment of the otherwise lost translation of the Theologico-Political Treatise (1670) on which she collaborated. It extends through her journals, letters, poetry, and her second great work of speculative fiction after Frankenstein (1818): a post-apocalyptic novel set in the year 2100, The Last Man (1826). Through a creative synthesis of Spinoza with Plato, Cicero, Wollstonecraft, and Glasite Christianity, Shelley developed an anti-apocalyptic conception of love as apocatastasis: a cyclical restoration of an ethical attitude of stewardship toward the whole world and its necessity. Through this recovery of a vital chapter in the history of European ideas, Shelley emerges as a central figure in Spinozan philosophy, especially the ethics and political philosophy of love.

Criminal Justice Without Moral Responsibility

This paper grants the hard determinist position thatmoral responsibility is not coherent with a deterministic worldview and examines hard determinist alternatives to traditionalpunishment. I claim that hard determinist accounts necessarilyinvolve consequentialist reasoning and discuss problems stemmingfrom them. I also argue that a revised model of traditionalconsequentialism called complex consequentialism, a view in whichmultiple values may be considered as ends, provides the best moralframework for a hard determinist account. Ultimately, I examine acriminal justice model that draws heavily on public health ideals andargue that it should considered a complex consequentialist account.

Monism and Meliorism

In 1887 the Open Court Publishing Company had its founding in a philosophy of monism. The company’s proprietor Edward C. Hegeler began the enterprise in an effort to promote his personal philosophic, religious, and moral ideas. He believed that these ideas could be conciliated with the growing scientific trends of the late nineteenth century, and that monism was the intellectual framework for doing so. Paul Carus, the editor of the journals The Open Court and The Monist, joined Hegeler as an intellectual ally in this regard. For thirty years he openly defended the doctrines of monism in countless articles and books, successfully grounding the Open Court on this philosophy. This paper uncovers the historical development of the philosophical origin of the Open Court as it began with Hegeler’s personal religious motives, his ideological tension with the original editor Benjamin Underwood, and his embrace of the monistic writings of Paul Carus. It also examines Hegeler’s and Carus’s publications and personal letters from the 1880s and 1890s in order to determine the fundamental doctrines of their unique sense of monism. In Carus’s writings in particular is proposed a monism of causality that is compatible with a deterministic worldview and a unitary conception of the sciences. Also, both Carus and Hegeler propose a monistic ethics of meliorism that conceives the diverse periods of human history to be evolving toward the one final end of the moral improvement of humankind. While these are the positive doctrines that they accept, they further reject the antitheses of philosophical dualism and irreligious attitude of agnosticism of all varieties.

Functional Freedom: A Psychological Model of Freedom in Decision-Making.

The freedom of a decision is not yet sufficiently described as a psychological variable. We present a model of functional decision freedom that aims to fill that role. The model conceptualizes functional freedom as a capacity of people that varies depending on certain conditions of a decision episode. It denotes an inner capability to consciously shape complex decisions according to one’s own values and needs. Functional freedom depends on three compensatory dimensions: it is greatest when the decision-maker is highly rational, when the structure of the decision is highly underdetermined, and when the decision process is strongly based on conscious thought and reflection. We outline possible research questions, argue for psychological benefits of functional decision freedom, and explicate the model’s implications on current knowledge and research. In conclusion, we show that functional freedom is a scientific variable, permitting an additional psychological foothold in research on freedom, and that is compatible with a deterministic worldview.

A deterministic worldview promotes approval of state paternalism

The proper limit to paternalist regulation of citizens' private lives is a recurring theme in political theory and ethics. In the present study, we examine the role of beliefs about free will and determinism in attitudes toward libertarian versus paternalist policies. Throughout five studies we find that a scientific deterministic worldview reduces opposition toward paternalist policies, independent of the putative influence of political ideology. We suggest that exposure to scientific explanations for patterns in human behavior challenges the notion of personal autonomy and, in turn, undermines libertarian arguments against state paternalism appealing to autonomy and personal choice.

