The scope of natural pedagogy theory (I): babies
This is the first post in a series of two installments by Pierre Jacob, dwelling on Gergely and Csibra's work on human communication. According to Csibra and Gergely’s (2009) so-called “natural pedagogical” approach to the psychological bases of human culture, human infants are innately predisposed to automatically interpret what Sperber and Wilson (1986) call an agent’s “ostensive” behavioral stimuli as cues that the agent intends to make manifest to the child some relevant novel information. Thus, the natural pedagogical approach takes for granted Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) relevance-based concept of “ostensive-inferential communicative behavior”, wh

Some like it hot
Relativity in culinary matters and in taste is a big issue - our tastes (or distastes) for things are indeed shaped by what we are used to eat and see eaten, as well as other factors, genetics being one. Now they combine with less strictly sensorial aspects - and disgust for instance integrates, as Rozin pointed out, what he calls "cognitive aspects" such as the idea that substance X is contaminating.  In his reply to Nicolas Baumard' post "Is a universal Michelin guide possible?",

Language faculty? Semiotic system? Or what?
To what extent does the use of language involve a language-specific ability, to what extent is it subserved by a more general symbolic or semiotic system? This is an old and ongoing controversy to which an article pre-published online in PNAS on Nov. 18, 2009 (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0909197106) and freely available here, "Symbolic gestures and spoken language are processed by a common neural system" by Jiang Xu, Patrick J. Gannon, Karen Emmorey, Jason F. Smith, and Allen R. Braun, makes an interesting contribution. Their abstract: "Symbolic gestures, suc

Is the spell broken? Reflections on evolutionary debunking and religious beliefs
At the Notre Dame conference Darwin in the 21st century, Paul Griffiths gave an interesting talk on evolutionary debunking arguments for religion. Evolutionary debunking arguments basically say that religious beliefs are unjustified because they are a byproduct of evolved cognitive predispositions. Daniel Dennett's

“I read Playboy for the articles”
Zoe Chance and Michael Norton have a delightful book chapter on the very creative ways in which people justify their questionable decisions. They report an experiment in which male participants were given a choice between subscriptions to two sport magazines. One covered more sports while the other had more featured articles. More interestingly,