What the Death Star can tell us about ergonomics methods

ABSTRACTImagine having to identify a critical flaw in a highly complex planetoid-sized orbital battle station under extreme time pressure, and with no clear idea at the outset where the vulnerability will lie? This was the challenge faced by the Rebel Alliance in the film Star Wars. One of the belligerents, the Imperial Empire, considered it highly unlikely a weakness would be found even if the other combatant were in possession of a full technical readout of the station. How could it be done? The first option presented in this paper is to employ traditional error identification methods of the sort contemporaneous with the film's release in 1977 and still in widespread use today. The findings show the limitations of this deterministic world-view because the method selected did not predict the actual vulnerability exploited. The second option is to use a systems-based method to model the Death Star's functional constraints and affordances and use this to assess the system's resilience. This method did detect the film ending, and several others. What began as an amusing aside has turned into a highly effective means to communicate across disciplines and enhance ergonomic teaching and learning. It also provides a compelling narrative around the use of reductionist methods for systems problems, and some wider implications for ergonomic method selection in more earth-bound settings.

The Language of the Stones: The Agency of the Inanimate in Literary Naturalism and the New Materialism

A suspicion toward inherited notions of agency has long been recognized (and frequently decried) as a defining feature of literary naturalism. But while the deterministic worldview of writers like Theodore Dreiser generated much lively debate in the early twentieth century, literary scholarship’s investment in the unresolved (and perhaps unresolvable) questions of inanimate agency raised by such works was gradually eclipsed by other concerns. Recently, however, a vigorous interest in such metaphysical questions has resurfaced in the discourse of new materialism, an interdisciplinary and politically committed field of scholarship dedicated to revising humanity’s conventional associations of materiality with passivity and predictability. While this is ostensibly a “new” movement, placing new materialism in the context of American literary history underscores how old—or rather timeless—the concerns addressed by the new materialism really are. Given these similarities, Trumpeter proposes that new materialist discourse stands to profit from a more nuanced understanding of literary naturalism and the discourse of new materialism can likewise help American literary scholars return to naturalist works with a more refined and reenergized perspective on the genre’s perennial concerns. This essay examines the role of the inanimate in Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy as a means for tracing connections and highlighting divergences between these two intellectual movements engaged in drawing humanity’s attention to the surreptitiously active nature of things.

Do attitudes toward societal structure predict beliefs about free will and achievement? Evidence from the Indian caste system.

Intuitive theories about the malleability of intellectual ability affect our motivation and achievement in life. But how are such theories shaped by the culture in which an individual is raised? We addressed this question by exploring how Indian children's and adults' attitudes toward the Hindu caste system--and its deterministic worldview--are related to differences in their intuitive theories. Strikingly, we found that, beginning at least in middle school and continuing into adulthood, individuals who placed more importance on caste were more likely to adopt deterministic intuitive theories. We also found a developmental change in the scope of this relationship, such that in children, caste attitudes were linked only to abstract beliefs about personal freedom, but that by adulthood, caste attitudes were also linked to beliefs about the potential achievement of members of different castes, personal intellectual ability, and personality attributes. These results are the first to directly relate the societal structure in which a person is raised to the specific intuitive theories they adopt.

O problema da transdisciplinaridade: ciência e filosofia hoje

The article starts with the question: Why does transdisciplinarity emerge for us as a problem? We will see how the problem of Transdisciplinarity is linked to the crisis of philosophy that is actually a crisis of the very idea of reason and, with it, a deadlock that carries on scientific knowledge also in its entirety. It will be clear that a very specific concept of reason, redolent of a deterministic worldview of modernity, is at the center of this crisis. Theoretical innovations in science and in philosophy illuminate a possible alternative: a new concept of reason, without the bias for the order, emerges from the inner critic to the Hegelian system design and its articulation with the theory of complex adaptive systems and the theory of networks, giving rise to a contemporary proposal of ontology of networks.

O problema da transdisciplinaridade: ciência e filosofia hoje

The article starts with the question: Why does transdisciplinarity emerge for us as a problem? We will see how the problem of Transdisciplinarity is linked to the crisis of philosophy that is actually a crisis of the very idea of reason and, with it, a deadlock that carries on scientific knowledge also in its entirety. It will be clear that a very specific concept of reason, redolent of a deterministic worldview of modernity, is at the center of this crisis. Theoretical innovations in science and in philosophy illuminate a possible alternative: a new concept of reason, without the bias for the order, emerges from the inner critic to the Hegelian system design and its articulation with the theory of complex adaptive systems and the theory of networks, giving rise to a contemporary proposal of ontology of networks.

Reading Providence out of History: The Destruction of Jerusalem in William Heminge’s The Jewes Tragedy

William Heminge’s critically neglected play The Jewes Tragedy (c. 1628–30; pub. 1662) presents a singular illustration of the seventeenth-century preoccupation with the siege and destruction of Jerusalem described by Josephus in The Jewish Wars (75 CE). Unlike other early modern retellings which habitually interpret the tragic event as divine punishment for the Jews’ rejection of Christ, Heminge eschews the conventional Christian moral and its accompanying providentialist rhetoric in favor of a thoughtful political analysis of the Jews’ defeat at the hands of the Romans. This article analyzes Heminge’s secular focus in the context of the fraught political and religious climate of the late 1620s, when the play was composed, as well as the Restoration during which it was first published. Specifically, it investigates the contentious interrogation of providentialism and the corresponding shift away from religious etiology and a deterministic worldview (in which God assigns the outcome) to a conception of history that emphasizes human actions over divine intervention.

A Compatibilist Theory of Legal Responsibility

Philosophical compatibilism reconciles moral responsibility with determinism, and some neurolaw scholars think that it can also reconcile legal views about responsibility with scientific findings about the neurophysiological basis of human action. Although I too am a compatibilist, this paper argues that philosophical compatibilism cannot be transplanted “as-is” from philosophy into law. Rather, before compatibilism can be re-deployed, it must first be modified to take account of differences between legal and moral responsibility, and between a scientific and a deterministic world view, and to address a range of conceptual, normative, empirical and doctrinal problems that orbit its capacitarian core.

Running High on Feeling: Emotional Ecologies in Sister Carrie , Robert Park, and China Miéville

Running High on FeelingEmotional Ecologies in Sister Carrie, Robert Park, and China Miéville Kevin Modestino (bio) Late in Sister Carrie (1900), Theodore Dreiser explains the chemistry of emotions in Hurstwood’s physical and moral decline: Now, it has been shown experimentally that a constantly subdued frame of mind produces certain poisons in the blood, called katastates, just as virtuous feelings of pleasure and delight produce helpful chemicals called anastates. The poisons generated by remorse inveigh against the system, and eventually produce marked physical deterioration. To these Hurstwood was subject. (302) These mysterious chemicals, katastates and anastates, were the postulation of Elmer Gates, an inventor and self-proclaimed experimental psychologist. While writing Sister Carrie, Dreiser had contacted Gates in the interest of writing an article about his laboratory in Chevy Chase, Maryland. But Dreiser’s interest in Gates went beyond his magazine work; Gates’s ideas about neuromuscular volition and the chemical changes spurred by emotion helped confirm Dreiser’s doubts about human moral autonomy. Unlike a previous generation of literary realists, he envisioned his characters as beset by external and internal forces, such as Gates’s chemicals, over which they had little authority or control.1 The only problem was that Gates’s ideas were mostly crackpot—they would go on to inform countless dubious self-help programs—and Dreiser’s assertion that the effect of these chemicals had been experimentally demonstrated was quite literally a scientific fiction. Dreiser’s novels are full of such speculations about the forces at play in the fates of his characters. In the logic of Sister Carrie a purse can build up in the mind of observers a “dim world of fortune” (6), inclining desires and imaginations towards its owner. A man’s passion (but not himself or his will) induces in a woman “a leaning towards him” (202). And a wad [End Page 52] of greenbacks finds itself removed from a safe into a man’s hand, without the man knowing how it all happened. Literary critics often read these scenes as reflecting a deterministic worldview, arguing that Dreiser created characters who were driven by instinct, trapped by evolutionary fate, and compelled to follow endless cycles of consumption.2 In contrast to these approaches, but not opposed to them, I propose to examine Dreiser’s novels as portrayals of dispersed, rather than determined, agency. In this reading Dreiser begins to look less like a late realist, questioning the mimetic accuracy of the ideal of moral autonomy, and more like a proto-speculative fiction writer, imagining the proliferation of agency through physiology, commodity objects, and emotions. As in the work of sf writers, Dreiser’s speculative leaps, his inclusions of pseudo-scientific theories, and his inconsistent Darwinism are not failures of mimetic realism or scientific knowledge.3 Rather, they are part of an encompassing attempt to disperse agency through multiple moral, physiological, economic, and environmental actors, not the least of which are emotions. This emphasis on emotional agency is something Dreiser shares with contemporary sf novelist China Miéville. Part of the “new weird” movement in Britain, Miéville’s novels explore both the emotional potency of encounters between human and non-human life and the circulation of power through cities in the form of incidental encounters, visual spectacles, and feelings of fear, anxiety, and paranoia. In other words, both Dreiser and Miéville imagine their characters as inhabiting “urban ecologies,” where selves have no moral, mental, or physical authority over the emotions that circulate through the space of the city independent from those who feel them. The idea of a human or urban ecology was prominent in Dreiser’s era. While Ernst Haeckel defined the word ecology in 1866 as the study of interactions and adaptations between animals and their environment, around the same time Herbert Spencer applied the revelations of evolutionary theory to the study of human social life and, in doing so, helped provide the groundwork for the field of sociology. While Spencer saw society as a self-regulating natural phenomenon, reform-minded sociologists in America wanted to use sociology to understand and temper the social upheavals of the late nineteenth century. From the founding of the American Journal...

Quantum Theory and the Boundary between Science and Spirit: Some Remarks from a Friend of Kabbalah

Physicists and philosophers argue whether quantum theory has spiritual implications. The vast majority of opinions are at two extremes: Some contend that quantum theory has absolutely no spiritual implications whatsoever, whereas others assert that it forms the very basis of a modern spirituality and can be directly applied to the human condition. It is this article's contention that neither extreme is correct. Quantum theory does have spiritual implications—a fact that its founders intuited and its enemies, Einstein preeminent among them, considered prima facie evidence of its as yet undiscovered flaws. Quantum theory has proven itself against all challenges more successfully than any other scientific theory, but its spiritual implications are extremely subtle. It provides a boundary to the materialistic, deterministic worldview and shows that there must be more to reality than that, but is inherently incapable of providing evidence as to the nature of what lies beyond that boundary.

Free Will, Determinism, and Stoic Counsel

Stoic philosophy has been charged with an inconsistency insofar as its deterministic worldview appears to conflict with its advocacy of various methods of self-discipline aiming at self-improvement...

Indeterminacy in Brain and Behavior

The central goal of modern science that evolved during the Enlightenment was the empirical reduction of uncertainty by experimental inquiry. Although there have been challenges to this view in the physical sciences, where profoundly indeterminate events have been identified at the quantum level, the presumption that physical phenomena are fundamentally determinate seems to have defined modern behavioral science. Programs like those of the classical behaviorists, for example, were explicitly anchored to a fully deterministic worldview, and this anchoring clearly influenced the experiments that those scientists chose to perform. Recent advances in the psychological, social, and neural sciences, however, have caused a number of scholars to begin to question the assumption that all of behavior can be regarded as fundamentally deterministic in character. Although it is not yet clear whether the generative mechanisms for human and animal behavior will require a philosophically indeterminate approach, it is clear that behavioral scientists of all kinds are beginning to engage the issues of indeterminacy that plagued physics at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Pascal's legacy.

The musings of a Belgian monk 300 years ago on the consequences of believing in God, or not, have influenced our Western life probably more than any other scientific or technological invention

Is our Universe Deterministic? Some Philosophical and Theological Reflections on an Elusive Topic

Abstract. The question of whether or not our universe is deterministic remains of interest to both scientists and theologians. In this essay I argue that this question can be solved only by metaphysical decision and that no scientific evidence for either determinism or indeterminism will ever be conclusive. No finite being, no matter how powerful its cognitive abilities, will ever be able to establish the deterministic nature of the universe. The only being that would be capable of doing so would be one that is at once transcendent and immanent. Such a being is compatible with the God of the Christian tradition, which yields that a deterministic worldview is compatible with (yet does not necessarily lead to) a deterministic worldview. A more important point is that because science is never able to establish the determinism of our universe, it can never definitely rule out divine action except on metaphysical grounds.